Last updated: January 22, 2017
Finally, there is a lifestyle tracker made just for women. The Bellabeat LEAF tracks sleep, activity, breathing, and even a woman's menstrual cycle. It is meant to provide a snapshot into a woman’s life so she can improve her overall health and well-being.
This Bellabeat LEAF review will show you it isn’t just for your sleep since it tracks many things that do impact your sleep.
Taking a holistic approach to your lifestyle and health will impact your sleep in a very positive way. A healthy, restful sleep doesn’t just happen once you enter the bedroom.
The more you focus on living a healthier lifestyle, the better your rest will be. Being able to track these things with the stylish looking LEAF will give you an idea of what you are doing right and what needs to be improved. Once everything is aligned, you will see your sleep improve immensely.
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Review of: Bellabeat Leaf
Use: Health Tracker/Smart Jewelry
Our Rating
Price
Priced on the higher end, but doubles as jewelry.
Usefulness
Stylish, so it can be used as jewelry, but also does a good job tracking activity.
We Like
- Tracks sleep, activity, breathing and menstrual cycle
- Easy to sync
- Can be worn as a clip, necklace or bracelet
- Long battery life
- Doesn’t need to be charged
- Vibrating alarm with three times
- Great customer service
We Don't Like
- Weighs too much to clip on lighter clothes
- Doesn’t sync automatically
- No heart rate monitor
- Can be glitchy
Summary: Bellabeat LEAF is a unique product that helps you ease your stress with help in meditating and breathing exercises. It will keep your active and exercising. You can keep track of your period, when you are ovulating, how many calories you burn per day and so much more.
What is the Bellabeat LEAF?
- The Leaf is a pendant that tracks your sleep cycles, activity, breathing, and monthly cycles. You can wear it as a bracelet, necklace, or clip.
- The Leaf can help calm your mind by using the meditation app. The LEAF teaches you how to train your mind with guided meditation exercises.
- The app has a period tracker which can help prevent surprises as well as track your ovulation to help with conception.
- It can be used to provide a reminder to take your birth control or to use the rhythm method.
- The LEAF connects to an easy-to-use app that will help you organize your activity and sleep as well as give you encouragement to improve certain areas.
How can the Bellabeat LEAF improve my sleep?
When you are aware of your activity and sleep, you become very mindful about your health and lifestyle choices.
Lifestyle can affect your sleep in a positive or negative way. With the LEAF and its accompanying app, you will become aware of how active or inactive you are.
Living a sedentary life is bad for your body as well as your mind, so it goes without saying that it also affects your sleep. The LEAF will give you reminders by vibrating when it is time to get moving again after sitting for long periods. This physical activity will increase sleep quality and duration which then leads to a healthier and more productive life.
The LEAF will also remind you to set aside time to meditate and help you with breathing exercises. This will help you calm your mind, refocus, and destress. Stress is the number one reason people have trouble getting a good night's sleep. If your mind races when you are just getting to bed, it takes longer to fall asleep, and you don’t usually sleep deeply enough to feel rested.
With the LEAF, the automatic sleep tracking will help you understand just how well you slept.
It estimates what time you fell asleep, what time you woke up, and how deep your sleep was. Based on how much you move while you are sleeping, it will determine if your sleep was calm or disturbed. It can accurately analyze if you woke up in the middle of the night.
By understanding how well you sleep, you can make some adjustments in your sleep routine and even your lifestyle to get your sleep back on track.
Finally, LEAF will give you notifications to keep you moving and help create and maintain healthy life habits. If you have been sitting too long, LEAF will send a friendly vibration to alert you that it’s time to get active for a while. You may be busy working or in the middle of something important, but you should at least make an attempt to take a break to go for a walk or even try some breathing exercises.
By creating healthy habits, you can transform your life and start getting the healthy rest that you need. All of these things fall into place when your life is in balance.
Bellabeat LEAF design
The LEAF is a fashionable leaf-shaped pendant that you can wear as either a clip-on or a piece of jewelry on a chain or wrist strap. Even though it looks great and works nicely as an accessory with many different fashion styles, it isn’t a case of form over function. It looks great and works even better.
The design is a shiny stainless steel leaf over a white ash wood, or a rose gold design over African Blackwood. All of the hardware is encased in a small casing that rests against your skin out of sight.
It is an elegant, yet understated, design that will complement most clothes and styles. It is a definite improvement over the genderless styles of many activity trackers. The metal, wood and leather looks natural and decidedly feminine.
The only drawback is that it is a bit heavy. If you use it as a clip on, it tends to fall off of certain lightweight fabrics. It works better on more sturdy materials, but it must still be in contact with the skin for it to work properly.
