Like many others before me I’m really disappointed that there is no way to better track female fitness in the app - health / pregnancy / breastfeeding.
I have read all the forum posts over the last several years, all of which ask for the same thing. The moderator response is usually dismissive - it makes no difference / the pregnancy setting did nothing / pregnancy doesn’t effect your health data etc. All of which are not true.
The moderator, like the software engineer is usually male and they seem to be incredibly ignorant about female health. Seeing as we make up 50% of the population and I would assume roughly 50% of Fitbit users - here’s some info.
During pregnancy women will:
- put on weight - an essential part of pregnancy, it’s important for us to track it and to gain in a healthy way. Weight gain is not consistent throughout the full 9 months. It changes over the course of the pregnancy as the baby develops.
- consume more calories, again not consistent over full 9 months and an increase in protein and specific nutrients become very important.
- our resting heart rate will rise, it can increase by 20 beats per minute due to the 50% increase in blood volume that we are pumping round our bodies. Our cardio fitness is not decreasing but the numbers tell us it is.
During breastfeeding women will:
- burn between 200-500 calories just sitting breastfeeding. We therefore need to increase our daily calorie intake by 300-500 calories.
Tracking our menstrual cycle accurately is important for:
- Not just fertility and mood but fitness and performance. The phase of our cycle can seriously impact our overall performance, endurance, heat tolerance and number of calories we burn. We can minimise the effect through diet, hydration and accurate tracking.
In specific reference to pregnancy whilst our bodies are already going through many changes we don’t need to see our fitness app telling us we are becoming less fit when in fact our bodies are doing twice as much work as usual.
If we own these watches it’s because we care about our health and fitness. Whether it be before, during or after pregnancy. If you are able to display average data for my age and sex there is no reason you can’t show average data for pregnant or breastfeeding women too.
To see our cardio fitness drop dramatically, see our BMI change from normal to overweight or be told that our period should be starting any day now for what can be up to a couple of years after giving birth; ruining the accuracy of previous data for our menstrual cycle is both demoralising and totally inaccurate.
In the words of Stacy T. Sims - ‘women are not small men’ - so please program your software accordingly.
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