"Your Day at a glance" on your Garmin watch

Yeah yeah, I know, I've been talking a LOT about my Garmin watch to the point that it probably seems like I am making commission on sales or something but I am not. I am just a very happy consumer that is now kicking himself for waiting so long to get involved with one of these things. What chased me away from ever getting one was the fact that it was over $300 and getting me to spend that much on anything that isn't a computer is a hard sell, regardless of what it is. To give you an example of how selectively frugal I am I once had a look at how expensive suits are where I live and instead, decided to fly to the other side of the planet for a vacation because people told me that the tailors over there do great work for 1/10 what it costs in USA. Now I have two, absolutely perfect custom-made suits that I bought for about $80 each instead of $600 each, plus I got to go on vacation. That's how I live my life.

So when people in the past were telling me how great these exercise sport watches were, I paid almost no attention to it because it is really tough to get me to spend hundreds of dollars on anything. It was only because a friend of mine let me borrow his Garmin watch one day that I saw exactly how great these things can be and mainly I only did it because the heart rate monitor seemed considerably more reliable than other such items I had used in the past.

So now I am digging into all manner of things that are on this watch and today I want to take a look at the "your day" feature that the phone app (which connects to the watch via bluetooth.)

now I am going to go ahead and tell you that I do NOT know how it determines all of these things. I do know that there was a feature that I had to deactivate because it was constantly telling me that I did an hour of the elliptical when I was actually at my computer doing work. I suppose the motion of my wrist doing paid work made the watch think I was just a monster on the elliptical because my heart rate stayed the same as well. So I deactivated that, but this "day at a glance" is pretty useful to me

One of the main things I like is "intensity minutes" because not all of my exercise is intentional. On this particular day I had to walk to meet up with a friend and because of my newfound devotion to getting as many cardio minutes as I can I decided to leave early and walk there instead of taking the train. It took about an hour but it is specifically because of the Garmin that I am trying to do as much of this as possible. Another time in the same day I was just walking up and down the stairs helping a friend move out of my building and had my watch on. This got my heart rate up and is in fact, considered exercise. In the past I never would have factored this into my caloric burn for the day, but now because of my wrist-bound friend, I can. I enjoy the fact that even if this watch is 10-20% off target as far as the caloric burn is concerned, I know have something that will make that calculation for me. It is nice to see that I burned more calories from activities than I did from just being alive.

That's right and I am sure all of you in these forums were already aware that your body will burn calories just by not being dead. Quite a lot of them actually. It has become a goal of mine to try to get my active calories higher than my resting ones even though that isn't really that easy to do. On this day I also went to the gym for an hour (only 15 minutes of actual lifting) and then rode a bicycle for about an hour. So it was a busy exercise day for me.

The main thing I want to try to do is establish a caloric deficit every day and this was something that was quite complicated for me to figure out in the past and involved a piece of paper. Now I don't have to do that anymore. There are parts of the app where you can enter exactly what you eat but I am not going to do that. I have a pretty decent idea about how many calories I am consuming on days that I don't drink beer which is most of them these days.

So even though I am running the risk of sounding like a broken record here because I talk about the watch so much, I am going to continue to say that I am VERY satisfied with it and am very happy that I made this purchase. I think that this piece of technology can be a bit of a game changer for anyone out there that is trying to lose weight or simply get into better shape.