I bought the bodybugg “intelligent calorie management system”

Today I finally broke down and bought a bodybugg.

If you’re not familiar with the bodybugg, it’s a nifty little gadget that tracks actual calorie expenditure (or as close to it as you can get outside of a lab setting). There are two parts: an armband that you wear during all waking hours (except when you’re wet, so not in the shower or the pool), and a website that tracks the data. The big benefit is that it’s possible, with consistent food logging, to know exactly what your calorie deficit (and expected weight loss) is.

I’d been pining after one of these toys for a couple of months, and tried to convince Apex, the manufacturer, to give me one to review on this blog. Sadly, they completely ignored me (didn’t even write back to say no, which I though was somewhat rude).

Eventually I gave up checking my spam folder “just in case” and decided to plunk down the substantial chunk of change ($399) and buy the dang thing. One of the trainers at my local health club was nice enough to spend an hour showing me the bodybugg a month ago when I was looking at starting the Johnson UpDayDownDay diet, so I bought it through him (I’m assuming he gets a commission).

Setting the beast up was a bit annoying. First, I followed the included directions and logged into the site. I wasn’t very far into it when I encountered the following:

The bodybugg system will not work with the operating system you are currently using. You’ll need to upgrade your computer.
To learn more, click here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/howtobuy/default.asp

Given that I’m on a Mac, I found the statement about upgrading my computer a little insulting. (Understand that I’m OS-agnostic; the language just seems a little rude.) I hadn’t realized that it was Windows-only (given that it’s web-based, uses Java, and syncs through USB). I don’t usually worry about that since I also have a laptop running Windows Vista; I just would have liked to connect the USB sync device to my desktop, since it’s not constantly being moved.

No matter–I grabbed my laptop and proceeded to set up there. Only… the site suggested that Firefox is an option (it tested for browser compatibility as well as the OS, and Firefox passed), but it got increasingly buggy as I went through setup. One particularly bad window used only about a 150×250 pixel space to display everything (despite maximizing the window) and required a ridiculous amount of scrolling to answer the large number of questions… only to do nothing when I hit the “Done” button.

It eventually occurred to me that even though they seemed to support Firefox, their odd attachment to Microsoft might imply that Internet Explorer would work better. I pulled up IE7, logged in, and wha-la: success. Turns out that they have designed so thoroughly around IE that it’s pretty much inoperable in other browsers, which is poor design (in this web developer’s opinion) but manageable since I actually have the required hardware and software.

Once I got that all sorted out, I got asked about food preferences, goals, all that good stuff. I’m now the proud owner (no, wait, the site is subscription-based…) of a page with little charts on it.

You can definitely tell it’s an up day! No exercise, and a lot of food… but in my defense, I logged all the food I’m planning on eating today, not just what I’ve eaten so far. Guess I’d better get jogging or something!

Now one of the disappointments of the bodybugg (but I knew it before I bought it) is that it only tracks calories used, not calories consumed. I know, I’m kind of just nitpicking at this point, but logging my food is always the hardest part of dieting for me, and the bodybugg ad on the official site kind of seemed to imply that it tracked intake. I figured out early on that it doesn’t, but it’s still kind of sad for me.

However, one of the things that sold me on the bodybugg is how easy their food tracker is to use. They seem to be using the Java equivalent of AJAX to quickly pull up foods and make adding them a breeze. I’m interested to see how well their “frequent foods” stuff works, but that will take a couple of days of using it. In the meantime, the food database seems reasonable complete and I’m feeling hopeful.

More updates to come as I actually get data!