I know. I’ve been horrifically slack with this blog. I blame the fitness tracker. Well, it already records everything I do. And, let’s face it, if I had to summarise my blog, it would be: Girl Goes On Diet. Girl Has Cheat Day. For the Past Five Years. (Moral of the story: Don’t cheat. Once you go carb, you can never go back.)

Yep, still on that 12” remix Cheat Day.

Annnnnyyyyywaaayyyyy… Remember when I was lusting for that vívosmart 3? Me neither. Long story short: I was.

I thought surely this bulky, ungainly vívosmart HR would give up the ghost soon. Except that it seemed that Garmin had finally built THE fitness tracker to stand the test of time. I bet it will be around long after the cockroaches have surrendered the earth to dust mites.

But,one rainy night, whist stranded by a storm in Romblon, as I tried to detach the tracker from its charger, the band came off with the charger. I did the dance of joy.

I wasted no time. As soon as I got back to Manila, I trooped straight into the Garmin office and plonked down the trusty old credit card for a vívosmart 3. As soon as the saleslady took it out of the box, the doubts started.

While it was definitely sleek, it wasn’t as slick as its previous counterparts. Truth be told, I thought it looked rather cheap. Worse still is that the “small” models come with copper clasps instead of silver. I’m not sure if the saleslady told me this just because they didn’t have any of the ones with silver clasps. Anyway, it just looked cheap.

Still, it had a screen that wasn’t on all the time, which is what I liked about the previous models. Little did I know that this feature would be the tracker’s undoing.

I left for Siargao the next day and took it into the pool. The tracker recorded only the first few seconds of the swim. When I was in the shower, I noticed the display changing. The next day, I turned on the activity recording feature of the device and swirled my arm in the water. Sure enough, the display went awry and then stopped recording. The damned touchscreen was too bloody sensitive.

While the vívosmart 3 has a lot of features that the old-model HR doesn’t have – I particularly like the one that assesses your stress levels while at rest. Mine, most of the time, was low. While registered high levels for several girl friends. (They said that maybe knowing your fitness tracker could tell you were stressed might make them more stressed.) It also had a feature that assesses your fitness age as opposed to your real age. Ideally, the lower your fitness age, the better. Unfortunately, I never got around to configuring that.

Garmin called to tell me that my HR was repaired