My BodyBugg review

Well I've had my BodyBugg for a week now and I can tell you, its a fantastic bit of kit, I had feared that it would have been tied to the account Lilliana had setup to order it for, they don't currently ship them to anywhere except the US or Canada, so I thought I might have had to use her account to access the webapp they have for tracking calorie intake and expended but once it arrived, my fears were dismissed, as I was able to tie it by the serial number to my own apex account, so that was one less headache for renewing the subscription.

Once I had tied it to my account I needed to install some software so I could upload any readings to apex, which was easy enough but when I came to charging and initialising the body bugg, this is where the problems started, I normally use safari as my web browser simply because, there is some weird issue where this computer has a problem with its memory, so chrome once I installed it, simply refused to load or even install but safari seems to be a buggy bit of software and no matter how many times I tried I couldn't get passed the starting page to set up the bugg, I thought to myself, I'll give firefox a try and it worked first time, so that was another hurdle passed, I already had the software on my phone as being able to use the software on my phone in the UK was the prime reason for choosing the apex option.

I managed to pair the bugg with my phone through the bluetooth, then no matter what I did, I couldn't get the software to link to the bugg, I followed guide after guide all telling me the same thing, unpair the bugg from the phone, then uninstall the software, re-pair the bugg and phone, reinstall the software then load the app but don't log in, press the bugg's status button then login, so on and so forth, I kept trying, nothing worked until I thought, what if I press the status button on the bugg, then start the app and like a bolt of lightening, it picked up the bugg and the various stats, showed up in wonderful green.

It was interesting to watch my calories burned and steps increase, almost in real time, I had to look through each of the information screens to see what each part of the software did, then I discovered a problem, it seems that, the bugg will only update the web server data, whenever you have it plugged into a computer, so of course, when the app refreshed the data, as apps have a tendency to do, it seemed to overwrite the info I was receiving in real time and no matter how many times I quit the app and did the trick that worked first time, it would only show as linked but not the battery life of the bugg, which tells me they are properly connected.

When I updated the webserver with the data from the bugg, the app seemed to work again, so it seems there is a massive bug within the software, which means the app occasionally becomes less than useless, especially as one of the functions is recording the calorie burn of a fitness session and without a proper connection you can't get any info recorded.

The only other bugbear I have is that the foods database, seems to be hard coded and that any foods you enter as custom foods, only get shown to you, unlike MyfitnessPal, where they become part of the community, which makes finding and recording food intake much easier, still once I've entered the foods I regularly eat, they will be available to me, so its not too bad, just a minor niggle.

The other thing I had trouble getting my head around was the fact that, it counts every calorie burned, including the ones your body naturally burns during the day even at rest, so I need to work out using the handy 24 hour bar graph, how many calories my resting burn is, minus the calories that it reports me as having burned per minute, as I don't want to have anything but my exercise burned calories entered into MyfitnessPal, based on the calories that MyFitnessPal reports as burned for each minute of exercise, I seem to be getting it right.


So as of the end of Tuesday, I had eaten 2,381 calories but burned 3,361, which gave me a calorie deficit of 980, which was just outside my 1,000 daily calorie deficit, which I'm totally blaming on the iceland takeaway dishes I had for my supper.


The system is available in the UK through http://www.kiperformance.co.uk/ but you don't get the option of the bluetooth SP version and the web subscription is ridiculously expensive, I paid £65 or $100 for my SP bugg, the ki performance price is £221 or $347.018, which I think is an eye gouging increase, for something that doesn't have the smartphone app option.

My verdict of the system is that it is brilliant, it will tell you very accurately what you burned for almost any given minute of the day, like when I had to run across to work and it had me burning 9.8 calories a minute at one point.