Night shift workers and FitBit....

[MENINBLK]

Hi,

I am a new FitBit Flex user.  I got mine from a TD Bank promotion.

I've been using it only a few days but I love how it helps you to keep track of your daily activities

and how it keeps you ACCOUNTABLE for your descisions becuase you can see almost

IMMEDIATELY how your descisions get you closer or farther from your goals for the day.

I just want to know if ther are any Night Workers here using FitBit and how are you finding

it working for you ???  I think it is a little confused about sleep times and it concerns me.

Any help would be appreciated.

Pete...

[Deyadissa]

I work midnights and so far I have lost 35 pounds in 5 months (from 215 at 5'11 to 180), I took a break and I now just started dieting again. Being a night shift worker shouldn't change anything, don't fall for the myth that you have to eat 3 times a day. You can eat once a day and be perfectly healthy, as long as you know how to curb appetites.

Sleep times shouldn't be an issue, all you do is press and hold the button on the fitbit and it starts a timer.

[MENINBLK]

Deyadissa,

I've been told by MANY people that eating ONCE A DAY is not good for anyone.

Your body requires energy throughout the day, so eating small meals througout the day

is what your body needs best. If you can't eat more than once, then maybe you should take

your ONE MEAL and break itup into four or five portions and eat them throughout the day/night.

I've been trying for years to lose weight and eating ONCE A DAY made me gain more.

I am now on a meal replacement program and I lost 30 lbs in the first two months and

I've went through the holidays on maintenance and never gained it back.

Now with my Fitbit Flex, I'm getting back into the full program to lose another 130 lbs

and I am hoping to accomplish this 6 months eating small portions througout the day.

[Deyadissa]

Just because multiple people tell you the same thing doesn't necessairly make it true. You can eat one time a day and be perfectly healthy, the only thing that matters in weight loss is total caloric loss for the week.

The whole eat six meals a day is complete nonsense, even if it boosts the metabolism the results are no where near eating smarter or lifting weights which increase metabolism for nearly the entire day.

[kaelarenee7]

I personally find it better for me to eat smalller amounts throughout the day, especially on days that I work. I eat breakfast before work, then usually about 2-3 hours into my shift my stomach is grumbling for food, and then again a few hours later.

I personally couldn't imagine just eating once per day, I'd be miserable with hunger all day and wouldn't be able to eat enough in the one meal to have a sufficient amount of calories eaten for the day, unless I went out to eat every time and got high calorie foods from fast food places or something.

[MENINBLK]

Deyadissa,

What ever works for you, the key is to keep it up and never give up.

Once you find your secret to achieve your goal, you have to maintain

whatever you are doing and get to your goal.

Good Luck !!

[Heybales]

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@MENINBLK wrote:

Deyadissa,

I've been told by MANY people that eating ONCE A DAY is not good for anyone.

Your body requires energy throughout the day, so eating small meals througout the day

is what your body needs best. If you can't eat more than once, then maybe you should take

your ONE MEAL and break itup into four or five portions and eat them throughout the day/night.

I've been trying for years to lose weight and eating ONCE A DAY made me gain more.

I am now on a meal replacement program and I lost 30 lbs in the first two months and

I've went through the holidays on maintenance and never gained it back.

Now with my Fitbit Flex, I'm getting back into the full program to lose another 130 lbs

and I am hoping to accomplish this 6 months eating small portions througout the day.

---

As far as strictly weight loss is concerned, meal timing and frequency has not been shown in studies to have any effect.

For you personally it may, either for getting a good workout in (and if not good, there is no need for body to improve from it), or for not binging, or for not getting tired all day.

Some people eat frequent meals, constantly keeping their insulin elevated, which turns off release of fat from fat stores. It also has potential to constantly be lowering their blood sugar, making them feel more hungry then they need to.

Some people are very active, and need a few meals throughout the day.

Some people if they eat late they keep munching, so they need to stop at certain time.

Others, no problem at all, if they got the calories left, they can enjoy it.

Same as some can eat 2 cookies and it's in their budget, others devour the whole bag if they eat just one.

Those are all personal decisions, and except for making a really wrong choice for you, really isn't a problem.

So your many people have no research to back them up.

[Gumdrop]

lately, I have crazy shifts so I sometimes have two sleep graphs for one day and an itty bity one the day following. (switching from day to grave and back). it doesn't matter to much for me, I'm looking more at quality of sleep. I worked grave sfor years so I'm used to the cross-day weirdness with logging foods and sleep.

if you're logging foods, I found that if you just put the first thing you eat as breakfast and then move on from there regardless of the clock-time, it works much easier. so if you start at 11 pm tuesday and get of 7am wednesday log what you ate at 1030 tuesday before work as wednesday's breakfast. it was weird getting used to, but it helped keep track of food much better.

if you're brand brand new there was a feature that didn't seem to be mentioned anywhere and it confused the hell out of me when I first started. if you tap to set up sleep mode during the day, it'll sometimes create it as an activity log for you. which is helpful sometimes, but not when you want it to be a sleep log. you can change it back and forth by selecting edit. now mine logs it as sleep...but still gives me the option to change it to activity.

