Wirelessly Track Your Activity and Sleep with Fitbit Technology

Mom Central received a sample of the Fitbit One and the Fitbit Force to facilitate this review. The views expressed here are entirely our own.

First a confession. I’ve become a true Fitbit addict. I got my first FitBit from my good friend and awesome national fitness and health mom expert, Andrea Metcalf. She said, “Stacy, you’ve GOT to try this out! Go do it.” And I said, “You got it. I’ll report back!”

Talk about wearable tech and the quantified self: I love knowing how many steps I’ve walked in a given day, how many stairs I’ve conquered, how many calories burned, and how much distance traveled. I now know that an hour of hard-core tennis amounts to about 3,000 steps, while an hour of power yoga (never do leave that mat) only gets me about 600 steps. Over the holidays, our entire family went on vacation to Israel (a huge bus-laden undertaking with 26 of us) and my FitBit wowed me with the knowledge that I was walking an average of 14,000 steps a day.

Plus, I’ve started taking advantage of the online food diary that enables me to enter what I’ve eaten, and quickly offers up robust prompts to give me specific brands, portions, and calorie counts. And I started quite the trend in our Mom Central offices. About half the staff now sports Fitbit devices as we zip along hectic days at work.

The Fitbit One clip and Fitbit Force wristband serve as wireless activity and sleep trackers, each making it easier than ever to turn fitness into a lifestyle. Both tracking devices record your steps, distance, calories burned, and stairs climbed. Come bedtime, they measure your sleep quality, feature online charts of your sleep patterns over time so you can learn how to get a better night’s sleep, and wake you up peacefully in the morning with a vibrating alarm.

The trackers come with a wireless sync dongle, which allows you to automatically sync real-time stats from your clip or wristband to your computer, iPhone, or Android smartphone. Fitbit offers a variety of free online and mobile tools such as the Fitbit Connect app where you can create a personal dashboard, log food consumption, set goals for yourself, and track your progress over time through easy-to-read graphs and charts. Moreover, you can send direct messages to family and friends also using the app, foster a little friendly competition, and earn achievement badges for certain goals met—such as daily steps, lifetime distance, and daily climb.

Each high-tech, comfortable-to-wear, and water-resistant, both the Fitbit One and Fitbit Force serve the same functions. Choosing between the two really just comes down to your preference. I enjoy wearing the watch for general physical activity, allowing me to check my step count regularly simply by glancing at my wrist, but prefer the easily concealable clip when at work or out for dinner at a fancy restaurant.

A downside to owning more than one Fitbit tracker, however, proves how each Fitbit user account can only have one tracker linked to it at a time. So if you’re likely going to want to bit one of the devices and stick with it. For me, that’s been the Fitbit Force, as I was forgetting to remove the clip from pants that I tossed into the laundry basket, and also to switch the clip from regular clothes to exercise clothes to back again.

Available online for $99.95 and $129.95 respectively, the Fitbit One and Fitbit Force come with free shipping, a 45-day money back guarantee, and 365-day limited warranty. For more information or about how to purchase, visit fitbit.com, and join the Fitbit revolution.

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