[jefflinwood]

Fitness tracking and notifications are the two "killer apps" for my Apple Watch. It's exciting that Pebble has now added fitness to its existing notifications capability, especially now that they are working with Stanford.

I'd never used a FitBit or similar fitness tracker before getting my Apple Watch, but I had been a huge Garmin GPS watch fan for running and biking in the days before my iPhone had enough battery life to last for a run with GPS enabled.

At first I thought I was mostly going to use the Apple Watch in conjunction with planned activities like running a few miles - I certainly use it for that, in conjunction with Runkeeper - but now I also use the passive activity tracking to keep track of how I'm doing throughout the day.

I won't say that it's strictly because of the watch, but I'm now about as fit as I've ever been, and I think the easy glance over to see where I'm at is really helping with that.

[adrtessier]

> I won't say that it's strictly because of the watch, but I'm now about as fit as I've ever been

I will gladly credit my Fitbit Aria scale for the same result.

Interestingly, it is less for the feedback if gives me in the short term and rather the long-term graphs. I know that if I want to manipulate the scale up or down in weight and fat percentage, I have to be consistent over really long periods of time. I almost never miss days running or at the gym, my days of heavy drinking are long behind me, and I feel orders of magnitude better than I have in years past. These systems really are fantastic tools, and show that the application of game mechanics can be a force for enacting strong positive change on a personal level.