We Gruve!

The Gruve is a weight loss management system that helps you lose weight by helping you making small, sustainable changes in your daily activities. It does this by creating daily activity “Green Goals”. These goals are not your normal exercise based goals, rather they are NON-exercise based goals. You meet these goals simply by moving around more, and sitting less. The Gruve device is worn on your hip and monitors your activities through out the day. At any time during the day you can click the “halo” on the gruve device and it will give you a color that indicates how close you are to meeting your Green Goal. At night you sync up your Gruve device with the website and it shows you how many calories you burned and if you met the Green Goal for the day. The information is presented in easy to use, customizable graphs. Below you can see my activity for the past week.

These charts are great because they clearly show the difference in your activity level between days. You can see that Saturday and Sunday, I did very little; whereas on Wednesday and Thursday I blew the doors off (thanks to the Shrinking Jeans Olympics!).

The Green Goal is calculated with information provided by you, such as your weight and with information from the assessment week. The first week you wear your Gruve is called the assessment week and you are not given any Green Goals. The device simply monitors your activity in order to learn about your normal activity habits. After the first week, the Gruve will analyze the data and generate a Green Goal that will enable you lose 1lb per week. While this might not seem like a lot, the idea is that these changes are sustainable, since it is such a small modification in your daily activities.

Another really great feature of the Gruve is that it calculates your “Energy Conservation Point” (ECP). Your ECP is the point that your body’s metabolism starts to slow down because of inactivity. If you can avoid reaching your ECP during the day you will burn the most calories possible. When you are approaching your ECP, the Gruve will vibrate as a warning. At that point you should stand up and walk around. If you continue to sit, the Gruve will vibrate again in a few minutes to let you know you have reached your ECP. I really like this feature as I sit in front of a computer all day at work and the Gruve does a great job of making me get up and walk around. Only problem is that sometimes I get up and walk around to the vending machine :)

Overall, I really like this device and the concepts that it uses in order to help you lose weight. The only draw back is that there is no eating component to the program, only a caloric intake recommendation. Since the system is designed to allow you to lose a pound a week, you need to be pretty conscious of what you are eating because you can eat that pound pretty easily.

One last point of frustration (especially for Christy and Melissa!) is that the Gruve only works with PCs at this point. Mac support should be coming soon.

I highly recommend this device for anyone looking to make little changes in their daily activities while making a big impact on their overall health.

Full disclosure:  The Sisterhood of the Shrinking Jeans received Gruve devices to review. The opinions expressed are our own.

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Tags: activity, Brian, Fitness, fitness, gadgets, green goal, Gruve, movement, muvement, NEAT, Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis

Category: Brian, Fitness, MIND IT, Product Reviews