The Fitbit Air is the hot piece of tech everyone is talking about, which is a little funny, because it really doesn’t do all that much.
Effectively a pared-back fitness tracker with the screen removed, this $100 bargain is the exercise tech for the casual user. Hardware-wise, it doesn’t have a lot going for it.
But magic happens in the software, and specifically, within the AI-powered Coach feature.
The Coach will crunch all the numbers the Air gathers and deliver them in an easily explained way.
You can also use its chat interface to log your weight, water consumption, and more.
I’ve been using it to keep track of my calorie intake, and I had assumed it wasn’t very good at it. The internet, at large, agrees with me.
So I put it to the test against MyFitnessPal, my gold standard for calorie trackers. To my surprise, the results weren’t at all what I expected.
I reviewed the Fitbit Air, and it (almost) completely won me over
Your next fitness tracker won’t have a screen, but it will have AI
A simple test, with a few rules
Before I tell you how it all went down, I had a few rules going into this experiment.
It goes without saying that I would log everything I eat on both the Google Health app and MyFitnessPal. However, how I’d log would be different.
For Google Health, I would exclusively log my food using the Coach. Since it was the Coach I was testing, I couldn’t cheat by navigating through menus.
For MyFitnessPal, the opposite was true. I would use the menus and search exclusively.
I would attempt to log the same food in each app and would only log for a specific brand if I had done so with the other.
So if I’d told the Coach I’d eaten two Warburtons white rolls, that’s what I’d log into MyFitnessPal.
The same logic applied if I wanted to scan a barcode in MyFitnessPal.
That functionality doesn’t exist in Coach, but I can take a picture of the nutritional information on the packet for the same purpose.
The goal was to keep things as even as possible and to give the Fitbit Coach a fighting chance.
It turned out it didn’t really need it.
The results were a big surprise
I ran this test for two days, patiently logging every meal, snack, and treat.
I dived into menus, I chatted with the Coach, I cooked up a storm.
After those two days, I checked on my logs and assumed I would see a big difference in the numbers. After all, the prevailing wisdom was that the Coach’s calorie counts were way off.
It turned out the two totals were pretty close:
- On Tuesday, Coach listed 1,959 calories. MyFitnessPal listed 1,782.
- On Wednesday, Coach had 2,315 calories, while MyFitnessPal had 2,424.
Sure, there’s a difference, but it’s not as large as I thought it would be.
Granted, a 177-calorie gap on Tuesday is an entire snack’s worth of calories. It would annoy me if I were in my cranky stage of calorie deficit, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter that much.
Unless you’re religiously scanning barcodes, weighing portions, and cataloging everything you eat, it will always be difficult to perfectly track your calories.
Perhaps if I were a professional athlete or a boxer cutting weight for a fight, I might try harder. But I’m not, so this sort of difference is absolutely fine for me.
Even if the difference bothered me, the Coach offers something so good that I would forgive it for almost anything.
Cooking without worrying about the details
I enjoy cooking; it’s a lot of fun. I don’t enjoy calorie counting; it’s not fun at all.
But I need to do both at the moment, and Coach helps with both.
Cooking while tracking calories can be tough. Unless you know the calorie count of whatever you’re cooking at the end, you’ll either pick what you think is the closest dish to what you’ve made or painstakingly include every single ingredient you’ve used.
I’m no stranger to counting calories, and I know it can be tough.
Checking how much you have left in the tank and comparing it to your running total can crush your dinner hopes and make you think twice about every snack.
Which is the point. It’s still a massive pain, but Coach makes it a lot easier.
When I’m done cooking and eating, I load up Coach, tell it what I ate, what was in it, and generally how much I had.
Then I leave it to do the hard work.
If I’m following a recipe, I can give it exact measurements. I can probably take a picture of the recipe and tell it I ate that.
It takes a lot of the struggle out of maintaining a calorie deficit because, weirdly, it’s the paperwork that makes it tedious.
The Google Health AI Coach handles all of that for me, and contrary to what I expected when I started this test, it does it fairly well.
Sure, it’s not up to a lab’s level of accuracy, but I don’t need it to be.
It’s good enough for me, and it makes losing weight a lot easier.
8.5/10
- Battery Life
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7 days
- Health sensors
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Optical heart rate, 3-axis accelerometer, temperature sensor
- Dimensions
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35 x 17 x 8.3mm (Module)
- Water Resistance
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50 meters
