Best Fitness Tracker For Weight Loss
For many people, the motivation for investing in a fitness tracker, is to lose weight. They are unobtrusive, easy to use, and affordable options that everyone can access. They have become so popular and normalised, that it’s a rare person you see at the gym or pounding the pavement, without one.
While there are some fitness bands out there that are just a glorified heart rate monitor, the Fitbit Charge HR has a range of great features that make it the ideal weight loss accessory and the best option for weight loss.
Fitbit Charge HR, ideal weight loss accessory and the best option for weight loss.
1. It's A Heart Rate Monitor
It is widely accepted that the greatest impact activity for weight loss occurs at 60 – 80% of your maximum heart rate. This allows you to exercise at a medium intensity over increasing periods of time.
By using an accurate heart rate monitor, you can firstly, easily work out what your average heart rate is, what your maximum heart rate should be, and also keep an eye on what your heart rate is averaging while you exercise, keeping it in the ideal fat burning zone.
The Fitbit Charge HR offers continuous heart rate monitoring
2. It’s A Pedometer and Altimeter
This is a particularly good feature for those who are starting out on their weight loss journey. Sometimes all it takes to get started is the motivation to move a bit more than you currently are. By having the pedometer built into the Fitbit Charge HR you can gauge how much activity you are currently doing. It may come as a nasty surprise how sedentary your life is.
Take heart however, this is just your starting point. Use the Fitbit as a motivator. Set yourself a daily step goal (10,000 steps is a target to start with, and works out to be approximately five miles), and when you are achieving it easily, make sure you increase it.
Stairs are way more challenging than just strolling around a flat surface, so it’s only fair that you are “rewarded” for making use of them. The Fitbit Charge HR also has an altimeter function, allowing you to determine how many floors you have clambered up, encouraging you to take the stairs.
If you need to be externally motivated to ensure you do your daily exercise, set up a competition with a friend or colleague on who can do the most steps. The winner of the competition using the activity tracker, wins all bragging rights, and a non-food reward.
3. It’s A Sleep Monitor
Sleep is vitally important to our lives and our health. It’s something most of us do naturally, and it’s one of the things that is sacrificed first in a busy life. What many people don’t know is that interrupted, and poor quality sleep can have physiological effects, disrupting hormones and metabolism not just making it impossible to lose weight, but ensuring that you gain weight.
For most people the ideal amount of daily sleep is 7 – 9 hours. By using a sleep monitor, you can see patterns in your weekly sleep cycles, and modify you behaviour to ensure you are getting enough sleep for your optimal weight loss.
4. It Logs Your Daily Activity Patterns
At the end of the day you can look at what activity you have done during the day, week, month and year. You can identify patterns where you are sedentary, where you sleep badly, where you make a huge effort on the exercise front, and where you are burning the most calories. If you also keep a food and mood journal, you can see where you are subconsciously sabotaging your weight loss efforts, and make adjustments to minimise the effects.
Perhaps one of the most exciting things is the long term tracking. If you’re feeling demotivated in your weight loss journey the fitness tracker can show you the changes in your ability over time. Sometimes a look-back at where you’ve come from can give you a push in the right direction.
5. It Syncs With A Wide Range of Technology
The Fitbit Charge HR dashboard is available for your desktop, tablets, and mobile. You can download using Itunes, googleplay and the windows store. The dashboard keeps all your records, shows trends in activity and sleep, can be used as a food diary, for calorie counting, can link with other users and connects in with a number of exercise apps such as mapmyrun.
The ease of integration means that anyone who has access to a computer, tablet or mobile can use the statistics and analysis to inform their future workouts.
When you combine all these features, along with the very handy watch, silent alarm and call alerts, you have a great tool in the Fitbit Charge HR that will help you develop habits to promote your weight loss.