Bodybugg Armband Review

My Top 3

I’ve been meaning to write this review for a while, but keep putting it off. But here it is , the long anticipated review of the bodybugg.

Price:
I got my bodybugg about a week after Thanksgiving. I ordered it online the day after Thanksgiving when 24 hour fitness was having a good sale. Thanks to the sale, and being a member of the gym, I got it for just over $200.00 with shipping. I didn’t opt to get the digital display watch. It also includes two over the phone “training sessions” (more on those later). It also came in a box with some free Apex products (a couple of breakfast sqaures that I haven’t tried yet, and 4 cookies–two peanut butter candy (not bad), two white chocolate (haven’t tried yet). The box also had an extra armband, a USB cable, and a wireless communicator (more on this later too)

Set-up:
I wanted to set it up right away on my work computer, but you have to download Java, and work doesn’t allow us to download. Probably for the best since I would otherwise spend tons of time with it at work. Once I got home, setup was easy. You plug the bodybugg into the computer with the USB cable and away you go. There are serveral tutorials to watch on using the bodybugg based on your goals (weight loss, maintenance, performance, or a combination of those). Then it asks you a number of questions about yourself in order to figure out a base number of calories it thinks you should eat, and the macro-nutriant guidelines (i.e. carbs, protein, and fat). The only thing I would complain about here is that as of right now you can’t use the bodybugg on a Mac. Not a huge deal for me since I have both, but I probably would have prefered to set it up on my Mac.

Use:
So you wear the bodybugg on the upper part of your right arm. Most of the time people can’t even tell you’re wearing it. Though it shows if you got a tight shirt on (or you’re in a sleeveless shirt, obviously). Then it keeps track of a number of different factors in order to tell you how many calories your burning. My only complaint here is that the device is not waterproof, so I can’t wear it in the pool. The bodybugg can sense when you aren’t wearing it, and so if you’ve got it off for more than 15 minutes, it will ask you once you upload your information what you were doing for that time and estimate your calorie burn.

You don’t have to wear the bodybugg to bed, but they recommend that you do wear it to bed as much as possible in order to increase the accuracy. It uses 1 AAA battery. Mine seem to last about a week. It would probably last longer if I didn’t wirelessly update to the computer (more later)

So once you’ve worn the bodybug around for awhile, you can download the information from the bodybugg onto the computer software (oh, yes my $200 included 3 months of the online software, after that I think its like $10 a month). Warning: This can be highly additive. You can update either by removing the bodybugg from your arm and plugging it into the computer via the USB cable or you can plug the wireless communicator into the USB plug on your computer and it will wirelessly get the information without you having to take off the bodybugg.

Once it’s updated the information it takes you to a nifty page. It tells you:
a) how many calories you’ve burned so far today
b) how many calories you will burn at the end of the day if you sit on your a$$ the rest of the day (well, it may not use that language ;))
c) how many calories you’ve eaten (more later)
d) your deficit or surplus number of calories for the day
e) a graph that shows you the number of calories you’ve burned each minute for the entire day. This is really cool. You can move around some arrows too, and it can tell you that between 6pm and 7pm you burned X number of calories. So I can tell you how many calories I burned in spin class, mowing my lawn, doing dishes, etc.

Also included on that page are:
a) number of steps you’ve taken (it’s a pedometer too)
b) break down of carbs/fat/protein for all the foods you’ve eaten and the total breakdown (more later)
c) time that you’ve been physically active for the day (Defined as anytime that you’ve averaged more than 3 calories a minute burnt)

Food logging:
Each day you also log in what you’ve eaten that day. Of course the bodybugg isn’t psychic so it can’t tell what your putting in your mouth. The part of the program that does this is user friendly. I haven’t had a problem finding foods, and those that you can’t find (some packaged things, etc), you can enter the nutrition info and save it. Of course you have to be good about making sure that you really only ate 3 oz of chicken and not 4 or 5, but this is the case with any diet based on calories/points/etc.

