Monitoring Sleep Quality, Exercise, and Diet with One Gadget
Whether you’re trying to lose weight or just maintain a healthy lifestyle, it’s important to make sure that you’re listening to your body. There’s a lot of information that can be obtained simply from observation of your diet, exercise, and sleep patterns, and you can use this knowledge to help you solidify good health habits and eradicate bad ones. For example, if you knew that you weren’t getting a high quality of sleep every night, you would probably take steps toward improving it, such as avoiding meals and exercise for at least 3 hours before going to bed. But you can’t implement a solution if you don’t know that a problem exists, so how can you monitor sleep quality, exercise, and diet 24 hours a day?
BodyMedia FIT
One option that covers all three of these important health elements is the BodyMedia FIT system. It looks simple enough – it’s just a cuff that you wear on your upper arm – but it’s loaded with technological features that monitor your daily actions with at least 90% accuracy. You can also set up an online account to track measurements such as number of calories consumed, calories burned, sleep duration, steps taken, and more. All you have to do is wear the cuff for as many hours of the day as possible (take it off to shower).
Features and Data Collection
The BodyMedia FIT cuff features galvanic skin response, which means that when you sweat, this information contributes to the day’s analysis of your activity rate. The cuff also measures the surface temperature of your body via a sensor that’s constantly in contact with your skin, measures the rate at which heat dissipates from your body, and accurately analyzes your motions with a three-axis accelerometer. Monitoring heat flux, or the measurement of how quickly heat leaves your body, helps analyze the amount of energy you expend throughout the day. All of this is great, but how do you collect and use the information gathered by BodyMedia FIT? Just take that cuff off for a few seconds, plug it into your computer’s USB port, and start reading the automatically uploaded data. It’s a simple process that gives you accurate details about complicated functions, and for many people, it’s worth the $259 price tag.
How to Use Your BodyMedia FIT Data
In addition to calorie counts, the BodyMedia FIT system lets you know details about your nutrition such as fiber and carbohydrate intake. With this kind of information, you can alter your diet to include more of what you need and fewer empty calories. You can also find out whether or not you should sleep longer, which of your daily activities burn the most calories, and how best to lose weight based on combined feedback on your sleep, diet, and exercise habits. You won’t be starving yourself or running yourself into the ground when you could be achieving more efficient weight loss results by altering your sleep pattern. By knowing your body well, half of the weight loss battle will be over and you’ll be free to enjoy life.
Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education and performs research surrounding online schools. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
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