Pregnancy setting

[Hillary86]

There needs to be a pause on female health tracking for pregnancy and breastfeeding. It’s resetting my cycle to hundreds of days which will be super fun when I actually want to track my cycle again. It makes health tracking useless at a time when you really want it to work. Also, it would help to have pregnancy settings for other apps (which I know is a long shot) but if you are trying to stay healthy and active during pregnancy, this feels like a place Fitbit could excel. I’m disappointed in these oversights. 

[LZeeW]

Hello @Hillary86 and welcome to the Help forums.  I am going to move your thread to the Female Health Tracking Forum.  It is a better fit for your topic than the Ionic device forum.

I think you should browse the Female Health Tracking forum -- you might find insights from other users.  You might also find links to Feature Suggestions to help make the female health tracking fit your needs.

IMHO, your issue is a bug that needs to be fixed.  Then again, the world of software engineering is disproportionately male.  I don't think they get it.

[Hillary86]

Thank you! Yes - I think a room full (or mostly full) of male developers
said “this feature is an edge case” and moved on.
--
--
Hillary Paul Metcalf

Sent from my mobile with care, but also with inevitable inaccuracies.

[naryamie9]

I agree. Fitbit really dropped the ball on that one. Today I noticed that my period's prediction just moved from last week to this week, Im guessing that is all it will do, just keep moving from one week to the next, throwing the whole thing off because there is no way to let it know when a woman is pregnant. If that is the case, Fitbit might as well get rid of the whole female health tracking feature all together, as it only partially tracks "female health" I see this has been an ongoing issue now for at least 3 yrs [from what I saw on other threads before I found this most recent one] so clearly in that time, Fitbit has not gotten a clue. Im really disappointed.

[vickssticks]

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 completely untrue. 

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.

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 9 straight months 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.

[MayoJane]

I lost a pregnancy in the 9th week back in January, and we've been TTC again ever since, and I can say that at least it doesn't appear to have counted the extra long cycle in it's averages when it's trying to predict ovulation or the next period, but it DID count the 40 day cycle I had last year as a result of stress. So I guess it silently counts any cycle lasting more than a certain length as a pregnancy (and the cut off is someplace between 4.5 weeks and 9 weeks) as a pregnancy and treats it as outlier data, but it's still less than ideal. What if someone had amenorrhea for non-pregnancy reasons and really DID have a 2 month long cycle? If it's silently counting all cycles of a certain length as pregnancy those people are not going to get good data. We can mark a positive ovulation test but not a positive pregnancy test? Weird.

[char.heloise]

No, don’t worry it’s not doing that. They have said they haven’t created any pregnancy settings or algorithms yet so it wouldn’t be ‘silently counting’ some long cycles as probable pregnancies and managing them any differently. Probably just some glitch or update to how they treat menstrual cycles that made it treat your data differently for those two periods. I’m very sorry for your loss (fellow loss parent here).

[Holtzmann]

I'm not pregnant and I don't plan to get pregnant anytime soon, but it's ridiculous that FitBit does not have this setting.