Week 43/2025: The week I ditched my Fitbit
I love the third week of October because it’s Hobart Show week and we get a day off in the middle of the week.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
Week of 20 October 2025
The week I ditched my Fitbit
I did it! I ditched my Fitbit!
My Fitbit history
My Fitbit history dates back to 2014, when I got a Fitbit Flex, a nasty little device that I had to remove from the band to charge, had no display, and flashed lights to indicate how close I was to my step goal. The bands used to break with monotonous (and expensive) regularity.
I’ve had several Fitbits since then, the most recent being an Inspire, which has a yellow band and a colour screen, and measures more things than I even knew existed. Heart rate, SpO2, sleep, steps climbed, breathing rate, skin temperature variation, stress scores, ‘readiness’ scores . . . I don’t know. I could link it to my phone so it buzzed when I got a text or a call, I could track water, calories, exercise.
A far cry from the Flex, which tracked, well, steps. And sleep.
We are family
In 2021, the Fitbit founders announced they had become “part of the Google family” because that’s what small businesses that start to get big do, isn’t it. They assimilate with tech giants and end up with a worse customer experience and a worse product (Hi, Instagram, I’m looking at you).
In 2023, they advised that I could to move my family’s Fitbit accounts to Google, which would enable more connectivity and more parental control, whatever that was supposed to be. And, while this was worded as an invitation, there was a bit at the end that said I would have to do this by 2025 to keep using my device.
I, of course, ignored this for the next two years.
More emails started arriving this year telling me of this move I must make to Google. They were now from “Google Fitbit” and worded much more aggressively than the previous ones.
You are receiving this email because there is an important upcoming change to your Fitbit account and action is required.
Well, you know what. Even though Google has access to way more of my data than I know about, and I’ve probably given it permission to access a zillion other apps that I don’t even remember getting, I don’t want Google to have my health data.
(They probably already do if Fitbit is now officially “Google Fitbit”, don’t they, regardless of my whether my account is connected to them.)
But still. It’s the principle. Or something. I don’t want to be forced to link my account to them.
That email made me decide that I was going to let the 2 February 2026 deadline slide by and stop using my Fitbit.
Fitbit knows too much already
It knows too much, it’s too complicated, it keeps telling my I am at the risk of ‘undertraining’ and ‘overtraining’ at the same time. It makes up these bullshit ‘readiness’ scores and it does some weird tracking thing when I’m walking so when I want to check the time, all I see is how long I’ve been walking for.
It thinks it knows me better than I know myself.
Well, no. It’s time to take back control and for me to start listening to how I feel rather than what a device tells me I feel. I already had advice from by sleep physiologist Stephanie Romiszewski that sleep tracking was a bad idea, and I’d already stopped paying attention to that. And I really didn’t take much notice of the other things. So why bother tracking them?
I walk enough most days to average well more than 8000 steps a day every week, so I don’t even need to track that.
The only things apart from its clock, that are potentially useful are the alarms, which I generally snooze anyway, to the point I have another alarm on the other side of the room so I have to get out of bed to turn it off. Also, the notifications to move if I’ve been sitting down too long, but they don’t work all the time anyway. And I occasionally use the timer.
But none of these are essential, and I was biding my time until the 2 February deadline.
However, on Tuesday this week I got another, even more aggressively worded email, in bold “Action is required to maintain access to your Fitbit account.”
If you do not move to a Google Account [their caps] by the deadline, you will not be able to continue using the Fitbit service or access your associated data.
Good.
I refuse to be forced to link to Google to be able to use a fancy pedometer.
Getting really pissed at Fitbit now
The Fitbit was at 52% battery and that email annoyed me so much I decided that when it got to zero I wouldn’t recharge it. I’d take it off and that would be the end of it.
I watched the battery slowly deplete over the week and it finally died on Friday.
I wondered if I should replace it with another device, but do I really want a device tracking everything I do? No, I don’t think I do. Yes, I know I’ve voluntarily let Google into virtually every other online thing I do, so why should this be any different? Is it the enforced nature of it? I don’t know. But the tone of that email tipped me over the edge.
Now I’m getting used to not having this device on my arm and it feels weird. I keep going to tap it to see the time and how many steps I’ve done.
I also feel refreshingly free!
Habit tracker
Existing habits
- Go outside first thing (7 days): 5/7
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 7/7
- Hip exercises (5 days): 6/5
- Walk (7 days): 7/7
- Carry a notebook with me when I walk (7 days): 3/7
- Thinking time (4 days): 5/4
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 5/7
- Walk 8,000 steps (4 days): 4/4 and no more!
