If you get a kick out of tracking everything from your heart rate while you’re in the zone to how many calories you’ve gulped down over the day, here’s a gadget you may want to add to your fitness-and-diet arsenal:
Fitbit is a sleek little device that clips onto your clothing (sounds a lot easier than those heartrate monitors where you have to wear straps around your chest!). It allows you to track your movement, sleep, and calories burned throughout the day and night (admit it, you’ve always wondered how many calories you burn sleeping). Based on an internal motion detector, it can tell how many steps you’ve taken and even how well you’ve slept at night.
Fitbit makes it easy (and kind of fun) to gauge how high your activity level is (I bet I wouldn’t impress it much as I sit here to write this blog post…).
You can pick it up for around $99.
If you start working out with a personal trainer and you’re trying to lose a few (okay, more than a few) pounds, the first thing that trainer will probably tell you to do is keep a diet journal. Write down everything you eat and carry that list with you. How… low tech.
Wouldn’t you rather type your munchies into a digital calorie counter? One that doesn’t just keep track of your entries but that also offers calorie estimates for over 50,000 foods, including information from over 250 restaurants and 500 popular food brands? One that is programmed to help you keep track of–and progress toward–your fitness goals? One that can be hooked up to your computer so you can download your information to a central place?
Sure, you would. Notebooks are way too Little House on the Prairie. Get with the modern age and pick up a digital calorie counter if you’re trying to lose weight.
The model shown here is the CalorieSmart Handheld Calorie Counter and is available at Amazon for less than $100:
Looking for a way to make counting calories more fun? Well, maybe not more fun (when is it ever?) but more convenient? The Diet Buddy is a hand-held nutrition calculator that lets you access the full nutritional information (calories, carbs, fats, sugar, fiber, protein, etc.) for more than 4,000 foods. It’s small enough to fit in a purse or pocket, so you can take it with you wherever you go. It also has an alarm to alert you when you’ve hit your daily limit of calories, carbs, sugars, or fats (I’m not sure I’d be particularly thrilled with this feature… like I want to know I’ve hit my max when it’s only 11 a.m.). In addition to helping you keep track of what you eat, the Diet Buddy acts as a pedometer that automatically counts steps and converts them into miles and calories. For $25, it seems like a pretty good deal.
Since when can a Coke product help you lose weight? Well, the newly launched Coke Enviga is supposed to. The Coca-Cola company says that drinking three cans of Enviga a day can burn 60-100 calories by revving up your metabolism. This is according to a study (funded by Coca-Cola, of course) on healthy 18-35 year olds (you know, the people who don’t really need to lose weight anyway). Even if the claims are true, the Wall Street Journal had a write up about how much you’d have to spend to burn off those 60 calories a day (each can costs $1.29). They pointed out that you’d have to drink 28 Envigas and spend $36.12 to burn off the calories in a McDonald’s Big Mac. That’s pricey and you’d sure be doing a lot of peeing.
But if you just want to check it out for the novelty of it (or because you like green tea drinks), by all means, let us know how it tastes.
Lose weight while sitting down? Sounds great! Where do you sign up? Ah, you have to buy a “Hula Chair.” Straight out of Japan (people are thin over there, aren’t they?), this chair is supposed to give you a healthier body, improve circulation, and burn a few calories here and there. All you do is sit on your butt and this “modern miracle” mixes ancient traditional Chinese medicine with modern 21st Century technology to improve your balance and coordination by gently aligning your spine. You can feel it working your abs and mid-section, all while you chill… Ah, fitness for the lazy. Gotta love it. And only $200. That’s way less than a Bowflex…