A few days before Christmas break, one of my coworkers was walking around handing out FitBit Flexes to all of us.

Were we beta testing something? Were we reviewing it?

Nope, just a company Christmas present.

SWEET!!

I’d sort of thought of asking for some sort of tracker for Christmas. Yeah, I work out, but how (in)active am I really the rest of the day? I walk to work and back, but I sit at a desk for 9-10 hours a day, rarely even leaving for lunch.

But how accurate are they? Would I get really sick of it after a day? A week?

I’d thought about asking for the Nike Fuelband SE for Christmas, but that was basically just because it looked cool. It measures your activity based on a semi-arbitrary number, but I would want real-world numbers in my fitness tracker, like steps or miles.

But since I didn’t pick it, I can’t really be choosy!

And while I generally am pretty active both in working out and in general lifestyle (thank you NYC and walking everywhere), it’s a good reinforcement of healthy habits.

If not another way for me to be competitive…

The app shows you this leaderboard of how you compare with your friends for steps.

It gives you a goal of 10,000 steps, which is a general guideline of healthy activity. I’ve heard that if you’re already pretty active, 15,000 steps is a good goal, but I’m okay with setting the bar low right now.

If I walk both ways to work and go for a run, I easily surpass 10,000+ steps. Some days, I take the bus one way if it’s cold, and if I happen to do a strength-based workout like Uplift or one of our workouts at work, I might not get to 10,000, but I generally do fairly easily in the city.

This week, in NJ for the holidays, I’ve found it much harder to meet my goal with more time in the car. On Christmas Day, I didn’t even reach 5,000 steps. Thursday, I took a yoga class, and I only reached 4,000 steps. I wish that there was some sort of 1 hour of yoga=x steps formula, but at the end of the day, it’s a really, really fancy pedometer. While writing this, I looked up to see if that was the case, and there is an option to separately input activities, though I think its estimate that I burned 91 calories is liiiitle low.

Looking at my FitBit data over the course of this past week, I’ve been really thankful that I live in the city and can get lots of built-in activity without really thinking about it. I likely won’t live in the city forever, and this really solidifies that I’d one day want to live in a town that has at least some areas I can walk to.

I’m still in NJ but went back into the city this morning to lead the JuicePress run, and I took a bath when I came back and fell asleep in the bathtub. So, it can be submerged for at least a little while and come out okay. (And apparently, the same can be said for me.) I also regularly shower in it, and it’s fine.

Below this, it also shows calories burned, which for me, is more of a nice to know. I despise tracking calories (although I may do so this week for Tina’s Get Healthy, Stay Healthy Challenge to be a bit more cognizant of just what I’m eating…), but that’s also an option within the system.

I also wish you could see how many steps you’ve taken right on the device. While the app is awesome, and I check it fairly obsessively, it’d be nice to see on my wrist. (Apparently the FitBit Force lets you do so.) It lets you track sleep, too, but you have to tell it via the app that you’re going to sleep, so it doesn’t confuse that with the other time you’re spending inactive.

Do you have a FitBit or other fitness tracker? How do you track your fitness/activity?

P.S. If you’re on there connect with me here: http://www.fitbit.com/user/227DSS (The interface to find people totally confuses me.)