- 9.30 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 1/6
- Evening routine (6 days): 3/6
New habits
- Set timer for morning planning (4 days): 0/4
- Work shutdown (4 days): 0/4
Summary of the week
Some positive things
1. Celebrating literacy
I went to TasTAFE on Monday for the launch of their Adult Literacy and Numeracy Tutor Manual. This manual was developed to support the literacy tutor training course, which I completed in 2022. Its available from Libraries Tasmania.
I was involved (very peripherally!) in this through my work and it was very exciting to see it completed and launched—to coincide with 26Ten Week, our annual awareness week celebrating our successes in adult literacy.
The manual looks amazing and will be a great resource for anyone teaching English literacy and numeracy across the whole country and, they hope, internationally too. It’s a wonderful achievement.
2. Resistance
On Wednesday I want to the Artfully Queer exhibition at the Salamanca Arts Centre with some workmates. This is an annual exhibition organised by TasPride to celebrate Tasmanian LGBTIQA+ culture and art.
This year’s theme was RESISTANCE.
Here are some of my favourite pieces and some words about them from the artist statements.
“Black Bantam conducting a sit in protest against battery farming.”
“For many people, the world of Harry Potter was once a lifeline, a place of refuge and comfort in hard times. It is no exaggeration to say these books helped me stay on the planet during my darkest days. Sadly, it has become impossible to hold onto that magical world in the face of the author’s escalating violence towards the trans community. I no longer want the books but struggled with what to do with them. This project—a funeral wreath in the shape of the deathly hallows—is my consciously made farewell to the characters I loved and a giant ‘fuck you’ to Jake Hay Rowling.”
“This jacket and train were worn by drag king and Judge Judys 2025 winner, Daisy ChainMale—alongside an upcycled ballgown—as their runway look in the Judge Judys finale. I designed this look to challenge the idea of what a drag performer’s ‘eleganza’ look should be, as a drag king who loves to defy the rules of gender. I wanted something grunge, environmentally conscious and just plain cool.”
“My octo-inspired mask is layered with resistance. Octopuses are slippery, adaptive, and masters of camouflage, always resisting capture or control. The mask itself is a form of protection, a nod to neurodivergent masking, but it’s also a projection of my beautiful-messy internal world shown through the chaotic collage and black doodles.”
We had a wonderful time wandering through and looking at the amazing work.
This week I learned
I watched a webinar from National Brain Injury Awareness Week (18-24 August) and learned a lot about brain injury.
In the webinar, Lex Bull, Rehabilitation Coordinator at the Royal Hobart Hospital, talked about the different types of brain injury.
Acquired brain injury which is an injury or damage to the brain that occurs after birth (and includes fetal alcohol spectrum disorder), and has been internally driven.Causes include strokes, brain tumour, drug or alcohol abuse, infection, and degenerative brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
Traumatic brain injury is caused by external factors like falls, transport crashes, assaults and sports. Lex said in Australia there are around 200,000 traumatic brain injuries every year and this is under-reported because around 80 per cent of them are mild (concussion) and the people often don’t seek treatment or report them. Fall are responsible for 39% of traumatic brain injuries and transport crashes for 31%.
The webinar went on to talk about the Brain Injury Association of Tasmania’s (BIAT) Acquired Brain Injury Identification Card Program, which has supported Tasmanians living with brain injury for over 20 years. The Australian Government has provided funding to BIAT to expand the card nationally. It will eventually be available for anyone with disability but is currently available for autistic people and people with brain injury. (Find out more at https://www.nationalassistancecard.com.au/)
This week I noticed
102 Queen Street, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, has a new mailbox.
What’s making me think?
I saw a post on Instagram about AI slop, which said that AI takes away people’s creativity. Not having to persevere to learn the skills of a craft means anyone can do anything, which devalues the arts and crafts made by expert artists.
Charlie Warzel from The Atlantic wrote the piece, and he concludes:
Generative AI is disruptive, is transformative, and is reducing friction, but the economic incentives for using it are geared far less toward supercharging human potential and much more toward producing abundant slop.
This is tragic. The loss of friction deprives people of something crucial. What happens between imagination and creation is ineffable—it entails struggle, iteration, joy, and frustration, disappointment, and pride. It is the process through which we enact agency. It is how we make meaning and move through the world. To lose that, I fear, is to capitulate on our very humanity.
I feel like this is the outcome the tech bros want.
Reading
- Grendel by John Gardner
- Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang
Watching
- The Amazing Race Australia Celebrity Edition
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘Mawdryn Undead’
Listening
- The Mighty Several by Paul Heaton
- The Eye Begins to See by Daniel J Townsend
- Into the Lights by James Parry
About The Author
