The Stupid Watch Works (For Me)

Yes hello, have I mentioned that I am an Apple fanboy? No? Okay, well, I really like Apple products. I think I've talked about this in more than one of my posts. However, there was one Apple product I never liked and I never saw the use case for, and that's the Apple Watch. I always thought it would be a waste of money. I think I was wrong, and here's why.

As I've went into more detail in on previous posts, I'm on a journey to try to make my health a little better. I'm not looking to get down to not fat at all, that's not who I am and it's also something I would be unable to sustain. My health goals really can be summed up as "less fat." Not going to go into it all again as I want to head out the door in a little bit, but the TL;DR is I'm eating better and doing Peloton workouts 4-6 times a week.

Peloton keeps track a of a lot of the metrics of my workouts and I like to nerd out over that data. I'm very online, I've used computers for everything I've done all of my life. I like data. I've also started using MyFitnessPal to track calories and that ties in with Apple Health. I have a bluetooth scale that ties in with Apple Health so I can track things on there too. So, I've already got a lot of data. What I didn't have any way to get was any health data such as heart rate. Having that information during a Peloton ride isn't vital, but it's more data for me to nerd out over. So, I went on Best Buy's website, found an Apple Watch Series 9 that someone had returned for a decent price and went and picked it up last week.

I love the thing so far. My heart has been a source of anxiety for me since I've been growing older and still treating my body like a garbage can and just sticking any food in there that I want whenever I want. Even if I'm working out and eating better, that's not 100% a cure for stress and anxiety. Well, my stupid watch monitors my heart and it makes me feel better because it hasn't detected it working incorrectly yet. I have a normal resting heart rate, I have a pretty elevated heart rate while working out, as expected. When I drink my energy drinks there's not even a noticeable change in my heart rate because I'm probably immune to that dosage of caffeine at this point (I truly just like the taste.) The watch yells at me if I've been sitting for an hour, which to my surprise has only happened a couple times since getting it. It keeps track of how many minutes of exercise I get per day and estimates how many calories I've burned based on how often I'm moving around/working out.

For the $300-ish I paid for the thing, it's honestly brought me a lot of peace of mind. When I'm doing my Peloton ride and get a notification on my phone I don't feel the need to stop my workout and make sure it's not something important I need to tend to right away (it never is.) Apologies if anyone actually reading this thinks I'm trying to sell you all of the Apple products, I'm not. A Fitbit would do everything this thing does and potentially even more accurately. I'm just very tied into the Apple ecosystem and writing about my journey to try to find better health helps me, and today one of the devices helping me do that happens to be an Apple one.

I probably won't do any sort of health check-in post this week as that's kind of redundant with this one, so here's where we're at this afternoon:

243.1 - 241.8 : Today's weight (My stupid weird brand name scale varies lol) 256: September 13 weight (the day I started Peloton)
309: The most I have ever weighed, in 2017.