INDIANOLA — My wife, Ashley, got me a Fitbit last month as an early birthday present, and I’m hooked.
The device, a rubber armband with a computer chip inside, measures how many steps you take with a daily goal of 10,000. That equates to about 5 miles walked.
I’ve found it quite difficult to reach that figure on work days, but that’s kind of the point: Office employees don’t do enough daily physical activity to keep from getting fat and weak, to put it indelicately.
A Fitbit helps you realize that and gives you some extra motivation to do something about it. It gives an element of competition as you can compare yourself against friends and provides plenty of statistics to track, which I’ve been a sucker for since reading the backs of baseball cards as a child.
After five full weeks, I’m averaging 7,525 steps per day. That ranges from a low of 4,008 on April 27 (it was a Wednesday and I was stuck in front of a computer working on newspaper deadlines) to a high of 16,843 on April 30 (a Saturday and I walked the golf course).
Not a bad start, but I’m a long way from hitting the goal of a 10,000-step-per-day average.
Of course, I face the extra handicap of refusing to engage in exercise for exercise’s sake. That means no jogs, treadmill sessions or trips to the gym. That sort of thing has always left me winded, bored and sore, far from the “natural high” that some avid runners claim. I take as my justification Paul’s admonition to young Timothy that “bodily exercise profiteth little.”
So instead I have to fit activity into my normal routine.
At other times in my life, I played a lot of sports, where your aim is to compete and the exercise is merely a necessary evil toward that end. Now, though, I don’t have those outlets and have to rely on other techniques to rack up steps.
Sometimes I’ll walk home for lunch, which is about half a mile, or I’ll walk to the post office or bank instead of driving those short distances.
I might be a little more likely to ask my 2-year-old daughter, Maggie, if she wants to go to the park. (The answer is always yes; if not, we go ahead and schedule a doctor’s appointment).
Those are all enjoyable experiences that help slow life down a tad. If nothing else, Fitbit has opened my eyes to that. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
In the spirit of full disclosure, Ashley and I did buy a small amount of Fitbit stock, just because we thought it was a good product and a growth industry. But if my investing history holds true, it will crash spectacularly.
I can live with that, as long as I end up a little fitter for it.
