One Year with Fitness Tracker

I had gifted myself a fitness tracker sometime this week, a year ago, as for some reason I believed a fitness tracker would help me stay fit, and help me become more conscious about not being sedentary during my typical day at work or home. Since then I have been walking 10,000 fitness tracker steps (actual physical steps could be little less, I am told) at minimum, and this milestone of 10K per day has become a new norm for me. Keeping up with 10K steps for a day, is the only consistent thing that I have done in my recent times.

As Peter Drucker said, ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. Measuring my fitness activity has been a enlightening experience. Fitness tracker dashboard clearly indicated my active minutes in a day, number of steps I walked, and calories that I am burning. At first, it was shocking to see that my active minutes were just about 15 minutes in a day, when I was thinking I was active for the entire day. Then I have realized I was just walking between my cabin in the office and few of my colleagues’ cabins or cubicles, and may be a trip to chai adda.

Now I make it a point to keep-up with my active minutes, number of floors, number of steps, and number of calories. Folks say, I am little obsessed about measuring my activity, as I get restless if I forget my tracker at home, and complain that today’s 10K steps are not accounted in my dashboard. If I realize that I have walked 8K steps at 11PM, I still go out in the dark and take a walk (often while talking to someone in East Coast or West Coast or catching up with Music or TED Talk or a Pod Cast) and make up my daily quota of minimum walk.

Did all of the above, positively impact my health? Yes, most of my vitals have improved or stayed consistent if they were already good, waist line dropped which caused me to refresh my wardrobe, and I am able to indulge on more food with less guilt (thanks to improved metabolism and calorie burn rate). I hope to continue the regimen for rest of the year, and report similar stats next year too.

Here are few screen shots from Fitness Tracker dashboard

Average number of STEPS per month, last one year