Rock Your BodyBugg

A little over a month ago, I bought a BodyBugg.

BodyBugg is a device attached to an armband that tracks the number of calories your body burns at any given time. The armband is worn on the back of your tricep. (Which means, contrary to popular belief, that is not a picture of my back.)

Before I say any more, it should be noted that I paid for the BodyBugg myself and am not getting any compensation for this post. I am not a cool enough blogger to get a BodyBugg for free. Or a Garmin Forerunner 10. What? Anyway, I’ve wanted to try one out for a long time but they were a little too expensive. So, when Michelle found one on sale online for $89.00, I grabbed it.

I wore the band for the first 24 hours just to track my resting/sleeping calorie burn, which averages between one and two calories a minute. As you can imagine, it made me love Breaking Bad even more when I realized that I burned about 90 calories while sitting on the couch watching it. Can Breaking Bad do any wrong? I’m thinking no.

There’s no way to read your calorie burn on the device itself, so you have to pop the Bodybugg out of the armband and hook it up to your computer by the USB cable that comes with it.

To get your calorie burn, you have to log into their Web site. When you log in for the first time, you have to register your device (which was a pain for me but their 24-hour service center was super helpful) and then enter your weight, age, sex, etc so it can accurately track your information.

The information from the Bodybugg syncs with the Web site and you can see your calories burned, and calories consumed if you log your daily food into their site (which I don’t because I use My FitnessPal instead). The site basically allows you to keep track of your entire exercise and nutrition plan, but I just use it to view specific calorie burn.

I wear the BodyBugg mainly for workouts. My main goal is to figure out which of my activities burn the most calories and I wanted to use something with more accuracy because cardio machines are notoriously off by about 20%. While a lot of the activities that I do averaged close to the amount of calories I predicted, there were a few surprises.

Remember that time I did Yoga? That hour and 15 minute session burned 174 calories, or what I like to call, “two Breaking Bad episodes.” The other day I wore my BodyBugg to Crossfit. We did the Filthy 50 workout and it took me 58 minutes to finish. My perceived exertion during that workout is extremely high. In other words, I feel like I’m going to die at any moment.

This is the workout, if you’re not familiar.

That workout burned 415 calories – about 150 short of my estimate.

I’ve worn the BodyBugg for several of those two-mile HIIT workouts I’ve been doing lately as well. Those runs burn about 325 calories in 20 minutes – about 75 calories more than I estimated. Pretty good for only 20 minutes of exercise.

So basically, I’ve been keeping a more accurate track of what I burn and have lost 5 lbs in the past three weeks. I’m not saying the Bodybugg is solely responsible for my weight loss because I’ve also been eating fairly well and doing two extra workouts a week (those HIIT 20-minute workouts), but I think it’s helped.

Overall, it’s made me more aware so that it’s easier to plan what I’m eating that day based on what workout I’ll be doing.