When I started this wellness journey earlier this month, I bought myself a new scale, because my old one was bouncing around too much to be accurate, and a pedometer.

I admit it. I’m a penny pincher, somewhat miserly, and I tend to settle for things that cost less but are of less quality, because they are cheap. It’s certainly become worse recently as I started repaying my student loans and became poorer again. One of my favorite inspirational blogs: The Happiness Project writes that she had a similar problem: where she’d hoard the “new underware” and reuses and reuses and reuses the old, and I’m very much the same. In any case, I looked at the pedometer selection at Target, which wasn’t very good to begin with. Pedometers ranged from the very cheap “only senses your steps if you walk the right way” to the very expensive “monitor your heart rate, calories burned, distance walked and for free, we’ll throw in a trip to the moon” GPS watch. I can’t tell you how long I lingered by that stand, making internal calculations. In the end, I gave into that voice of frugality and bought the second cheapest pedometer, thinking that I didn’t need all of the fancy features, I just wanted something solid that worked.

I wore the pedometer to work on Saturday when I was on call to see how many steps and how far I walked on call. The darn thing read every hip movement as a step, even when it was just bouncing on my toes because rounds were lasting forever. And I’d brush my hand against it and it would reset. In the end, I have no idea how much I walked (a little less than usual, I think, but probably close to 4 miles altogether) and I was just as good guesstimating without it.

I’m looking to get another pedometer. But this time, I’ve done the research to figure out what is the best brand and works the best for the price, which I should have done in the first place. Lesson learned. Again.