The LEAF comes with a bracelet strap or a necklace strap along with a small tool to open the casing when you need to change the battery. The battery is a standard CR2032 cell that is easy to find when it needs to be replaced.
Please note: if you wear it as a necklace or bracelet, it is not waterproof and will have to be removed when you take a shower. It is water resistant, however, and will still be fine when you sweat during a workout.
How does the LEAF perform?
In terms of activity, the LEAF tracks active time, steps, and distance, showing your daily total as well as your seven-day average. When you enter your weight and height, calories burned are also estimated.
Where it comes up short in terms of tracking your activity is that it doesn’t differentiate between specific types of exercise. For example, if you run three miles or walk three miles, it just registers that you went three miles; it doesn’t indicate whether you ran or walked. It is, however, very accurate with steps taken. It doesn’t detect your arm movement so, if you are moving your arms around a lot but not walking, it won’t count any steps.
If you want to be more accurate in terms of calories burned, you can manually enter what the type of activity was, and it will adjust the calories accordingly. A nice feature is that breastfeeding is an option to track. A typical session can burn 500 calories or more, so it is important to keep track of your calories with the app.
Automatic sleep tracking happens as soon as you get to bed. It will show you the duration of your sleep and how deeply you slept. If you get up at night, it will register on the LEAF.
A gentle vibration will wake you in the morning. It may be too gentle for deep sleepers to wake up, however.
The next morning, you need to manually sync the LEAF to the app on your smartphone. It will display your last night's sleep as well as your last seven days in a chart so you can see how you average. When you sync it to the app, it will ask you if the readings from the night before are accurate. It will also ask you where you wore your LEAF as this affects its precision. It is advised to wear it clipped onto your shirt.
If you remember waking up and lying awake for a while while you tried to fall asleep, that may not register. You can manually add that to your reading so it is accurate. The same is true if you remember getting up during the night. It may not register, but you can manually add it.
It may seem like a chore to have to have to sync it manually everyday. This feature is actually beneficial as it will end up extending the life of your battery.
The period tracker doesn’t give a great deal of detail, but it is handy to use for knowing when your next period will be as well as when you are likely ovulating. This can help you conceive, or you can use this information as birth control depending on what your plans are.
To set up the LEAF, you have to manually enter when your last period was and how long it lasted. Make sure you are keeping track before you get your LEAF, so it can give you an accurate prediction on your next period.
If you are on birth control, you can use the LEAF to alert you when you need to take your pill.
For meditation breathing exercises, you need to use the app on your smartphone. There are audio-guided exercises that act as a sort of coach. The different types of breathing exercises are for focus, inner peace, and dealing with menstruation discomfort. It doesn’t matter if you are a frequent practitioner of meditation or a newbie; there are options for beginner, intermediate, and expert.
Get the most out of your LEAF
You should make sure you are syncing your LEAF to the app everyday and really looking at the data. If you forget to do this, the LEAF will store your tracking results for 14 days and will download all of the data the next time you sync it.
There is no display on the LEAF so, if you have the time to check your app throughout the day, you will be able to make any adjustments to your routine.
A lot of data can be added to the app to get an accurate picture of every aspect of your day. You can add when you take a nap and for how long. You can register when and for how long you breastfed. In the morning, you can also edit any inconsistencies in your sleep readout.
If you do yoga or have sex, make sure you manually log them as they count as activities and will show the estimated calories burned.
Setting goals will also help the LEAF alert you and give you that little push you may need to stay on track. The inactivity alerts are especially helpful in keeping you moving.
Doing all of these things will result in a healthy lifestyle and a much better sleep routine.
FAQ about the Bellabeat LEAF
Q: Can you get it wet?
A: No, you cannot get the LEAF wet. Do not take it swimming or in the shower.
Q: Are there different sizes for the bracelet strap?
A: Yes, there are two sizes available.
Q: What if the LEAF stops working through no fault of my own?
A: There is a one-year limited warranty. Contact the manufacturer for instructions on how to activate your warranty.
Q: How big is the LEAF?
A: It is 48x30x13mm or 1.88x1.18x0.5 inches and weighs 18 grams or 0.63 ounces.
Bellabeat Leaf Review - Final Thoughts
I highly recommend the Bellabeat LEAF as a sleep and activity tracker. It is the only sleep monitor that provides for a holistic approach in identifying and remedying the parts of your lifestyle that are unhealthy. Also, it is a great jewelry piece so you can happily wear it in public.
Try it and see how much your sleep improves with time. When you take full advantage of all the LEAF has to offer, you will feel more healthy, less stressed, and, most important, well rested.
I hope this Bellabeat LEAF review has opened your eyes to how important it is to live a healthy lifestyle; only then will you get the sleep you need.
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