After using my Fitbit Wireless Fitness Tracker for some time I was ready to take my findings to the next level by conducting a Fitbit Premium Review. When you purchase a Fitbit you are given a free membership to access all your information. The free access is great, it has a lot of benefits and you can’t go wrong if you decide not to splurge a little on the Fitbit premium membership. However, if you are looking for a little extra tracking, reporting, and motivation here is a breakdown of the benefits of the Fitbit premium membership. Here is a quick snapshot of what you get with the $49.99 per year.
Fitbit Premium Review
The Fitness trainer is a great tool in the Fitbit premium membership and one of the advantages of Fitbit when comparing Fitbit vs Oura ring. This tool is good for motivation. You can tell the Fitness trainer what your goal is, and how active you would like to become. It will calculate what your activity score should be and increase it slightly over time to get to your goal. The visual on your dashboard is a great motivator to see how much more active you need to be to reach that day’s goal. Here is a comprehensive shot of a previous 12-week period.
12-Week Period Overview
The chart on the right is the same chart you will see in your dashboard each day when you log in and will show you how close you are to meeting your goal (the line). The pie chart shows you how many days you met certain portions of the goal over the 12 week period. The bottom bar is what you set to be your goal. Every 12 week period you can increase your goal to get to the activity level that you strive for.
Food report
One of my favorite reports in the Fitbit premium membership is the Food Report. When I do log my food or have it in the past, it is important to me to see it in a percentage-type report. This helps me adjust how much of what I’m eating and when. I am a firm believer (this is my opinion please do not take it as advice) that your carbs should be heavy in the morning and wean down through the day. However, you will see from this chart that I didn’t follow my own beliefs.
One of the things I love about this report is not only the graphic representation of my eating but also the little bits of advice and information. For example:
You burn 1252 calories more per day than you eat. To lose 1lb of fat a week, you would have to burn 500 calories more per day than you eat. Your current intake should reduce your fat weight by about 2.5 lb per week.
Also, this advice:
Good eating habits spread calorie intake throughout the day and skew toward the morning.
Right now dinner takes up 32% of your calories. Try to keep dinner and evening snacks to below 30% if you are trying to lose weight and below 50% if you are trying to maintain your weight.
Further, into the report, you will get a breakdown of your calories per group as well as your top 10 foods eaten. Even further is a detailed report of the foods eaten with all the breakdown of fat, carbs, protein, etc. for the time frame selected. There are additional reports, the activity report and the sleep report. You can see where you fall regarding the average percentage of individuals for both reports. Here is a copy of a sleep report.
Sleep Report
You can see here that I’m just below the recommended amount of sleep and it even tells me that I get 21 percent more than most women my age and weight. In addition to these reports, there is a handful of benchmarking reports that look similar to the report above. They will show you where you are on the scale of average people. The benchmark reports can be created for several different aspects from daily steps, total calories, actual sleep time, and weight. You can further customize the report by telling it who to compare you to such as male and female, age, and weight.
Overall our Fitbit premium review decision is the Fitbit premium membership is a great deal and definitely motivates you if you like to see your progress in the form of reports. As well as how you stack up with others. I need to have a goal or I get lost. Note: I’ve done earlier reviews on the Fitbit One and then the Fitbit Ultra if you want even more information on the free membership and the product itself.
Update 10/18/19: Since the publication of this post, Fitbit premium has changed considerably. I have not used the new Fitbit Premium found here and my one complaint from conversations and research is the new Fitbit Premium does not include the reports I have outlined below. It does appear to have some more in-depth reporting on your sleep which I find interesting.
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