Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I hate this F*ing thing. It started out innocently enough. Track your steps, I thought. It'll be good, I thought. So I sprang for the Garmin. Low(ish) cost, counts steps and keeps track of stuff. Yeah. That'll work. What happens after you turn 50, see, is the weight can creep on. Slowly. Slowly. Silently. Until suddenly you weigh more than you did at the highest during pregnancy. Yikes! And since my girls are teens, I can no longer blame the youngest one for baby weight, which is what I did for years. So I get the thing and put it on. It innocently looks at you and says, "Yeah, you can do 5000 steps a day. That's not much, fatty." So I do. At the beginning, it was just for tracking steps. You can connect to this other app to track food intake if you want, but no, that's not for me. I just wanted to see how many steps I was doing every day in my rather sedentary life. Well. That first day I did nothing but watch. Um. 3584 steps. Really? So, I realized, yes, this is bad. After that I made it a point to AT LEAST make the minimum steps. After a couple of weeks, I noticed that the required count was sneaking up. Suddenly I had to step 5200 steps, and on an on, until finally it hit 7200. OMG. So, meanwhile I'm trucking along every day, meeting my steps. Who wants to sync up and see all those lovely orange step lines (goal met for the day) with horrifying blue mixed in (goal not met). It happened a couple of times, don't judge. Have I left it until 10:00 p.m. to find that I still need 4000 steps? Yes I have. Again, don't judge. I did the steps. So then to add insult to injury, the other thing this guy does is it blinks a red line at you if you sit on your butt too long. I'M WORKING. It doesn't care. So now I find myself leaping up and marching around so as to not piss it off with my inactivity. So then it starts playing mind games. "Geez, you're doing all the steps. Would it kill you to give up some of the sugar and carbs?" So then you decide okay, I can give up sugar one or two days a week. Hey, I really like ice cream, kill me. So after it looks at you and rolls it's eyes, you figure, okay. Sugar just one day a week. I can do this. The Garmin is like, "Yeah, piggy, you can. It's not going to get you the thanks from a grateful nation, but it's a start." So that happens. Next it's carbs. I mean, you're doing the work, right? Next thing I know, I'm not wasting any precious step-taking minutes. Waiting for water to boil on your scrap of dinner? WALK! Take the dog out a couple of extra times, it adds up. This thing is breathing down your neck, tracking every move you make. I have worn a track through my kitchen, living room, and family room waiting for stuff. By the way, books on tape are awesome. I find myself a month later. I have more energy (who knew?). My dog is thinner. I'M thinner. We're saving a fortune on rocky road ice cream. My girls and husband are happy because I have less time to hassle them. It's all this Garmin's fault.