I've found it's actually pretty helpful for setting up day-sleep. I've been able to check restlessness and awake frequency on my day/early evening sleeping for night shifts and found that certain things I do during the day will really help.

so far, I love it. it's kept me motivated to do more and it's been great seeing how active I really was to start.

also, a note about the once-per-day eating. sometimes hunger signals are dampened at night due to it being night. (circadian rhythm) it's not unusual for this hunger to come back in spades once morning light starts. this is more for graveyard, but I found eating just normal helped...but I always saved a snack or timed dinner for sunrise because I'd be super sleepy the hour before and then famished right as it rolled around.

for swing shift I ate pretty much like normal, mostly I got up in the late morning and instead of going to work did all my errands and whatnot. so I had breakfast and lunch at home, brought dinner in to work. some days I'd be too busy to get both breakfast and lunch in and I'd have a really large dinner. I found I was satisfied eating dinner about 9:30-10:30pm on swings, and about 5-6am on graves

you can play with carb amounts if you feel the need. some people benefit by decreasing them for shift work. the theory with fewer carbs intake while working nights and graveyards is often because you may not have adequate time between eating them and burning them through your activity. mostly, they'll be stored if you aren't burning them...and your metabolism may be slightly more sluggish for these shifts because you're counter to circadian rhythm. but a lot of that is pretty indvidual. you may find you crave them more...some of that may be due to weird sleep patterns if you haven't really gotten used to day sleeping. I'd watch your cravings, cravings for sweets and fats usually indicates a lack of sleep quality more than true hunger. sleeping well during the day has a bigger impact on food needs for shift workers in my experience.

I never really had issues with the timing, either sleeping during the day or with eating over nights... and at one point lost about 90 lbs while working both swings and graveyard shifts. I did regain, but that's not because of the shifts. but I've seen some co workers really struggle...put a morning person on graveyard shift and they can have a lot of trouble day sleeping, then they have constant hunger and cravings for sweet and fatty food because they're just plain sleep deprived.

[Gumdrop]

also, I just remembered: switching to the 24hrs clock in your setings can really help with manually logging sleep times.

[fitbritt911]

I work every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 6:30pm till 7:00am. I have the Charge HR and I have it on the sensitive mode. I find that its pretty accurate for me. I will look through my log and it will tell me when I was awake or restless and I can remember "oh yeah thats when my 5 year old came in to ask me a question." I'm pretty sure its not "dead" on with everything but It's pretty dang close. I find working nights most people have stuggles losing weight due to not getting enough sleep. I get plenty of sleep thanks to my awesome hubby but my problem is swithching from days to nights and remembering to eat during the night. And sometimes I'll get home monday morning exhausted and wont eat till tuesday 😕

Good luck!

[SunsetRunner]

I also work shift work, rotating nights and days with 12 or 9 hour shifts. It is definitely hard to plan your days around it, but it is doable. I lost 30 lb a few years ago and I was working shift work then too.

I only have the Fitbit Zip so I don't know about any of the sleep stuff....I know that I don't sleep enough 🙂 But if anyone out there wants to add me feel free, it is always nice to have people to talk to that are in the same boat.

Mer

[Hez]

Which fitbit do you have??  I am looking at getting one, but not sure which to get as I am a shift worker as well and was concerned about the sleep/wake schedule etc. I was looking at the flex or the charge right now.

Cheers!

[LedMatrix]

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@Deyadissa wrote:

don't fall for the myth that you have to eat 3 times a day. You can eat once a day and be perfectly healthy, as long as you know how to curb appetites.

 _________________________________________________________________________________

Sorry, but this is atrocious advice and completely false, as scientifically proven time and again. Please don't make statements that fly in the face of proven scientific fact.

In clinical trials, scientists have discovered that eating just one meal a day has negative health effects in the long term. One study published in 2007 in the journal “Metabolism,” subjects who had all of their daily calories in one meal developed higher blood sugar levels and elevated levels of ghrelin, a hormone that controls appetite. The researchers concluded that over time, eating a single meal daily could put people at higher risk of developing serious conditions such as diabetes, stroke and heart disease.

References:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2121099/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22587351

http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/skipping-meals-can-have-negative-consequences

[Sheebo]

I have the flex, and find its working just fine with my 10pm-6am schedule. It has auto-track mode for sleep thats pretty accurate, and i dont ever have to remember to start/stop sleep mode

[Tons849]

I work night shift and have found that my flex still believes I am sleeping between 11pm and 6am. I don't know what it thinks when I am sleeping between 7am and 12pm in the day, but it doesn't show it as sleep, even if I manaully put it into sleep mode it shows I have slept when I was actually at work.

[x_Toots_x]

For me it doesn't really matter what shift I'm on or when I sleep as long as the 24 hours balances out. I use the standard meal times of breakfast, lunch and dinner as simply that. Fitbit doesn't care that I had a bowl of cereal for dinner or soup and salad for breakfast it just cares that the information exists.

As for sleep again I find it's 24 hours and doesn't seem to make much difference when I get my sleep only that I get some. Though I haven't had to do a 'zombie day' like @Gumdrop was talking about where you get minimal sleep one day and function like a useless zombie to revert yourself back to regular folk time. For me that would be the only challenge I think.