Date:

August 6th, 2015

So Fitbit is now the boss of me.

Summer is always the time where I get to pay attention to my body and get back into shape, with grand ideals about continuing into the fall and winter and then having that kind of die off around November when it’s too cold to run outside. I also do some general health stuff – not strictly fitness – like try to tune my palate to crave less sugar and lay off the carbs quite so intensely. I love sugar like a person with a brain that wants sugar, so it’s tough, but I’ve made some moves over time that stuck. For example, I walked myself off sugar in tea. Used to have two teaspoons in every cup, and three or so years ago I just started using less and less until I wasn’t adding sugar anymore. Stuff like that. Nothing drastic.

Then earlier this year my spouse got a fitbit and I watched him lose 30 pounds and just be more dedicated overall to moving and being active. His fitness level has improved. So I got one, too. And now the device is the boss of me. I won’t bore you with a lot of detail about weight and exercise here, but I’ve had the thing roughly 30 days, and since strapping on the actigraph, I have walked 10,000 steps every single day. That little buzz that I made it…it’s really motivating for me. I don’t know why. Just works. And it works out to basically two walks a day, which isn’t bad.

One of the things the actigraph measures, besides my steps, is my heart rate. Having more information about what my heart is doing is kind of fascinating. I have hereditary low blood pressure (in fact, I have historically had a tendency to pass out, like delicate women receiving a shock in gothic novels), and I kind of always assumed my heart was in good shape, even though heart rate and blood pressure are not directly related. And it turns out, my assumption was correct (this time). My heart is fine. Resting heart rate should be between 60 and 100 beats per minute (according to AHA, here), but lower is not necessarily bad, just means your heart doesn’t work very hard. That’s me! Lazy heart girl. Here’s the graph of my resting heart rate for the last 30 days:

Screen Shot 2015-08-06 at 7.52.46 AM - Resting Heart Rate

During the 30 days shown on the graph, I also started C25K (again, for like the third or fourth time), and started back to doing yoga regularly (which I hope to be able to sustain in the fall, when school starts. I’ll find out in a couple of weeks whether this will work out or not). There’s a kind of steady climb on the graph, and then a sharp drop below what it was when I started monitoring. Is my resting heart rate affected by the high intensity workouts, the running? Or is it the yoga? Or both? Or neither? It’s kind of neat how it has plummeted, even though I don’t really understand why it would do that. Today I sneaked a peak at my fitbit during yoga, right before savasana, and my heart rate was clocking 52. That’s the thing about having the data always there. One wants to monitor it. How low can it actually go? Is it going to climb back up? Level off into the mid-50s after a bit? I have no idea. Stay tuned.

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