A calorie counter watch is not, despite the name, a calorie counter that watches you eat, or a watch that counts calories. No, a calorie counter watch is a device you wear on your wrist that monitors your heart rate and from this, extrapolates how many calories you are burning throughout the day.
This can be, as you might imagine, incredibly useful for your fitness regimen, regardless of what your actual goals are. Knowing how many calories you are burning throughout the day is one of the key factors in being able to control your weight. The other knows how many calories you are taking in.
That said, a calorie counter watch can be useful for more than just losing weight. If you are trying to get in better shape in general, it can tell you how much activity you are getting through the day, as well as letting you know how hard you’re working. This is a much more efficient way to do things rather than just relying on feel.
The calorie counter watch can also be useful if you’re in the enviable position of trying to gain weight. This is not a problem for most of us, but you’d be surprised how many skinny teenage boys are out there are looking to add weight for sports or even just to look better. The watches can allow them to eat more on days when their activity is up and less when they are just lounging around.
In essence, what owning and using a calorie counter watch will give you is knowledge. We are not, when it comes to food and exercise, very good at estimating. To a person, we nearly always overestimate how much we work and underestimate how much we eat. Anything that gives us better control over this is going to be very helpful in achieving our fitness goals.
You can estimate your calories when you are doing a certain kinds of sustained exercise. It’s not hard to find out, for example, that running will burn off about 100 calories per mile for a 150 pound person. What is harder is when you are trying to integrate more activity in your day to day life.
You’ve started using the stairs instead of the elevator, or you’re parking further away from the building at work. All these things add up, but without something like a calorie counter watch, it’s going to be very hard to tell how much these activities are helping. It’s like groping around in the dark.
With a calorie counter watch you will know exactly how much your are burning, and this will allow you a great deal of precision in knowing how your fitness goals are progressing and what you need to do each day to step it up.
A calorie counter watch is not quite as accurate as the more sophisticated calorie measuring devices like the BodyBugg, but they are much more convenient, since they look and function much like a regular watch, and they’re much cheaper to boot. If you’re trying to lose weight, you’d be well advised to at least try using a calorie counter watch.