First, I have to admit that I’ve never used fitness trackers:
I’ve never felt I needed extra motivation to stay on track. I’ve never been that interested in the data it would collect. I’m not convinced they could possibly be totally accurate with everything they’re telling you (especially with calorie burn….there are so many variables that play into how many calories you burn), so what’s the point after all?
However, even being disinterested in that data pre-tracker, I do feel like it would be very easy to get addicted to that data if I ever did get one. So many pretty numbers!
The biggest reason for it, though, is this: by using them, I feel like we’re getting farther away from truly knowing our bodies.
Maybe that seems counter-intuitive. “You’re getting so much information via the tracker! Doesn’t that mean you know your body better?”
I’m not so sure.
I think the ultimate goal is a lack of obsession on all sides: don’t obsess about food, don’t obsess about exercise. Instead, in an ideal world, we would eat when we were hungry the food our bodies were asking for. We would move when it felt good to move and stop when we needed a rest. We would know the difference between hunger and boredom. We would know the difference between exercise fatigue and true pain. Most importantly, we would be free from guilt about those rare days with too much food or too little exercise.
I feel like the fitness tracker, for all its good intentions, actually leads us away from that sort of knowledge. We learn to rely on the numbers it gives us to understand if we’ve done “enough”. We allow ourselves to be measured against a standard that may or may not be suitable for us, whether that’s 10,000 steps, 2,000 calories, or whatever. We feel good about ourselves if it says we burned 600 calories at the gym–and bad about ourselves if we don’t.
We’re all motivated in different ways by different things. Obviously, as evidenced by their popularity and increasing sophistication, a lot of people love fitness trackers. There’s a huge part of me that says, “Awesome! If that little device will help you stick to your workouts and change your life, hooray!”
But the other part of me really hopes that you’ll only use it until you develop healthy habits that you stick to because they feel good, not because of a number that lets you know you’ve done enough for the day.
Do you use a fitness tracker? Tell me about your experience with it!