Goals and Progress:
When you first set up your body bugg you can set your goals one of many ways. In the weight loss area, you can either tell the program you want to weigh a certain amount by a certain date, or you can do it based on how many pounds you want to lose a week. I set mine to aim for 2 pounds lost per week. I didn’t worry about how long its going to take me to do it. But if you wanted to lose 10 pounds by a wedding or something like that, it would calculate it all for you. So then based on what you enter it tells you what your daily average caloric defict needs to be. To lose 2 pds per week, its 1,000 calories per day. You also imput the amount of exercise your doing, and then it sets how many calories it thinks you’ll burn and what you should eat. I’ve had to adjust this once or twice, but nothing huge. (I now have it set up as my goal is to burn 2,600 and eat 1,600).

Each week you weigh yourself and imput your weight (you can also do bodyfat % and measurements). It then can tell you how accurate your food log was. So it will give you what your calorie defict was based on both your changes in weight, and in your food log. Obviously, the closer these two numbers are together the better. If you don’t lose as much as you wanted to, it will either allow you to continue on the program as planned (if you think its hormonal, sodium, etc), or will ask you whether you want to increase your calorie deficit to catch up, or push out the amount of time you’ll spend trying to lose weight.

The program also makes meal plans for you. I’m pretty picky about what I want to eat, so I haven’t used these. They are also heavy in Apex nutrition bars, etc.

Training sessions:
When you buy the bodybugg you get two phone training sessions (you can buy more later too). The first one was after I had been using the bodybugg for about a week. She just went over the basics of the program with me and tips for using the bodybugg.

The second one was after I had been using it for about 1 month. She made a big report for me that showed many things including:
-average calorie burn by day of week
-average calories eaten by day of week
-average steps per day
-average breakdown of carbs/fat/protein
-frequency of specific foods I had eaten over the last 30 days (so I knew I ate for example 5 lowfat waffles)
-average calorie deficit based on logged food and based on weight

That report was pretty cool. What I don’t know is the persons qualifications who I was talking too. She didn’t offer any, and I didn’t ask. She didn’t really give any dietary advice, but I also didn’t ask for any. I think it could be harder for a person who is just starting out and doesn’t have any idea about what to do.

Overall:
So far I think that bodybugg has been a good tool. It’s allowed me to more accurately know how many calories I’m burning and what I’m eating. I know its probably not 100% accurate, but its a start (and by the way, the calorie burns are way lower then what the machines or even my heart rate monitor says). So far, it seems that its been pretty accurate about the amount of weight that I have lost. (So if I go a week with an average of 1,000 calorie deficit a day, I generally lose about 2 pds that week). When I was with my family in Vegas, I basically stopped logging food. It was too hard since I didn’t have a scale to weigh anything, and we ate out a lot. But I did use it to make sure that I was getting in a fair number of calories burned.

It has made me a little more anal in my life, which may not be a good thing. I sometimes can get down on myself if I haven’t burned enough calories, or don’t end up with quite a 1,000 calorie deficit. I also don’t like that I have to wait until I get home at the end of the day to know how many calories I’ve burned. But that would be fixed with the simple buying of the watch, which I might do.

Anyways, its obviously a personal choice. I personally think that the way to lose weight (and keep it off), is to eat less calories then you burn. It’s not easy, but it is that simple. Obviously, you shouldn’t be eating all your calories from candy, carbs, etc. But I don’t buy into diets that restrict whole groups of foods (carbs, dairy, etc.) I’ve seen a lot of people lose weight on them, but I’ve seen those same people put the weight back on and more. And personally, for me, if I’m “told” that I can’t have white bread, or refined sugar, what do you think I want?! With counting calories in and calories out, I can have a little treat sometimes, and just work it into my calories. It just seems a million times more sustainable.

I don’t know that I’ll wear the bodybugg for the rest of my life, but I might I’m going to keep using it until I get down to my goal weight, and then I’m sure for awhile after that too, because I will not be gaining my weight back. Once I get down to goal, you can change the program so that you just maintain your weight and focus on calories in equaling about the amount of calories out.

You can find out more about the science at bodybugg.com

Tags: