Review: BodyMedia Fit LINK - Part 4 Neat Stuff! (final installment of review)

I will add to this post over the next few days as I discover cool things about this whole system.


How Many Calories Did I Burn?


I live in an apartment building where the laundry room and a small exercise/weight room are directly across from each other. Since I've just taken up Hoop Dancing, I thought I would see how good a practice area the weight room would be if I was doing laundry at the same time. I hoop danced between 6:30 and 7:30pm wearing my armband.

After connecting the armband by USB and syncing the data with the Activity Manager, I was able to view this report:

By moving the sliders at the bottom to the period of time during which I was hooping, the report stretched out to show me how many calories I burned during that period.

Estimated Calorie Burn

The longer and more often that I wear the Armband, the more it gets to know my daily averages and can give me an estimated calorie burn for the day by hovering over the light blue portion of the bars that 'grow' horizontally as the day progresses and more calories are burned. Here's an example of what that looks like:

Useful Reports To Obssess Over

hahahaha, I love that title. It's so true, isn't it?!

In the Activity Manager, to the right of the Facebook icon is a link you can click to export data into an Excel file, or other variations if you like. I chose Excel, here's the result:

Here's the report. Although it was disappointing that a key calculation was totally left out, so I added the column and the calculations myself. You'll see those highlighted in purple:

BodyMedia Fit "FitCoach" Tips

Sometimes there will be a little "note bubble" appearing next to one of your Summary screen categories to praise you, give you some helpful tips about nutrition/exercise, or give you a heads-up about some of your data. Here is a screenshot of two FitCoach tips I opened:

Thank you FitCoach for pointing out that I ate too much chocolate yesterday. Give me a break, I'm a girl and it's "that time of the month" :)



FitCoach: You're more than just a number on the scale

FitCoach realizes that I haven't weighed myself in a week and its way of encouraging me to track my progress in other ways is to tell me that I can also measure my waist as seen in this tip:

To log a waist size, it was pretty simple to find:

Personal Bests

Any time I have a new personal best, I am notified! Check it out!

Import Heart Rate Monitoring (Garmin GPS)

In the dashboard of the Activity Manager, you can import heart rate information from a heart rate device!  I don't have a heart rate device though.