Gruve thing

Gruve Thing

By Megan Malugani

I’ll try anything, ANYTHING, to avoid another sedentary winter spent in hibernation mode, where the longest walk I typically take is from the refrigerator to the couch. So the idea of wearing the Gruve device—which records every calorie I burn—appeals to me. I have high hopes that just clipping the device to the waist of my pants every morning will serve as a guilt-inducer. The Gruve will keep me off the couch! The Gruve will get me on the treadmill! The Gruve will prevent me from packing on an extra layer of wintertime fat!

Week One: How active am I?
In early December, my Gruve adventure begins when I clip the device on my waistband for the first time. The device is supposed to record all of my horizontal, vertical, and diagonal movement. When I’m standing, it’ll even pick up swaying and fidgeting. Too cool!

The first week is my Assessment Week used to calculate my Green Goal (target daily caloric burn). I am supposed to go about my regular routine, and I do. Besides an indoor roller-skating outing to a nearby town with my 5- and 7-year-olds, the week (pathetically) involves no intentional exercise.

At the end of the week, I sync my device and see that my baseline Green Goal (calculated based on my resting metabolic rate and my current activity level) is set at a measly 361 calories per day. (It would be higher if my intention were to lose weight rather than just try to maintain my current weight.) I immediately begin rationalizing: my Green Goal would be much higher in any other season, when I could go outside with the kids or take my nightly stroll through the neighborhood. But then I view it as a challenge: find ways to be more active without using the weather as an excuse, you lazy schmuck!

Week Two: Getting buzzed and losing my Gruve
I get buzzed by the Gruve for the first time while I’m taking a nap with my baby. The vibration is supposed to notify me that I have been seated or sedentary for too long and that I should get up and take a five-minute walk. I brazenly ignore the buzzing, not even tempted to change positions and even slightly annoyed that the buzz could wake the baby. So much for motivation!

A few days later, I lose my Gruve completely. It’s a $200 device, loaned to me by Muve, Inc., and it’s lost somewhere in the clutter of our home. I lament the fact that I must be expending literally thousands (thousands!) of unrecorded calories looking for my Gruve. I offer a reward to the kids for finding it, but end up locating it myself, under a pile of clothes in the closet where I’d changed from work clothes to sweats one day. It’s a good thing it was buzzing from inactivity or it would have been lost forever!

Week Three: Momentum gains
After getting my Gruve back, I re-commit to upping my activity level. I don’t want to waste my time with this awesome device. Upping my activity isn’t hard during a week when I’m cleaning the house like a madwoman in preparation for holiday guests and out Christmas shopping several times. In fact, my biggest calorie burning day so far—509.9 calories—occurs when I hit five stores around town in three hours and then go to the mall. I’m not even jockeying for the parking spots closest to the stores, like I usually do, because parking further away will help me reach my Green Goal quicker. Talk about Power Shopping!

I already notice one major pattern to my caloric burning. The days I am working at my part-time job are far more sedentary than my days at home. I get buzzed several times a day at work, and hardly ever at home. I incorporate an extra walk through the skyways into my workday routine, but it’s still a challenge meeting my Green Goal on workdays.

Week Four: A break for the holidays
I’m quite active in the days leading up to Christmas—shoveling, building snowmen, and entertaining. Five days in a row I burn more than 400 calories, but then on Christmas Eve I drop back down to the 200s. From Christmas Day to New Year’s Day, I go on vacation without my computer and leave my Gruve at home with no way to charge or synch it.

Besides a day spent playing boot hockey, I doubt I reached my Green Goal many of the days between Christmas and New Year’s, although I do wonder how many more calories I burn by carrying a 15-pound baby around with me the majority of most days than if I were empty handed. I also wonder, after five too many Christmas cookies, how long it will be before the Gruve incorporates technology that zaps you not only for inactivity, but when you’ve pigged out and exceeded your recommended caloric intake for the day.

Week Five: New year, new me (I hope)
My New Year’s resolution is small and attainable—wear my Gruve every day in January and be more active (how’s that for vague?). I’m homebound the first few days of the month with sick kids, however, and get off to an uninspired start. The subzero temperatures seem to have chilled not only my body, but my ambition to move.

By January 3, however, I’m sick of sitting around (and I realize that Wii wakeboarding does not, in fact, burn many calories). I refine my New Year’s resolution: I want to reach my Green Goal the rest of the days in January. That very day, I walk on the treadmill in my basement while watching the kids play video games. It takes two stints of walking on the treadmill—for about 15 minutes and then 10 minutes later—to reach my Green Goal, but I feel great.

Week Six : Treadmill time
I finally get back into the office, and every day I go to work I have to hit the treadmill (at just a medium-paced walk) for a few minutes in the evening to reach green. Luckily, my kids get in on the action. My daughter puts on exercise clothes—she looks like Olivia Newton John—and does jumping jacks alongside me. Both my older kids are constantly checking my Gruve device to see if I’ve hit green yet, and I am getting a little obsessed myself, pressing the button on the device at least a dozen times a day to track my progress. I realize a secondary benefit of this experiment is getting my kids more interested in fitness.

Week Seven: Stair stepping the old-fashioned way
“Mom, can you get me something to eat?” “Mom, can you come watch me build a Lego ship?" “Mom, can you come up/down/in/out here?” Believe it or not, these words—spoken literally dozens of times a week (or even a day)—are likely what keep me from turning into a blob of Jell-O in the winter. Most of the moms of young kids I know are pretty slim, and this constant motion must be the reason why. I record the number of trips I make upstairs and to the basement of our two-story house one typical day: it’s 22, and that must be worth something exercise-wise, right?

Week Eight: A real workout
I have my best day yet—I reach my Green Goal by 2 p.m. and burn 630 calories. This takes a little extra effort—an actual workout on the treadmill at the Rochester Athletic Club. I know this sounds pathetic to the gung-ho exercisers of the world, but I am proud. I am finding the Gruve to be a great motivator and I actually miss it when I am not wearing it!

Week Nine: It actually worked!
By the end of the Great Gruve Experiment, I’m such a Gruve slave that I jog around the conference table at work when I get buzzed (I’m sure my boss thinks I have to go to the bathroom), I volunteer to be the gopher who picks up lunch for my colleagues on a busy day, and I see the positives when I have to park three blocks from my son’s school on an icy day. I also resent that the Gruve isn’t waterproof when I spend an hour in the pool with my kids because the calorie burn is unrecordable, and I walk on the treadmill during a Vikings game (the pre-Gruve me would be glued to the couch).

I regularly hit the treadmill for periods of 10 to 15 minutes during the day, without beating myself up for being too wimpy. When taking the kids swimming or ice skating, I’m more likely to join in than watch from the sidelines. Good health can be fun, I discover, and I deem myself a Gruve success story at the beginning of February. Rather than starting (and probably failing) with a grand new exercise plan for 2010, I realized that just being more active in my daily routine has great benefits. And who knows? “Real” exercise may be next.