Review: BodyMedia Fit LINK - Part 2 (one full day & night of wear)

So far I'm impressed with the Link Armband.

In Part 1 of my review, I ended my post saying that I was heading to bed. It's now 7:26am, I took the armband off as soon as I got up, and plugged it into the USB cable that I'm just leaving attached to the computer.

It began syncing immediately since the BodyMedia Sync Application was already running in the background from when I installed it yesterday.

I grabbed my breakfast and a hot chocolate and sat down to review the results by clicking the green "Activity Manager" button on the BodyMedia Fit website.  This is what was logged overnight:

This information gets added to the data for the morning after sleeping. When I went to bed, it was Feb.5th and when I woke up (Feb.6th), this was logged under today's date. I had trouble getting to sleep last night, so I can see that I was last recorded as "lying down" at 12:08am and then "asleep" at 12:19am. After taking a Robaxacet with Ibuprofen in it, it took 11 minutes to put me out. My quality of sleep was probably the most interesting of the things tracked since it's going on while I'm unconscious. I know I didn't exercise yesterday, so the results are just everyday movement. Here's what that looked like:

The numbers on the left show 2/4/6/8 calories per minute and each spike shows how many calories per minute I was accomplishing for any given action or inaction.


Food Logging:  MyFitness Pal vs. Activity Manager at BodyMedia Fit

As I had logged all of my food with MyFitnessPal, only the calories for each meal category were imported into the BodyMedia Fit Activity Manager, however it gives a much nicer pie chart and nutrient summary than the online reports available from the online version of MyFitnessPal (their mobile app reports are more enhanced than the reports offered online):

Here's how it looked in MyFitnessPal:

I wanted to see whether I would prefer logging my food with MyFitnessPal or logging it via the Activity Manager at BodyMedia Fit. First, I had to go to my Preferences screen in the BMF Activity Manager and switch it from "Third Party Logging" to "Food Logging" as shown here:

Once I did that, I was starting fresh with the food database available at the Activity Manager and although I do enjoy creating my own foods to select from as I could do with MyFitnessPal, the ability to find foods that other people have added to a database is only available in MyFitnessPal as shown in the two searches side by side.

 My decision is to continue logging food with MyFitnessPal.



Today, based on my sleep from 12a.m. onwards, I started the day off with a 477 calorie deficit since it takes effort to sleep poorly for 5.5 hours (hahahaha). Here is how MyFitnessPal treated this deficit as "Exercise":

I have yet to go to my West Coast Swing dance class tonight to find out how many calories I've typically burned doing that activity, and I have to download the info from my armband containing all the data for the daytime.


End of Day Results:

I want to show you the Summary screen on the Activity Manager now that I have taken off the armband and uploaded the data while I had a shower before bed. I'm going to put it back on an hour after taking it off so I can see how well I sleep.

In the dark grey column are targets for the day (I set the 1400 calorie target, everything else was set for me based on answering questions in the setting up of the Activity Manager when I made choices about what my goals were, what amount of activity I would likely be doing and how fast I wanted to see results).

In the right column, starting from the top is how many calories I burned among the various activities of the day and all of the bodily functions of sleeping, breathing etc.

Then it lists how many calories I ate, which then shows how much of a calorie deficit I created. If I wanted to lose a pound a week, I would need to create a deficit of 500 calories per day. Since I chose during the setup process that I would like to lose 2 lbs per week, that is why the 1000 calorie deficit is listed on the left in the Calorie Balance row.

1 pound loss per week math: 3500 calories in a pound / 7 days in a week = 500 calorie deficit
2 pound loss per week math: 7000 / 7 = 1000

The # of steps taken is quite higher than the other days, but then I was at dance class this evening where I was doing a lot of "triple steps".