Stuff I Try Out

 

One difficulty in trying to keep track of your exercise activity and diet is...well....keeping track of it all.  The little gizmo pictured above is one such handy tracker.  It's called GoWear and it's by a company called Bodymedia. You wear this device around your upper arm and it measures your activity level during the day.  It will even measure your sleeping activity if you wear it to bed.  There is a web site where, for a monthly fee, you can download all the info and put in stuff like what you have eaten, what exercises you do, and your daily weight if you choose.  It actually works pretty well as far as gathering useful data...but it has a couple of major problems.

This first one is, it's really not very comfortable.  As I said, you wear it on your upper arm so you broadcast to everybody that you're fat and trying to monitor every minute of your day.  Since you wear it on the same spot every single day, it starts to chaff and you need to take a vacation from wearing it every so often to keep from developing a really nasty rash.  I found that I could only wear it about three or four days before I had to leave it off for a few days so that my skin could heal.

But the biggest problem is the web site.  You have to download software in order to sync up the device to the tracking website.  I recently obtained a new computer and....guess what?.....I could not download the software.  I tried customer service FAQ; they told me to download the software.  I tried customer service email; they told me to download the software.  I called the customer service; they told me to download the software.  I could not make them understand that downloading the software was the damn problem.

So....after over a year of paying monthly dues...I canceled the service.  I still have the device and it's a hundred dollar piece of junk with absolutely no use to myself or anybody else.  I would definitely NOT recommend that anybody try this thing out.  Once Bodymedia has your money, they could not care less about you.  I found something much, much better......and I'll talk about that tomorrow.