The latest obesity rates have U.S. adults clocking in at 42.4% obese, and numbers continue to increase. That’s a good motivator for many to start shedding pounds — the health and physical appearance benefits speak for themselves.
Fortunately, the tech world we live in today offers a variety of smart gadgets that can make the journey just a little bit easier. We searched for weight loss tech for your home — not just gadgets like air fryers, blenders, and elliptical machines, but new or unique products you can use to really make a difference. Check out our collection of weight loss gadgets for your home.
If you eat the right portion sizes, it can help you monitor and regulate your calorie intake and stay within the United States Department of Agriculture’s recommended guidelines. For instance, the guidelines say that a moderately active female between the ages of 26 and 50 should eat 2,000 calories per day, and a moderately active male between the ages of 26 and 45 should eat 2,600 calories per day.
If you’re eating one and a half times the serving size, but only counting the calories for one serving, this can cause you to gain weight without even realizing what you’re doing wrong. This food portion plate can help prevent accidental (or purposeful) overeating.
If you really want to commit to eating the right portion sizes, opt for a food scale. Weighing your food isn’t just for personal trainers and fitness junkies. If you weigh and pre-portion your meals, it can promote the mindset that food is fuel. It can also save you time throughout the workweek.
The only thing better than fresh herbs and veggies is fresh herbs and veggies that you grow yourself. Using specially designed smart soil, built-in sensors, and LED lamps, an indoor herb garden lets you grow herbs, cherry tomatoes, and even strawberries on your kitchen counter or in your living room. It’s one of the more affordable herb gardens we’ve found, and it might just motivate you to cook at home more often.
These days, you can get a bathroom scale that can tell you much more than just how many pounds you weigh. Smart scales, like the Withings Body+, can scan your body and tell you useful information like where you gained weight, where you lost weight, where you built muscle, where you burned fat, and what you look like now versus what you looked like three months ago.
You can use this information to target your workouts toward your problem areas, or to see what you are doing right. Check out our other smart scale recommendations to see all your options for these useful devices.
Google Assistant can play upbeat tunes, connect you to Fitbit Coach with a voice command, or allow you to use the popular fitness coach app FitStar — along with a lot more. It’s a great little smart speaker to include in a home gym, which is one of the best ways to make sure you are regularly shedding pounds. Plus, you can use it to control other smart devices.
Activity trackers you wear on your wrist are great. But, if you’re looking for something a bit more discrete, an activity tracker ring may be the answer. The Oura ring helps measure sleep, activity, body temperature, and more, giving you a more complete look at your biorhythms and what you can do to burn more calories. It also comes in a variety of sizes and colors, and has water resistance for showers and swimming.
Hitch the Garmin Running Pod to your shoe for workouts, and it will help you measure your running performance in great detail. It can track steps per minute, ground contact time, stride length, oscillation, vertical ratio, and more. These metrics are great for runners, of course, but the Pod can also be a big help to those who are just starting to jog or go on runs to burn calories, and want lots of data to help them practice the right form and avoid pain or injury … as long as you don’t mind diving into the little details.
There are a lot of high-end fitness devices you can buy for your home if you have the money and the room. But The Mirror is one of our favorites, for several reasons. First, while pricey, it’s more affordable than many other luxury fitness items. Second, it’s literally a high-tech mirror, so you can hang it on a wall and use it just like a normal mirror in the house. Third, you can use the Mirror to get classes, instruction, and analysis for a variety of fully-body exercises right there in your home (a roll-out mat may be a good idea too, but that’s basically all you need). Keep in mind that The Mirror does require a subscription to use all its capabilities, so there are some ongoing costs involved — but that’s true of most fitness apps.
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.