Last year, when my boyfriend turned 29, I gave him a Fitbit Surge exercise watch. Less than a year later, the strap started to come apart from the actual watch piece. He called the company and they happily sent him a new one, no questions asked. With a little super glue, patience, and some bitching on my end (about how he should’ve cleaned the strap to avoid degradation), the old watch had been fixed.
For $250, we ended up with two Fitbit watches, one half-broken and the other new. I happily took the old one -- still totally intact -- which I’m wearing now.
I’ll take a moment to explain how the Fitbit Surge works. Back in the old days, before watches were also mini-computers, people carried around pedometers (little contraptions that counted footsteps). Fitbit made these types of tools popular again by combining a pedometer, a heart rate monitor and some other nifty features all into one super waterproof watch that works really, really well.
With the Surge, I can see the time and date, the number of steps I’ve taken in 24 hours, my heart rate (which is 94 right now -- don’t worry, that’s normal for me), how many miles I’ve traveled, the calories I’ve burned and how many floors I’ve climbed. All of that information is available right on my wrist, which is nice because it means I don’t have to carry my phone around or even look at my phone to check progress. I can also track my exercise and change music (whether it's Pandora, iTunes, or a YouTube playlist) right from my watch.
The Fitbit app works with the watch via Bluetooth connection and in the app, I can see everything from my watch (as well as my quality of sleep. Yes - Fitbit monitors your sleep patterns, which is both handy and creepy). I can also use the app to track my food/calorie intake, my weight, how many ounces of water I’ve had, etc. Basically, the Fitbit -- the Surge in particular -- is an amazing device in many ways. But don’t be fooled. There are a few downsides to wearing the watch, and I’m not talking about the terrible watch tan you’ll inevitably get.
When I first began wearing the Fitbit, I had a lot of ideas about how it would change the way I exercised. I don’t know why, but I really did believe that the Fitbit would somehow -- maybe through magic -- help me get in more reps at the gym or make me lose weight/body fat faster. While it did (and still does) have the positive effect of making me walk around more to increase my step count, it also has the reverse effect of making me feel like garbage when I’m climbing into bed and see that I’ve got 1,128 steps for the whole day (my goal is 10,000 steps).
Glad I got that out of the way.
The Fitbit Surge is also bulky and unattractive. I know that sounds shallow and probably stupid, but if I’m wearing formal clothes for work, school or for an evening out, the Fitbit looks out of place, like I'm wearing a guy's watch (and I have freakish monster-man hands, so it should look fine). In these situations, I don’t want to remove it because I want to track my steps, but I have a lot of other, nicer watches that I don’t wear. I tried to wear a nice watch on my right wrist and the Fitbit on my left, but I got tired of all the bastards calling me "Timex" and "Big Ben." People kept asking me for the time, too, which also got annoying.
OK. Maybe the bulky, ugly thing isn’t such a big deal for most men because the Fitbit Surge sort of says, “Look at me! I’m fit!" or "Look at me! I have something like an Apple Watch! I'm wealthy!” But then there's "the Workweek Hustle."
The Workweek Hustle is a Monday-through-Friday challenge where "friends" join each other to see who can get the most steps for the week. A little competition is healthy and fun, except when it drives you and your boyfriend to go on a 30,000 step death march on a Friday afternoon in 90+ degree heat because you’re both really freaking tired of Brian winning the challenge every single week for the past 15 weeks in a row. By the way, we still lost.
A daily average of 18,000 steps is about the same as walking 9 miles a day.
You can also "cheer" other people on in the competition whenever they move forward, meet their step goal, win the challenge and so on. Cheering is great! Except when 10 different people cheer eight different things and all you see on your phone’s lock screen are notifications from Fitbit that all read, “Cheer! Cheer! Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!” The cheering is actually so bad within our group that my boyfriend and I will frequently blow up each other’s phones by repeatedly sending the word ‘cheer!’ via text or Fitbit.
There are also badges you can earn by hitting certain milestones, like walking 30,000 steps in a day, climbing 100 floors or walking x amount of miles over the course of x months. The problem with some of these badges -- namely, the stair-climbing badges -- is that the number of steps that count as "one floor" seem to change from person to person. For example, my boyfriend and I went to a water park once and we climbed a ton of stairs. We actually climbed the same amount of stairs because we rode all of the same rides together. At the end of the day, I had climbed a total of 113 floors while my boyfriend had only climbed 85. How that’s possible, we still aren’t sure because we spent the entire day together and climbed the exact same amount of steps. This inaccuracy eventually led my boyfriend to declare that my Fitbit was off and therefore I didn’t deserve my badge -- a feeling that was only intensified when, a few hours later, our Workweek Hustle group saw the badge and cheered it. Repeatedly.
And beware the "Weekend Warrior challenge." It’s the Workweek Hustle, but for the weekend. You’ll undoubtedly make a friend who begins the challenge, invites you, and you join because you don’t know that said friend is going on a 2-day, 100k run with lots of other physical crap involved, thereby ruining your weekend plans of sitting on the couch and eating/sobbing into an entire family-sized portion of mac 'n cheese. But seriously: nothing is less motivating than having someone invite you to a step challenge when you both know that their plan is to go for 200,000 steps and your plan is to see how much butter you can fit into your mouth while trying to find an outfit that helps you blend in with the couch a little better.
That's the face of someone who ate too much butter. Or too little.
Your Fitbit will also enjoy telling you when you haven’t met your exercise goal for the week, step goal for the day, sleep goals or calorie goals. The days when you do hit those goals, you feel pretty good about yourself. But on those other days -- or sometimes weeks -- when you’re pretty inactive, Fitbit is the first one to let you know just how much of a lazy, couch-blending slob you’ve been.
I still wear my Fitbit, and I always recommend that people buy a Fitbit because it really does help you keep track of your activity. Just beware of the watch tan, the cheers, and the friends who’re a little -- or a lot -- more motivated than you.
Erin, you lying sea hag.
