What's Bugging You?

by Jessica Downey

I put the bodybugg to the test and, instead, it tested me. Here’s how one little device changed my diet, my calorie burn, and—hopefully—my fitness.

Maybe you’ve seen gym members or Biggest Loser contestants wearing bodybuggs and thought it was overkill. But if my first week of being bugged has taught me anything, the bodybugg is a tool that helps you change your body and be truly honest with yourself, maybe for the first time in your life.

It’s 10:30 AM, and I just finished my spin class, ordered my morning chai latte, and plugged my bodybugg into my Mac for the first time today. The good news: it says I’ve burned 1,075 so far today—41 percent of my goal. The bad news: my favorite morning beverage logs in at 190 calories, which is close to 10 percent of my goal for the entire day.

But the bodybugg is, by its nature, a good news/bad news thing—you cannot dodge reality unless you take it off, which basically amounts to quitting. And now that the new bodybugg is half the size and thickness of the old one, you can just about keep it strapped on all day. In conjunction with your specific body parameters (age, gender, height, weight), the bodybugg’s four sensors measure your motion, skin temperature, the rate at which heat is dissipating from your body, and skin impedance (sweat rate), which tracks your calorie expenditure with 90 percent accuracy.

The concept behind the bodybugg is simple—you must burn more calories than you consume if you want to lose weight. It automatically tracks what you burn, then the user enters what they eat. And this is easy, too, because the tracking system has a huge database of food built in. This morning, I entered “Life,” and it found my Quaker Life cereal right away. The hardest part, really, is remembering what you ate and being honest about how much. “Most people underestimate how much they eat and they overestimate how much they burn,” says Mark Barriere, manager of fitness education for 24 Hour Fitness.

But if you fall into this category, you have plenty of company. “Even experts in the field underestimate their caloric intake. If you don’t track it, you have no idea,” Barriere says. “People eat for many different reasons: emotional issues, boredom, or, sometimes you don’t remember putting the food in your mouth if you are pre-occupied.”

And this was my first lesson as I began using the bodybugg: I eat more than I thought. But the second issue I faced was a little tougher to swallow—for a person who is conscious of what she eats, avoids red meat, and packs in lots of vegetables, I was consuming too many calories. But this is a common experience, says Rick Wenner, education manager for Apex Fitness. “Those who actually log their food accurately, it’s shocking for them how many calories they consume,” he says. “They go to Starbucks and think they are getting coffee and a bagel, but they actually get a caramel macchiato, which is half their calories for the day. Because people really don’t know how many calories are in things.”

I’m in the midst of training for a spring marathon, so maybe subconsciously I thought I could eat more. And I eat healthy foods, so perhaps I thought I could eat more of it. But Wenner tells me this is typical, too. “You see people who want to train for a marathon and they gain weight. They think they are training and running every day so they eat a lot more food,” he says. “But the bodybugg holds you accountable. If you keep yourself accountable to bodybugg, you can’t help but be successful. If you’re using it properly you have to go out of your way not get results.”

The third thing I discovered in my first week of bodybugging is that I burn plenty of calories when I’m working out, but while I’m working on the computer, I might as well be sleeping. In fact, it’s now 11:30 AM, and I’ve burned just 62 calories since my last check, just over 1 calorie a minute.

Barriere had a similar experience with his bodybugg when he first started using it. “I burn about 1.1 calories sleeping. When I’m at my desk I burn about 1.1-1.3 calories when I’m working,” he says. “So I realized I had to change it up while I’m working. I had to move around, sit on a ball, jump up and down once in a while.”

This season’s Biggest Loser contestants, who all used the bodybugg, learned a similar lesson early in their training, says Wenner, who worked closely with the contestants and trainers to get the most out of their bodybuggs. “In the beginning, they’d go for walks all the time. But if your calorie burn target is 6,000 calories, walking isn’t going to get you there,” he says. “So it really taught them about intensity and calorie burn.”

It’s almost noon now—lunchtime. Just knowing I’m going to log in whatever I eat, I’m thinking I may go for a salad, instead of the tuna melt on special today. And then I may go for a little walk before going back to work. At least for the moment, the bodybugg has done its job, and I guess that’s the whole point.