Category Archives: reviews

Gaining a Fitbit has me losing (weight)

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Getting love from my Fitbit ChargeHR upon reaching 10,000 steps

Getting love from my Fitbit ChargeHR upon reaching 10,000 steps

A few years back, I took part in a wellness competition that pitted co-worker against co-worker, trying to see who could get the most steps. People were organized in teams, and we were given these exceptionally junky (but free!) pedometers that we clipped onto ourselves as a way to measure our movement.

It totally stressed me out. I hated it.

Here’s the thing: as a new person at my company, and wanting to take advantage of my employer’s encouragement to be healthier, the competition gave me a great incentive to get up and move myself out of my cubicle. It also gave me a sense of belonging, even if only to commiserate with fellow pedometer-wearing folk who similarly hated the clunky, clearly-worth-the-free-price devices. I bowed out after doing a couple of these competitions in a row; I couldn’t handle the stress of keeping up with co-workers who had A LOT more time to work out every day, and I truly HATED wearing the pedometer. I could never seem to find a place to wear the device where it would measure my steps accurately on a consistent basis, and woe unto me if I forgot to put the thing on, since we had to log our steps daily.

But the thing is, I still wanted to be healthier, and that’s been a constant struggle. Movement during the day can be really difficult, especially when you work in an office environment where the majority of “active” time is when you’re going between floors or rooms for meetings.

Enter Fitbit.

I have friends with Fitbit devices, and I’ve seen them sported by several co-workers. They talked about how great it was to strap the thing on and not really think about it; their steps were just recorded for them. Feedback happened when you hit a step goal that YOU set, and the price wasn’t heinous.

After much hemming and hawing over which features were most important to me, I settled on the Fitbit Charge HR. I wanted it to count flights of stairs (to encourage me to skip the elevator), and I really liked that it had a wristband more like that of a watch. Facebook friends and page followers also told me that they’d had better luck with the Fitbit Charge HR‘s wristband than that of the Fitbit Flex (something about breaking?!), so that also pointed to the Fitbit Charge HR.

So I got one. And I LURVE it.

I’ve had mine for about a month now, and it’s gotten me to MOVE more just by its being on my wrist. That doesn’t mean it buzzes at me when I’m sedentary for a stretch (which would be a nifty feature, btw); I mean that its very presence is a physical reminder that I’ve made a promise to myself to be healthier. Thus far, it has been working: I’m taking the stairs more at the office than before I got my Charge HR, and I’m more motivated to find ways to get to 10,000 steps for as many days as I can. That number is still not nearly as many days as I’d like but–baby steps. Without some kind of step counter I just didn’t have a good baseline for what a “normal” day in my life looked like anymore, and it’s impossible to measure progress without knowing your starting point.

It also helps that it’s easy to use. Setup instructions are minimal; you download the app to your phone and it walks you through everything (including getting an account set up on the Fitbit website). Once this is all set, the device synchronizes data wirelessly using Bluetooth, so the cumbersome data entry of those prior years’ competitions is never happening again. Even better, I get real-time feedback on the device and on the app.

 

A recent Sunday, often my most active steps day

A recent Sunday, often my most active steps day

In general, I’ve found that the Fitbit Charge HR solves three problems for me:

  1. I can’t forget it – with a clock of its own, I wear my Fitbit instead of a watch.
  2. I don’t struggle finding a place to wear it – it goes on my wrist and stays securely there.
  3. I don’t have to fuss with logging steps – that’s done automatically by the device, which sends the info to the app (which then sends the info to the website).

One area of improvement for Fitbit would be a longer charging cable; it’s designed for charging with your computer, and I charge my devices with the wall instead. (This problem was easily solved by buying an inexpensive USB Extension Cable from Amazon).

The result of my Fitbit experiment: I’m making more progress in my weight loss.

So that’s really the big test, right? If you’re starting to see that you’re passing a plateau mark, that’s a good sign. In my case, the first inkling that I’d reached a turning point was when my clothes (particularly those for work) were hanging off me. The next point that it clicked for me was when I went to the doctor’s office for my physical and she told me that I’d lost 17lbs since my exam in 2014. Sure, a good bit of that was done pre-Fitbit-purchase, but I’d plateau’ed a couple of months ago and needed help getting my weight loss going again.

I won’t say that a Charge HR can do this for everyone. Honestly, if the motivation isn’t there, there’s no amount of wearable tech that’s going to make it happen. And I’m not losing crazy amounts of weight where I’m dropping a dress size a week or something. The Fitbit is just helping me keep track of where I was and giving my wrist a gentle hug when I make my daily goal.

My tight shorts aren't so tight anymore.

My tight shorts aren’t so tight anymore.

