I have an off-again on-again relationship with diets and exercise. I’m one of those people that needs a while to build momentum exercising and then I’m great until a life event happens. That life event was moving from NYC to New Haven, CT and commuting two and a half hours each way to work. That basically destroyed any positive habits I learned over the preceding 9 months of weight and cardio training. Fast forward to January this year and I am back in NYC with a lot of time on my hands and a bigger stomach.
After enrolling at Chok Sabai gym and working out 2–3 times a week with cross training exercises; I’ve decided to get serious about tracking my eating and workouts. I’ll attempt to outline how I plan to lose 35 pounds using an Apple Watch, Runkeeper, MyFitnessPal and my Fitbit Aria scale.
The Runkeeper dashboard has a wealth of stats and reporting, however many of these options are only available with an Elite account.
Right now my gym time is in flux due to my work schedule and changes to my sleeping habits. I’m supplementing my workouts with running and tracking my performance using Runkeeper. My current session average is 1.8–1.9 miles with a pace of 13 minutes per mile. Sometimes I can run the entire time and other days I may need to take a short break.
Realizing that diet plays a big part of a weight-loss plan, I signed up for MyFitnessPal to track what I eat daily. I eat out for breakfast and lunch and use Seamless several times a week for dinner.
MyFitnessPal is the middleman between Runkeeper and Fitbit since most of these services since ecosystem lock-in is the name of the game.
The Setup
I bought a Fitbit Aria scale for Christmas and I’ve found the results to vary depending on the floor surface. Right now the best place for consistent results is in my bathroom with a tiled floor. Each weigh-in is then synced to my Fitbit account online which is then passed to MyFitnessPal.
I use Runkeeper to track my running activity and I find it to be a wonderful solution with a very large ecosystem of partner apps and devices. I can start a free run on the Apple Watch and the data will be waiting on the iPhone when I’m done. Thanks to a Reddit post about using MyFitnessPal as the middleman between FitBit and Runkeeper I can now see my weight changes in Runkeeper.
Key learnings
Runkeeper is a recommended solution for beginner runners and I upgraded to Elite so I can get access to premium plans. (Sub 30min 5k)
Fitbit seems to keep activity data close to their chest. I.E. no support for Apple’s Healthkit.
MyFitnessPal is a great intermediary across all these fitness platforms.
Runkeeper needs to support glances on the Apple Watch.
All the technology in the world doesn’t mean anything compared to the human will.