Don’t be a slave to the wristband. Photo: Courtesy of Unsplash
Maybe you, like my aunt and apparently the rest of America, got some sort of fitness tracker for your most recent birthday or gift-giving holiday. You have become that obsessive person who walks around the block before bed just to hit your prescribed number of steps. You know exactly how much you’re walking, and sleeping and eating. Technology is making your life way better. The future!
But now that there’s some evidence that they don’t work as well as they’re supposed to, and that some people who are using them to lose weight are actually gaining it instead, or developing unhealthy eating and exercise habits. It’s possible that you’ve been wearing that plastic bracelet for nothing.
There are a few reasons why digitally monitoring all of your bodily functions isn’t as precise as it seems.
The first is that we’re all physically and metabolically different. That means that, even when you enter in your height and weight, it’s not accounting for how you, individually, process things. You might burn calories differently than another 5’6” 29-year-old female, which can give you false readings.
Good or bad? Photo: Courtesy of Vernon Chang/Flickr
There’s also the argument that healthiness is directly tied to happiness. Constantly tracking your input and output takes your focus away from enjoying things, like appreciating the views on your hike, and instead places it on counting steps. It makes it hard for you to listen to your body when you have a hard metric to compare it to. This is a particularly slippery slope for people with a history of eating disorders. It perpetuates the sense that you could always eat less and work out more, which isn’t necessarily true or healthy. It can lead to binging and purging, or obsessive behavior.
Then there’s the reality that you’re probably bad at math, and that, even when you have numbers in front of you, calories in doesn’t always equal calories out. Seeing that you knocked out a specific number of steps sometimes makes it feel like you have carte blanche to eat whatever you want, but that’s not particularly good for you. It gives people a false sense of how much they should eat and opens them up to unhealthy eating habits.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. Keeping yourself accountable and keeping track of your movement can have plenty of positive impacts: You might stop sitting so much, or start walking places more. So, if your wearable is making you feel healthy and happy, great, stick with it, but if it’s causing you any guilt or stress, let it go. You can find better jewelry.
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