 

In the past month, I’ve dropped an inch or two from my waist, to the point where my “tight waist” shorts now barely hug my hips. I’ve lost 3.5lbs, about one pound per week (which is a totally healthy amount to lose per week). All in all, it’s pretty incredible.

I can’t wait to see what the next month brings.

 

Movie Review: “Tomorrowland”

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Tomorrowland

“This is a story about the future, and the future can be scary” — the somewhat ominous first words from John Francis “Frank” Walker (George Clooney), at the opening of Brad Bird’s latest opus. Rather than bringing us straight to the shiny future teased in the movie’s trailers, “Tomorrowland” truly begins with a visit to the past, 1964 to be exact, and the World’s Fair in New York. Young Frank (Thomas Robinson) makes his appearance at a booth for the vetting of inventions, and when a taciturn Nix (Hugh Laurie) seems to find every reason to turn down Frank’s only-barely-not-working jet pack, a sweet young pixie named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) chases him down and coyly offers him a second chance to impress with his technology.

Athena hands Frank a pin with a “T” on it and orders him to follow her from a safe distance, while she then dashes ahead to the “It’s a Small World” ride (which actually debuted at the real-life 1964 Fair). Frank manages to scamper onto one of the boats and the pin ensures that he’s spirited away to a world straight out of every futuristic drawing ever produced (or perhaps from the pen of the designer of London’s Shard), where his jet pack manages to save his life almost immediately upon arrival. Frank and Athena are soon reunited and, as much as Nix dourly regards Frank, he’s unable to deny that Frank has some techno skills.

 

Young Frank and Athena at the World's Fair

The younger Frank (Thomas Robinson) talking about his jet pack with Athena (Raffey Cassidy)

 

Skip now to present day, where Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is trying to sabotage the demolition of a NASA launch platform at Cape Canaveral to stave off a future that puts her engineer father out of work. “It’s hard to have ideas…and easy to give up,” she says. Given how the rest of the movie goes, I’m inclined to agree with her. Over the course of the two hour and ten minute-long film, Casey goes on your standard hero quest through space and time–to the point where I started to wonder if Bird himself gave up and just dropped scenes and concepts from “Back to the Future II”, “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief”, “Contact”, and “The Lorax” into the largest blender he could find.

 

Casey in the wheat field

Casey (Britt Robertson) seemingly transported to a field wheat

 

A strangely un-aged Athena plants a pin on Casey, who soon discovers that it has the power to show her a transformed world with the lovely dichotomy of a super-futuristic city surrounded by fields of completely untended wheat. As it happens, the pin is merely an ad; it shows Casey the visuals but none of it is real. When the time runs out on the hallucination (or very intricate hologram), she finds she’s mostly waded into a swamp. One quick internet search later, she finds a place that may have answers about the vision from the pin: a nerdtopia of a store called “Blast from the Past”, run by Ursula (Kathryn Hahn) and Hugo (Keegan-Michael Key).

It’s once you get to “Blast from the Past” that “Tomorrowland” veers firmly off the “OK for Small Kids” path, when a variety of killbots sporting hyper-bleached toothy grins begin the first of several lengthy appearances, blowing up things left, right and center, and placing Casey firmly in danger. Athena helps save the teenaged heroine, aiding her escape and setting her on the path to meeting up with Frank, at which point the strange story takes turns both predictable and disappointing.

 

Frank and Casey in Frank's house

Older Frank (George Clooney) and Casey (Britt Robertson) having one of many arguments

 

The pairing of Casey and Frank goes well enough, but at this point the story itself becomes too much of an unoriginal hot mess to match with some of Bird’s earlier work (such as “The Incredibles”, which is Bird and Pixar both firing on all cylinders). As much as Frank initially resists Casey’s pleas for help to get to the city of the pin’s visions, he soon wholeheartedly jumps into her quest and all too slowly reveals why it is that he no longer resides in the utopia she glimpsed. The remaining threads of the story then pull together in a manner well-telegraphed to those paying attention.

On the plus side, the casting was fairly well done. Robertson is plucky and adorable (sort of a Jennifer Lawrence-lite), and Clooney plays “get off my lawn” rather well for someone who started out his career as a heart-throb. Cassidy plays Athena just right, and the combination of Key and Hahn needs to get its own TV show (or she needs to be a regular on “Key and Peele”). The visuals of the shiny city with multilevel pools and flying everything are gorgeous, although occasionally the green screening doesn’t quite work as well as it should.

Where “Tomorrowland” falls below expectations is in how often it spends too much time wallowing in misery over discarded gadgets and people, showing the myriad ways one can disable a grinning killbot, and lecturing everyone on how little we appreciate everything around us. Meanwhile, it gives short shrift to the future promised by the eponymous “land”, in particular leaving a whole piece of what’s happening in that city completely unexplained, and the writers maddeningly deny Laurie’s Nix the opportunity to chew all the scenery within reach. Talk about not appreciating something right in front of you.

