Friday, February 6, 2015

Fun with my FitBit

Santa brought me a FitBit for Christmas.
I love it!
I'm having so much fun with it.
One thing it's doing for me is making me ever so conscious of my steps, and the effect that those steps have on my body.
For instance, I actually managed -- one Sunday -- to get up to 10,000 steps in.  And the next day my muscles were taking me nowhere!
Scratch that idea.  When you have fibro, you have to pace yourself and 10,000 steps in a day is way too much.  I don't care what the experts say!
I've since learned that if I limit my steps to between 5,000 - 6,000 steps a day, I'm OK -- for the most part.
Anything over 6,000 steps in one day and I have terrible leg cramps during the night.  I've seen the pattern.  
So now I try to make at minimum 5,000 steps each day.  Anything over that is a bonus.
The price I pay for going over that 6,000 step threshold in a day?  Besides the leg cramps that night, I can't make even 2,500 steps the next day.  Simply not worth it in my books.
But the feature I most enjoy with this FitBit is the sleep monitoring report.
I indicate when I'm going to sleep and when I wake up.  And it monitors me while I'm "asleep."
I've learned that on average it takes me six minutes to actually fall asleep.  (I've always felt that it took me "forever."  Apparently, that's not true.)
I've also learned that when I'm "sick" (which I have been for most of the month of January), I waken anywhere from 11 to 17 times a night.  Not a very restful sleep.  But when I've not been sick, I waken perhaps two times.  A much more normal pattern, methinks.
Sleep data has always been of interest to me and I love getting this information every morning.  I know it's not the most accurate of data in a scientific sense, but it is reporting something.  And I'm enjoying it.
Oh, I also like learning that during my sleeping period, I'm taking steps too.  Yep.  Some nights I'm walking nine to twelve steps at a time, without getting out of bed.  Neat trick that, don't you think?
Have I mentioned that I'm having fun with my FitBit?

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