Every time we have to get into a bikini we wish we had a magic button we could press to instantly make us look thinner and more toned, but we all know that’s wishful thinking. Looking fit and feeling good about our bodies is more about regular exercise and good nutrition, less about magic, non-existent solutions. We never thought we’d have a problem maintaining our exercise routine (good nutrition is more of a battle because we love food). From Middle School through college, we were athletes who comfortably did two-a-days in multiple sports and still had the energy to hit the gym. In fact, in High School – before we had any common sense and when it still seemed like an easily attainable goal – we would tell our friends that our goal in life was to become a “hot mom” Ã la Jessica Alba.
Something happened when we hit our mid-twenties. Everyone else’s excuses about not having enough time or energy to work out became our own. These days, in an effort to revive health and fitness in our life, we’re focused less on our “hot mom” goals and more on getting ourselves to be more active overall. Finding and signing up for ClassPass was one huge win for us. It instantly diversified our exercise options. ClassPass helped us become more active by rekindling our love for dancing and spinning. We also like having the threat of a late fee for going AWOL because it makes us think twice about missing a class. Despite all of that, we still miss workouts (sometimes an extra 30 minutes of sleep is totally worth that $25 late fee!) and we don’t have any motivation to move outside our 1 hour at the gym.
As experts on our headspace, we know we thrive best when we’re held accountable so we’ve been intrigued by the idea of a health or fitness tracker since they started becoming a “thing”. Our only deterrent? The designs that we found weren’t really up to par with our arm candy standards – until a friend pointed us to the Withings Activité Pop. This wrist gem is the waterproof, more minimalistic, health tracking cousin of our favorite Michele watch. The only evidence of tracking is a smaller, inner dial that ranges from 0 to 100 to represent the percentage of activity you’ve completed toward a preset daily goal.
We’ve only been wearing Activité Pop for t-minus four days and that tiny dial has already gotten us to make a ton of conscious changes. The first day we wore it was one of those from the bed to the couch to the bed lazy Saturdays. On that day, it got us to transition between the couch and bed a couple more times than normal so we could get in a few more steps toward our measly 4,000 steps a day goal (we only reached 400 steps…womp, womp). The next day we took Activité Pop with us to our Vixen Workout class, where we reached 100% of our daily step goal by just arriving to and participating in the class (yea, we were impressed too).
For the weekdays, we increased our goal to the recommended 10,000 steps which meant seeing the dial move at a slower pace toward 100. That alone helped us make the right choice between taking the stairs or the elevator, sitting on the couch or pacing. Heck, it even pushed us to give a swim workout a try. After all, it’s waterproof to 50m and is swim tracking enabled so why not use it to its full capacity? Turns out we’re not very good swimmers so our swim workouts will probably be few and far between, but we liked seeing that dial move and the sunrise was pretty dope too.
