Let me just start by saying that I love my Fitbit, regardless of what people say. I've been seeing articles shared on Facebook about how pointless they are because your iPhone already has very similar capabilities, but I love mine.

I received my Fitbit Flex for my birthday in 2016, and I wore it for 6 months straight. I stopped wearing it for a bit, but with my "new year, new me" mentality, I've started wearing it again.

It does so much more than count your steps. With the app connected through Bluetooth, you can track your sleep, movement throughout the day, calories burned, distance walked and how active your Fitbit friends are being.

The tracker and app push me to be more active by giving me a goal of 10,000 steps to try to hit every day. Not only that, but it tracks how active you are throughout the day by prompting you to hit 250 steps per hour for most of the hours that you're awake.

The app lets you add friends and see how many steps they are getting to compete against them. It has different challenges you can invite friends to so you can get some "healthy" competition, pun intended. It sends you notifications throughout the challenges that allow you to see where you're at in comparison to your opponents.

I really like the sleep tracking feature as well. You can tap a button when you're about to go to sleep to show you how long it takes you to fall asleep, or if you forget, it just tracks how many hours you actually got. Not only that, but it shows how much good sleep you've gotten versus the amount of time that you were awake or restless throughout the night. This is helpful if you often wake up not feeling rested so that you can try to take steps to change your routine and make your sleep more restful.

The app is the same for each different kind of Fitbit, having pre-made workouts, meal planning, exercise calendars and sharing options, hydration tracking, food logging and weight tracking. Your home dashboard can be customized for the types of tracker capabilities and your personal fitness goals. Some trackers can monitor your heart rate, while others just count steps. Others have built-in watch and step displays while mine only shows goal progress by a status bar of blinking dots instead of digital numbers. The different features include floors climbed, cardio fitness levels, on-screen workouts, built-in GPS, call and text notifications, calendar alerts, music control and guided breathing sessions.

I think that my Fitbit will help me achieve my health and fitness goals. They won't work for everyone because of what someone wants to work on and what they're willing to do, but I think mine is a good fit for me. Visit fitbit.com for more specific info.