It gives you a severe electric shock whenever you eat sugar. JUST KIDDING! Hahahaha, oh that look on your face was priceless.

This purchase actually happened yesterday before The Moderately Great Weight Loss Plan. I just want to say that now, in case someone is tempted to jump on me for Doing Something New. Someday I’ll get lambasted for Doing That Annoying Capitalization Thing, and I’ll blame it all on Winnie The Pooh. Who had a problem with sugar, I’ll have you know.

(I’ve been like this all day, sort of rambly and tired and battling a major headache. I might be getting sick. I apologize ahead of time.)

I bought the FitBit after doing some research on the BodyBugg, which my friend Saska owns. The weird thing is that there exists a gadget that gives you data about your body, and I didn’t get one the second it came out. Where was I? Reading Milne?

She loves her BodyBugg, and has talked about it before at her own blog, and I’m always THIS CLOSE to ordering one, but then I decide that it’s too expensive. It’s $200 to purchase, and then you need to spend money every month on a subscription (one blog said it was $15/month), which I find frustrating. Any sort of device that collects my personal data seems like it should be mine after I buy it. I shouldn’t have to keep paying to get the information it’s collecting on me. Not to mention, while it’s supposed to work with the Mac, a read a dozen reviews of people complaining it didn’t. So I kept looking, and in the Amazon forums for the BodyBugg, someone mentioned the FitBit.

So what the heck does it do? From the website’s FAQ:

The Fitbit Tracker contains a motion sensor like the ones found in the Nintendo Wii. The Tracker senses your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities. The Tracker measures the intensity and duration of your physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, how long it took you to fall asleep, the number of times you woke up throughout the night and how long you were actually asleep vs just lying in bed. You can wear the Tracker loosely in your pocket or clipped to your clothing, even bras.

Calorie data from the Tracker is very similar to those from energy expenditure measurement devices used in clinical research. The Tracker will give you a good sense of how your activity levels change from day to day.

The Tracker is also one of the most accurate pedometers. We’ve tuned the accuracy of the Fitbit step counting functionality over hundreds of tests with multiple different body types. For most wearers, the Fitbit should be roughly 95-97% accurate for step counting. We spent a lot of time ensuring that this accuracy is achieved even when you wear the Fitbit loosely in your pocket.

Sleep data from the Tracker correlates very strongly with results from polysomnograms found in sleep labs.

It’s an amazing little device, and it costs just $99. The website that it delivers your data to is free to access, and you can even set up your account and begin tracking food before you have your FitBit, which is what I’m doing right now (this is my calorie-counting). It gives you daily feedback on your activity level, your food consumption, and your quality of sleep. The battery for the device lasts about ten days, and it uploads all the data wirelessly through a base station, both Windoze and Mac compatible.

Over and over I’ve read from people using these devices that how much they thought they were moving and how much they were actually moving was completely different. Using this helped them see where they were off balance, as well as show them how many calories they burn in a day, and how their food intake stacks up against their activity.

It’s actually the sleep monitoring that I’m most excited about! One reviewer, Elaine, posted this detailed and incredibly useful blog post over on Spark People (check out her update as well), which showed screen shots of the readings she got while sleeping one night. She was able to see how certain activities at night disturbed her sleep (her boyfriend coming home), and she even noted how the device apparently caught her moving around during the time her alarm used to wake her up. She noted on her screen shot, “Old habits die hard!”

I have very frustrating sleep problems, which include waking up from what appears to be a good night’s sleep only to be exhausted and worn out. While my FitBit won’t ship until the end of October (I saw on their Facebook page that they’re saying JANUARY now), I’m hugely looking forward to seeing what my nights look like when graphed out for quality of sleep. Am I moving the whole night and not realizing it? The FitBit will tell me.

Beyond that, it will be, hopefully, an incredibly useful motivational tool to find that balance between what I take in and what I expend energetically over the course of the day. And balance is what I’m looking for right now.