As far as the question of whether “Tomorrowland” is okay to watch with kids, I’d recommend it for children 8 years or older. Below that age, some of the violent scenes may be too disturbing. It’s actually somewhat difficult to tell which age range is the target for “Tomorrowland”, since portions of it are fairly kid-oriented but the action scenes are really too much for the smaller set. Perhaps all that jumping around between the past, present, and “future” has “Tomorrowland” just as confused as the rest of us.

 

2-1/2 out of 4 stars

“Tomorrowland” opens nationwide on May 22, 2015. This movie is rated PG for sequences of sci-fi action and peril, thematic elements, and language.

 

Product Review: Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves

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{Disclaimers: 1) I am not, not do I claim to be a doctor. Before you attempt to use this product, check with your primary care physician and/or specialist health care professional to be sure that it’s right for you. 2) I received this product for the purpose of testing and was allowed to keep it as a courtesy for posting a review. I received no other compensation for this review. In other words: this is MY opinion and not a company-paid PR piece. Take that for what you will.}

 

Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves

If you’d asked me a year ago whether I wanted calf sleeves, I’d probably have given you more than a little side-eye. It wasn’t until my triathlete dh started showing off his calf sleeves that I learned of their value for workouts. Prior to that, my sole exposure to these was knowing them as “compression stockings” (or similarly named items), worn by patients with lymph edema on their lower extremities.

DH wears high-quality calf sleeves during his workouts, so when I was approached with the opportunity to review Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves, I was curious about trying them out for myself. I will say that the product information on the Amazon product page is somewhat lacking for textual information, so it’s vital to review the pictures, including this one, with a size chart:

 

Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves Size Chart

 

Unfortunately, the size chart didn’t start things off on the right foot; what I consider “top of sleeve” would be the highest point of my calf (or, alternately, the girth, which other manufacturers use as a key measurement). Also, the sizes listed can’t possibly be in centimeters, else there’s no way I could’ve fit even the XL sleeve on my women’s size 14 calf. Things didn’t improve dramatically when my sleeves showed up with no packaging other than a plastic bag marked with an “XL” sticker. (I can only hope that this was due to my getting these for a review; if this is how they send out products purchased by customers, that’s not a good thing.)

 

The tests:

I took my calf compression sleeves out for two different workouts–a 5K walk inside on the treadmill at the gym and just under 5K outside on a cold Sunday morning. They were also washed in between the workouts.

 

The results:

Both workouts went well enough. In the gym-based workout, I wore them with the same climbing capris that I used for last year’s marathon walk, and I was able to keep a nice clip going on the treadmill without my shins kicking up any measure of fuss about my speed. I didn’t overheat, and the sleeves stayed put without feeling like I was having my blood supply cut off. For my outdoor walk, in 30-35ºF, I put them on under thinly-lined track pants, since the temperature at the end of a walk typically feels about 10ºF warmer than the actual air temperature. My thighs were slightly chilly as I set out, but this wasn’t the case at all for my calves–they were a perfect temperature and, again, very comfortable without any concern of feeling too constricted.

Unable to find any information on proper washing instructions, I hand-washed them on a day in between the two workouts. They felt exactly the same after air-drying as they did when they first arrived (no pilling, no snagging, and no easily detectable degradation of elastic quality).

 

Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves

The Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves, with my track pants pulled up to show how they fit as “cold weather” gear

 

The Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves look and fit much like a footless women’s knee-high stocking, in tights-level weight, and I found them generally comfortable to wear before, during, and post-workout. The trouble is, without knowing that I was wearing the right size (thanks to the screwball size chart), and not knowing that I was applying them properly (due to the lack of ribbing, markings, or any other indication that definitively shows which way should face front), it’s hard for me to know that I was using them properly. That’s more than a little bit disconcerting.

The price point is considerably lower than that of most calf compression sleeves ($19.99 versus the $50.00 or so that I’m used to seeing), but other manufacturers’ sleeves–including the ones dh and his fellow triathletes purchase–have packaging, ribbing, markings, and various other indications designed to increase the likelihood of correct use. The Light Step sleeves are also marketed for general use, from fitness to therapeutic needs, which suggests they’re designed for no specific application.

It’s hard for me to recommend the Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves; it’s unclear to me that they did much to help my performance and they seem designed as a generic alternative calf sleeve. Perhaps a future revision of the product and packaging will move the Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves forward, but for now they leave me with the impression that these sleeves aren’t yet ready to go the distance.

 

Where to buy:

Light Step Calf Compression Sleeves are exclusively sold through Amazon.com. As Light Step does not yet appear to have a formal website of their own, you can connect directly with Light Step through their Facebook page.