I've been wearing a bugg for 2 1/2 months now and want to make some comments on my own experience but first wanted to address a few posts:
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Originally Posted by Babyducky
Hi all,
I have a Bodybugg and have had it for some time now (about 6 months). I wear it off and on, usually determined by how motivated I am feeling. I have a wedding coming up in about a year, and I am working on losing about 60 lbs. I have a question about driving. My Bodybugg seems to pick up a lot of movement when I am in the car. I drive a stick shift, and my commute is an hour each way in heavy traffic, but it seems odd to be burning ~5 calories a minute while sitting in the car. While briskly walking, I only burn between 6 - 7 per minute. Has anyone else experienced this? I think it is throwing my daily total way off...
Thanks,
Dana
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I don't know about the car situation - you may want to let THEM know about that since they continue to do updates for various activities detected - that does seem off. Your numbers for your weight for brisk walking are actually pretty high. I'm 185ish right now and when I run I average around 6cpm burn. Brisk walking for me is 3-3.5. So count yourself lucky in that respect!
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Originally Posted by ndnguy85
if you guys are expecting to lose the precise amount of weight every week like the bugg tells you..it ain't gonna happen.
so just keep that in mind. weight is affected by wayy too many factors to be used as a reliable indicator of FAT LOSS.
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Have you actually used it yourself? What are you basing this on? I've been using it for 2 1/2 months and my overall numbers are within 5%. From a week to week basis, it isn't representative but over a 4 week period it is VERY accurate.
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Originally Posted by hereyago
I reset my trip before getting on the elliptical last night to compare the calorie burn and number of steps between each.
The armband was off and lower on the number of steps by about 10%. I know that the step count on the elliptical is accurate. I am sure it is because my left arm may not be moving as much as it would if I were actually walking particularly when I let go of the moving handles and rest them periodically.
As everyone has said the calorie burn was drastically different as the workout machines tend to inflate your results. The Armband measured about 55% of what the elliptical said I burned. I am going to wear the Polar heart rate monitor and compare that to the mix too.
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I use a Polar F11 for cardio along with my bugg. Machines will tell me I burned almost double my bugg, the Polar F11 shows around 50% more burned than the bugg. I have no doubt that HRM's would be unreliable showing my burn. My doc agreed with this. I have a very low resting heart rate - 57-58 bpm. I've been in exceptionally good physical condition most of my life and the bulk of my weight gain was in a 1 year time frame. (I went from 145 to 205.5 from June of last year to June of this year - it started when being put on Prednisone for a short period of time.) The problem for me is that the extra weight on my body accelerates my heart rate very fast. For example, when I jog 5 mph, my hr jumps to max within a minute or so. I think my heart thinks I'm doing it while carrying an extra 40 lbs or so on my back hehe So the burn rate cannot be accurate for me personally.
To relate my own history with the bugg. I got it because charting my BMR and supplemental activities were not giving me an accurate picture of what I should have been losing. Yes, I did remove my BMR calories from the extra activities to try and be accurate. But it didn't work. The HRM also didn't work and as we know, it isn't effective for tracking burn for strength training and some types of sports.
My own idea was that even if the bugg was inaccurate, I could make adjustments on my own to what I was seeing so that I could get a better handle on what I needed to do in order to lose weight.
Right after getting the bugg, my weight loss as far as the SCALE went came to a screeching halt. I had lost around 15 lbs in 6 weeks or so. Then for 6 weeks I pretty much stayed the same. HOWEVER the deficit shown by my bugg when comparing to body fat rather than scale alone are within 5% accuracy. Let me explain ---
Even though I wasn't losing weight on the scale, my lean body mass changed tremendously. When I started to lose weight, I was at around 43% body fat. When I started with the bugg I was at 32%. I'm currently at around 28%. The bugg deficits correlate exactly to this when considering 1 lb of fat loss is 3500 calories, 1 lb of muscle increase correlates to 500 extra calories and the change in the water I am carrying (39% up to 42% now) makes up the rest of the difference. The numbers have almost exactly balanced out for me. For the water percentage, I'm basing that on one of the higher end tanita's which have matched dunk test results.
Figuring this out goes a bit beyond what the normal bugg reporting does. In a way, I feel it has given me more control and in other ways, it's made me realize how much less control we have over WEIGHT loss (as opposed to fat loss) compared to what I thought. ie I can say I will burn so many calories through exercise and consume so many and will lose X pounds of fat based on this. However I cannot say what other shifts will happen in terms of the percentage of water weight I am carrying or muscle gain so knowing what the scale will say is a different story.
I have found through ongoing use that some activities are off a little in their burn rate. For example, rollerskating for me is underestimated a bit and tennis is a little overestimated.
A few other remarks - for sleeping I keep it on all the time. More because it helps me measure the quality of sleep I'm getting. If I see steps in my sleep, that is a sign I had poor quality sleep. So I look at what I did the previous day and try and make adjustments based on that. In the early days I didn't wear it consistently to sleep and that would set my overall burn off a little.
For normal activities, I've found the step counter part to be accurate. I use a wii fit from time to time and the numbers for free step are within 5 count of what the bugg says (and given I'll do around 1200 steps in a 10 minute period, I think that's a pretty reasonable error margin). I've compared it to an Omron for walking/running and it's been accurate within 0.5%. At faster speeds on a TREADMILL, I find it can be off a little more because I don't move my arms at the same pace my legs move. I don't use an elliptical now but when I did in the past and used an Omron, it was off as is. Any pedometers are known to be off for elliptical and bikes when used out of the box. Even with the Omron, you'd need to do a 100 step test to match it properly. The bugg doesn't have such a sensitivity feature so you have to make adjustments accordingly.
A few other observations - when I had a high temperature for a couple of days, my bugg showed a burn at a very high rate. Overall - and I was inactive those couple of days - I burned at much being inactive as I did with a normal workout thrown it. But at the end of the week, the numbers balanced out. I really don't like the manual adjustment part when you aren't wearing the bugg. Swimming for example put in a burn rate much higher than I know I burned. I did wear my Polar for swimming and the adjustment in the Apex interface showed more than my Polar burn did even. So I know that was off. The best post workout burn I have seen has been from when I do HIIT. I'd see my resting burn rate be higher for up to 20 hours after a session. I had asked my bugg coach about this during my free call and she said that HIIT does have this effect.
On pricing - if you have a local 24 hour fitness and know someone else locally that wants a bugg too, I suggest going to the manager and seeing what kind of deal you can strike. My partner and I got our buggs for $220 each including the display. They are still making money at that price, so don't feel bad about trying to negotiate.
With everything I wrote, I am not implying by any means that the bugg is a perfect tool for everyone. It has made me more accountable and I definitely know I won't be without it for the duration of my weight loss journey. Even knowing that a 5 lb loss decreases my burn rate for doing the same activities and by how much is useful for me. If you've not gathered this from my post, I'm also a tool junkie and don't believe that any one tool completes the picture. But the tools and monitoring steps I take combined are really helping me stay on track rather than just using the scale alone as a judge. I am motivated but I know that if I had gone 2 months of maintaining what I thought was a calorie deficit and seeing NO change at all on the scale, I'd have been ready to throw in the towel. Knowing that my body FAT loss was happening was crucial for me not only to stick with it but to actually increase my motivation.
Sorry for being so long winded
Armband vs the elliptical
