I’ve learned to ignore the people who tell me that if I just exercised more or did yoga, or “fill in the blank with the latest fitness craze here” I’d be “cured” of my fibromyalgia. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to do things to make me feel better. One of these is rejoining Weight Watchers (WW). I’ll talk about that in a future blog. The other is being aware of just how much I move in spite of how much pain I’m in. Those who think I sit on the couch and get other people to do things for me or are lazy are sadly mistaken. With my cheap (under $25) step counter from Amazon, I regularly logged about 5000-7000+ steps a day. More on weekends. That’s just me getting stuff done around the homestead like morning and evening chores. These days I’m closer to the 7K mark each day because I work in my office cabin, so do run into the house from time to time.
The problem with my cheap step counter was that while it could sync to my phone, it often didn’t. And that meant I’d have to manually type in my steps, and I’d not track some because I’d put in my count toward the end of the day, then not update it at the very end of the evening. I also didn’t want to put out the cash for a fitbit or something that did sync to my WW app.
Enter the Amazon Halo. I received an early invite from WW and decided that it would be my gift to myself. It syncs with the app, and I really wanted a more robust step counter. There are features I won’t use like the tone of voice tracking. That’s too triggering because of events and people in my past. And I’ll probably not take a picture of myself and calculate body fat, at least not for good long while. I’ve only used it for the step counting and syncing with my WW app, but the labs and videos look interesting. I hope to try them soon.
What I am finding out is that I’m moving more than I thought. In addition to counting steps, it also tracks the time I walk. So the 15-20 minutes when I’m doing feeding and chores and bringing in (or taking out) SuperDuck. Those are activity points on top of the steps. Or the half an hour or so on my lunch breaks when I feed Polly and do some horse chores. Yep, that’s a long-term activity too. It means that I’m seeing a lot more activity points on my tracker, and if I wanted to, I could eat them! (haha!)
The one thing I miss is a watch face and an ability to check my heart rate without going to the phone app. But otherwise, I am loving the Amazon Halo and it’s helped me be on top of my daily activity and health progress, which means I can correlate more what I do to how I feel. Perfect for those days when PEM (Post Exertion Malaise) hits me and I’m not sure if I “worked harder than days earlier”. I can check and now I know.
