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How to Use Your Activity Tracker So You Don’t Abandon It Mid-Year


It turns out a bunch of you did get Fitbits last year—or even longer ago—and have managed to keep using them ever since. Here’s your best advice.

Use All the Features

Gumbercule, who lost 40 pounds while using a Fitbit this year, writes that it helped to use and customize all of the app’s features. Besides viewing your step counts, you can ask Fitbit to adjust your calorie targets to your weight loss goal, and to track what you eat alongside how much you burn. Gumbercule recommends tracking in MyFitnessPal, which can talk to Fitbit, since it has a better food database than Fitbit.

Think carefully before asking your app to adjust your calories based on exercise, though. While it helps some people, it can also be a trap that leads you to eat more calories than you should.

You don’t need to use every feature every day, though. Bluesnow writes that constant diet logging felt stressful. “Don’t go overkill with the food tracker. ... I do use it from time to time—just to get a good idea of what my daily caloric consumption is to see if I’m within a health zone—but doing it on a daily basis drives me absolutely insane.”

Don’t Expect It to Do All the Work For You

Seeing your step count won’t magically motivate you to take more steps. That’s probably why I tossed mine in a drawer—I didn’t have a solid plan for what to do with that data when I got it. Shuffy writes that they bought a Fitbit after exercising regularly for two years. Kahn265 writes, “Like ANY tool that gathers information - it’s useless if you don’t use that information to make a plan.”

Research confirms this, by the way: fitness trackers are best at helping you stick to a plan you’ve already committed to.

Rope In Your Friends

While you don’t want to get into unhealthy comparisons with others, Envador found motivation by connecting with friends on the Fitbit app. “You get periodic emails showing how much more walking and how much more active you are than your rival. Or see how much of a lazy sloth you were last week, which could be just as rewarding :)”

Set Goals That Make Sense for You

Rae reminds us of the importance of setting our own goals, not just relying on factory presets. “I have a friend who is insists on doing 10,000 steps a day even though it is super damaging to her health as she has issues with her feet.”

Since the point of a fitness tracker is to help you reach your goals, make sure you aren’t substituting some Fitbit exec’s idea of health for what you actually want and need in your life.