For Christmas, Christelle bought me a Fitbit Charge. It’s not something I would have thought about buying for myself but I’ve been wearing it for nearly a month and it has taught me some things I didn’t know and confirmed some others.
1) I really suck at sleeping.
I love to sleep but I always feel tired. There is a running family joke about my need for sleep. I know that I don’t get enough sleep and although the sleep tracker isn’t exact, after using it this month, it seems that although I go to bed for the requisite number of hours, I just don’t stay asleep for very long. So I’ll be in bed for 8 hours but only sleep for about 5 to 6 hours and sometimes less. At the weekends, I wake up just as much but can go back to sleep for a little bit longer, although I don’t sleep in, I’m usually naturally awake about 8.30am and those 2 hours make all the difference. It seems that I need more time in bed and as my natural sleep pattern would be to get to bed about 11pm and wake up about 9am (which I did over Christmas). I know that they say that an hour’s sleep before midnight is more valuable than an hour’s sleep after midnight but for me it seems that any sleep I get after 5am is my best sleep!
2) I like it when the targets go green.
The targets aren’t going to make me that much fitter. In January, each day I need to drink just under 2 litres of water, take 10,000 steps, climb 10 flights of stairs, be active for 30 minutes, walk 5 miles and burn 2000 calories. I really like it when all of the targets are green by the time I go to bed and I find myself having a longer journey into work so I can walk to from Kings Cross to work rather than from Warren Street. I’ve even started walking up escalators to get the stairs target met. I’ve been missing the mileage target averaging about 4.5 miles a day and so I started walking more on the weekend so even if I didn’t make the daily target, I got 35 miles a week in. Strasbourg was great for hitting the targets, Jo lives on the 3 floor and I walked to and from Ms T’s school 4 times a day!
3) The more I do, the more I want to do.
I know that the tracker isn’t perfect but it’s a useful way of pushing me a little bit further so I hit the targets and I was really sad that I didn’t hit any of my targets Monday to Friday last week because of being ill. My plan next month, is to push my self a tiny bit more, to aim for a 13,000 steps a day and 40 miles a week. It’s not a huge amount but pushing myself a little further can’t hurt!
Nic Dempsey 