Living with a Bodybugg: Lessons in calories, metabolism, and weight loss
In August of 2010 I purchased a Bodybugg in order to help my weight loss efforts. The Bodybugg measures calorie burn. By pairing it with a food log, I was able to figure out how to make calories out greater than calories in. I have been wearing it ever since for maintenance, and it’s done a great job there too. During the time I’ve owned it I learned a lot about how my metabolism works, and had a chance to do some interesting experiments.
Last night I presented a talk on the Bodybugg at HacDC as part of a Quantified Self meetup. The meetup was surprisingly well attended, with over 20 people, and there were many good talks. It ranged from people who had written their own apps and gotten 30,000 users, to a clever fellow who boosted his pullup metrics with just paper and stickers. (If the last item sounds interesting, I highly recommend checking out a similar free website, Joe’s Goals. Very simple way to create or break habits and IT WORKS.)
I haven’t given a PowerPoint presentation in…decades? Didn’t particularly want to pay Microsoft for the privilege, either, so I downloaded OpenOffice and used their presentation software. It’s remarkably good. I then exported the slides to PDF, a universal format which I was confident would be supported by the presenter’s computer. And it was. All in all, much less painful than I feared it would be. I notice that Oracle now sponsors the Open Office project, no doubt they are delighted to deny their enemy a customer.
I promised to post the talk online, so here it is. This is the link to the slides in PDF format.
The sample slide from the Bodybugg website doesn’t have my name, because I purchased the device and remaining subscription from someone else on eBay, a good way to save. The data however is my own
UPDATE: I have since figured out how to use the Bodybugg without paying the subscription fee. May be of interest to fellow hackers.
[…] my previous post I talked about the bodybugg and how I used it for body recomposition. Many people that look at the […]
I downloaded Python 2.6 in my computer as well as numpy. I installed Python then tried to install Numpy but numpy will not install. I get the message “puthon 2.6 required not found in registry” What should i do to jailbreak my bodybugg to clear its memory? RSVP. Thanks!
Elias
Elias, I think you will have to ask a Python expert, which I am not. The comments in the blog post I linked to for the library have some installation tips. My guess is that you don’t need numpy in order to do the “simple” functions like clearing the memory. Make sure you installed Python 2.6 and not 2.7.
Probably Elias has found his answer by now, but I had the same problem with the Python version. Turned out that it doesn’t work well on a 64-bit operating system. I installed everything without issues on my other half’s 32-bit machine.
Question to those using the hack: how do you guys interpret the numbers? I am looking for the skin temperature one specifically (the reason I bought the Ki Fit – that’s what it’s called here – and the values are not visible in the web site interface? I see numbers around 2400 for temperature and from your posts, I understand that Fahrenheit is even higher in numbers than Celcius we use here, but 24 degrees is impossible (should be around 36.5 Celcius), it might be the environment temp but then I’m not even finding skin temp? I found it such a hassle to measure it daily with a thermometer in the morning before getting up or to move to the couch during the night, that having the Ki Fit and just reading it out each day seemed the perfect solution.
Erica, are you still using this method? I wondered if you just gave into the subscription.
I’m no longer using the bodybugg; at the end of the day, I found a well-designed meal plan works best for what I want to accomplish.