iHealth Fuel Band - My New Favourite Accessory

I make no secret to the fact that my fitness and health regime has taken a very abrupt nose dive lately - purely out of a sheer lack of any sort of spare time.

...and to me becoming very lazy of late...

I do hate it though.

I hate feeling rubbish, sluggish and bloated all of time and I hate that I am missing my gym classes so much.

But I will rejoin this week - after pay day that is.

And I'm even a little giddy at the prospect of getting the running trainers back on again for some early morning jogging around my area.

I will do this.

Part of this re-found enthusiasm is due to a little package I received in the post recently.

This amazing little watch like iHealth Wireless Activity Tracker was sent to me as part of the Health On-Line Body Fuel Campaign (details here) and I was just so excited to start using it.

Although I didn't quite know what a "fuel band" was initially, after a quick internet search I was bouncing-off-the-walls-giddy.

I immediately opened the box, downloaded the compatible "iHealth" app to my iPhone and got the little circular device straight on charge.

Once I had a full battery, I popped the iHealth tracker into one of the wrist straps and I was all set.

The device and app connect and synch together via a bluetooth connection, then, any information collected will be stored directly onto the phone app.

It's fab.

My first use of the device was at night - there is a special fabric wrist band the device can be placed fully inside to be worn for bed.

Once on "sleep" mode the clever little thing collects information relating to sleep patterns - deep sleep, hours spent awake etc - it's brilliant - especially once the data has been transferred and you get an informative little graph on your phone to take a peek at

No wonder I was tired the day after this rubbish sleep.

The app has a really easy to navigate menu screen - just tap on an area and you are immediately able to manually add data into the app.

The food diary style option of logging everything eaten during a day looks really useful for weight loss and counting calories, but I haven't used this section fully - as of yet.

I absolutely loved the pedometer style step counter it has though.

I found it really spurred me on and encouraged me to actually get up and walk more and be more active throughout the day.

It became a little challenge - I just had to get the steps logged and reach my 10,000 daily step limit.

And I did it!

Yay.

I also had a lot of "Oooh I like your new watch" type compliments whenever I wore the iHealth tracker too, so I think I need to add "stylish and appealing" to the positives list too.

It really is great, useful little device and I love it, but to summarise, my pros and cons of this fuel band are:

Pros:

~ encourages exercise

~ easy to set up

~ easy to use

~ phone app is free and easy to navigate

~ stylish 

~ interchangeable wrist straps and clothing clips

~ lots of different functions for the price

~ graphs are interesting and easy to understand

Cons:

~ slightly too chunky a design to wear with everything

~ the colour choice of band/clip are limited

~ quite difficult to take the device in and out of the watch strap without holding down the reset button

~ quite expensive (£43)

I would rate this tracker on a scale of 1 (rubbish) to 10 (magnificent):

~ Ease of use - 9

~ Ability to improve exercise - 10

~ Value for money - 8

~ Overall - 9

I just love the little thing and I will use it all of the time - especially as it's spurred me on to up my exercise again.

And I now have actual real-life proof - in graph form no less - for The Hubby that I don't sleep nearly as much as I should.

Sleep in for me this weekend please...!

Fab little thing

*product sent for review purposes - thoughts/pictures ALL my own