Unfinished Bitness

Fitbit has done an excellent job and designed a well thought out and easy to use web interface for accessing your account.

Login

First you need to login.  Online accounts are free if you want to try it out before investing in a tracking device like the Zip or the One.  If you’re wondering what the difference is, the Zip can’t track sleep.  You can register for an account through Fitbit or use your Facebook or Google accounts for authentication.  I recommend against the latter for a number of reasons.

Dashboard

Once logged in, you get your Dashboard.  This gives you an overview of your stats for the day.

Scrolling down in Day view you can see your Food Plan, Body and Sleep information.  And yes I’m a tad out of shape (working on it) and didn’t get much sleep the night before I took the screenshots.  The metrics here are not completely accurate as I was not fully tracking food.

You can switch the view to week or month views which give some more interesting statistics.

Logging

Click the Log section and you can see everything that can be tracked.  Food, Activities, Weight, Sleep, Heart-rate, Blood Pressure, Glucose, and a Journal.  The journal can be used to track mood and has a free form note field for anything you want to note.  Some of the parts have more than one view, indicated by dots at the bottom of the section.  Clicking the left or right arrows switches them out.  More good details are in these sections so look through them!

Scrolling down through the Food section allows you to enter meals and see statistics about what you have consumed.  And look at that, the French Dip I ate totally blew my sodium intake for the day.

One section that many will be interested in is the Blood Pressure section.  I have a Withings cuff which syncs to my Withings account via my iPhone.  Fitbit doesn’t have a sync for this like they do with weight.  There is a 3rd party web site which says it will sync this as well as other sources (http://www.syncservices.com), but I have not looked into it in detail.

The Glucose section will be of interest to diabetics.

Wrap Up

The gear icon in the upper right will show the last sync time, battery level, allow access to account settings and provides the logout function.

Next I’ll guide you through the Fitbit iOS application.

Next: Getting fit with Fitbit, Part 3 (iOS)