It’s that time of the year again. The time of year where people begin to make New Year resolutions. One of those resolutions might be to lose weight or to get in better shape. You can go to the gym and run on the treadmill like the hundreds of others that have the same resolution. Why not do it with a little help though?
The iFit Active can track your lifestyle while you are being active and sleeping. The Active wristband is comfortable to wear just like a watch (it actually is a watch!), or you can simply clip it to your waistband.
The iFIT works around the clock every day to track your calories, activity and sleep. The iFIT can work as a stand alone device just using itself as a daily record keeper, or you can download the iFit Track App for your phone or other Bluetooth enabled device.
Nutrition logging on the iFIT device itself is pretty easy, as long as you know roughly how many calories you are consuming. Just a simple push of the buttons on the device and you can jump through how many calories you want to log. These calories will be updated to the app via Bluetooth, but there won’t be a record of what kind of food was consumed. The App itself has been re-done recently to make it a little more user friendly than in the past. You can scan the barcode of the item, or do a simple search for food you have consumed. The app will then easily display your daily nutritional information for a quick reference were you stand in categories such as Carbs/Fiber/Sugar/Sodium and such. Overall the nutrition logging is beneficial, only if you can be diligent enough to log them all in.
Step calculator can be setup to fit your strides for the most accuracy. I have used this while walking a mapped out route and also in the gym on a treadmill and have found the counter to be pretty accurate overall. You can set and establish daily goals which you can easily see how close you are to meeting these goals throughout the day. The device can be setup to vibrate once your goal has been reached just so you can get a quick notification.
Sleep function was the most intriguing to me when I started with this device, and probably still is. Suffering from sleep apnea and using a CPAP, sleep patterns became part of my everyday life and studied at one point. The iFIT actually tracks your movement while you sleep and logs it. You can set what time you normally go to bed and want to rise. It will alert you at both times via a subtle vibration, you can allow it to go into the mode or manually override it. It is always quite interesting to know how you feel in the morning, but to visually look back on it and realize how you feel shows up good or bad on the app log.
Overall the iFIT Active is a good basic step/nutrition/sleep recorder. It wears easily, the battery life lasts a decent amount of time and it is discrete and functional at the same time.
The downfall to the device is that it does not sync up with IHealth for those Apple users out there, but maybe in the future this will change. Also there seems to be some BlueTooth connectivity issues I struggle with on occasion, but doing a device reboot on the phone or iFit seems to clear this up.
You can purchase the iFit Active at Amazon.com as well as at other major sporting goods stores.
Trying to find the perfect gift for your loved ones this holiday season? If so, check out Third Stop on the Right’s 2014 Holiday Gift Guide.
