35. Is it ok to use fitness trackers?

Fitness trackers generally encourage you to track food or exercise, or both. Are they helpful though, or are they harmful? Let me help you to decide as I discuss how they are used, the issues with logging your food and exercise, when they can be useful, and what to consider when deciding whether it is ok for you to use a fitness tracker.

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Please note, this podcast is intended to be general information for entertainment purposes only. Any figures quoted are correct at the time of recording. As always, please seek the support of a registered professional before making changes to your diet or lifestyle⁠, or if you feel that you are affected by any of the topics discussed.

Related Topics:

Intuitive Eating, HAES, Health At Every Size, Body Positivity, Body Confidence, Body Positive, Anti Diet, Non Diet, Diet Culture, Food Freedom, Fat Acceptance, Fat Liberation, Self Care, Weight Loss, Eating Disorder, Eating Disorder Recovery, Disordered Eating, Nutritional Therapy, Slimming World, Weight Watchers, Cambridge Diet, Cambridge Plan, 121 Diet, Lighter Life, Noom, Coaching, Healing, Health, Wellness, Calorie Counting, Macros

Transcript

0:09

Welcome to Intuitive Eating and Body Positivity I'm Terri and I'll be talking about all things intuitive eating, body positivity, and shaking off weight stigma, diet that we can all have a better relationship with food Hi. I owe you an apology, don't I? I'll be with you every week, I said. And then last week there was no podcast episode. I'm really sorry. If you could have seen me last weekend, you would have understood Now, I don't record these episodes in advance because I things that have gone on in the week, current I like to talk to you as things happen in life, rather than having this backlog of previously recorded And so I do tend to do them on a Friday or a Saturday Well, I went to a party on the Saturday. Let's just say I had a lovely time and Sunday I did Yeah, it wasn't a pretty day. And so the podcast didn't get done and the newsletter And there was all sorts of bits and pieces So I do apologise. But yeah, this is life, isn't it? And I think that's just the way life goes. Sometimes things happen that means your normal plans don't happen, and as much as I love you guys, I do love my bed So I am sorry. I kind of miss it when I don't do it as well, I know these episodes should go out and I enjoy seeing it the downloads happen because that means that people are that you are wanting to listen and wanting to hear So I do feel like I let you down a little bit, So just know that my preference is actually to do these podcasts, not to not bother if So leading up to the party, you might have seen if you're I was talking about the outfits for the party. I was talking on my stories about how I'd ordered This was going to be a nice dress up party. It was for a friend's 40th birthday. So I was going to get dressed up and wear something nice. So I got online because we all know that's where And I ordered a load of dresses, and I did Anyway, they arrived and I had a bit of an evening after work where I tried them on and tried to decide I had good faith. I'd ordered the right sizes and things like that. So I came out of it a bit disappointed and I took to my Instagram stories I tried the dresses on some didn't fit. Fine. That was, I think, a little bit of my fault and a little bit of the fault from because they gave me an idea online of what But there was also an indication that I probably So it's one of those things. I just ordered the wrong size in some of them, and some of them just didn't But it gave me a bit of a wobble because as much as on the whole, I'm not comfortable with finding things to wear I don't know what suits my body anymore. Since my body has changed, I don't think I really knew But I live day to day in the clothes that I'm that I'm used to, and to go out and try and find to wear in a body that I've not had to dress for this It's all a little bit outside of my comfort zone. So I got a little bit down on myself. But I decided what I would do is put them aside. I would have a little moan to a friend, moan to a friend, rant to a friend, which way I put my feelings across to somebody and decided that I'll just come back to this Come to this another time. It's absolutely fine. And long story short, when I came to dress for the party and I had the dress on with jewellery, all that sort of stuff, I was actually really I was really comfortable. Really happy with one of them. So off I trotted to the party and I felt good. I had a really good time. I had compliments on the dress, which was actually really nice because it's nice to have and not necessarily on the body that's Do you know what I mean? So often we're quick to say, oh, you've lost Don't you look amazing? But I was really happy to just have people say that they I'm happy with that. That's all I wanted. And I had a really good night. I had such good fun. I felt really good. It was really nice. I had somebody say to me, oh, you're the girl And somebody else stopped me and she said, I follow you on Instagram, So it's nice to see that people are there, kind of rooting for you, even when So I guess this is a little bit of motivation to have a bit of faith in your When you're going out somewhere, just rock up, wear what you're comfortable in, wear what you like about what other people are going to think of what Because that is what I have to do. In the end, I had to go in with the attitude of I like what I'm wearing, I don't And that is the mindset. So that's a little teeny tiny message for you is just if in something and that's what you want to wear, then wear it But yeah, Sunday was not a great day. So Sunday was a write off. I could have done with Monday off work to get over Sunday. What else have we done this week? We went for family lunch yesterday. That was supposed to be between Christmas but lots of things have happened and Covid Two people involved. So the chefs went down with Covid so we had to rearrange our booking, that sort of thing, and we finally got to have our family Christmas get The food was amazing. If you are catching this Sunday or Monday, have a look I had the biggest brie wedges you have ever seen. They were massive, and when you cut into them, they were all gooey And then a massive burger which was homemade and juicy If you're catching this Sunday or Monday, have So good. In fact, they were so much food I didn't even have pudding. No, I know. Dessert came over... No, thank you. I am quite full enough. That's unheard of. Unheard of for me. Gosh, I've got so much to say. Can you tell? This is what happens when I I've got lots to say to you. This week I'm going to talk to you I don't know if you saw again on my Instagram stories, I put a question box up and said, tell me what you Basically. Do you like them? Do you not like them? I wasn't leading this conversation anywhere. I was just interested to see what people thought of their fitness trackers or fitness Because I wanted to come on here and talk to you about fitness trackers and kind of give you the good, them so that you can make a decision on whether you First off, what even is a fitness tracker? They come in a wide range of forms, but you will most things like MyFitnessPal and Fitbit. Those are going to be the most popular ones I think And they're generally apps that you have that help you to track certain things. Food, exercise, But it's not just myfitnesspal and So you've got different variations. You've got people like Garmin that will make I think those will be more geared up to the exercise side but they will always or almost always encounter some kind Phones these days have got fitness trackers I think mine is called a health log, So it's quite deceptive, isn't it, a name like Health Log? Actually, what it's doing is tracking different Diet clubs will have apps. I think now most diet clubs will have some form of app to help you track the food that you're eating that are intended for you to track your food through the week from these diet clubs, they're also I know that when I was at Slimming World, we used I hated them. Do you know what I did instead? Oh, God. I went online and I ordered myself a special I don't know if that's what it was officially called, but it was basically this had been designed by somebody and they were selling And I won't tell you exactly where on the Internet, obviously, but I ordered it this book of these pieces of paper where I could write and drank, every bit of movement And that is a paper form of a fitness tracker. Essentially what they do is they make you focus on what you're eating, what you're drinking and the doing really. That's the basics of it. Now, the problem with this is that it becomes all about numbers for a lot of people. It becomes a really You're always going to be looking at the numbers on the screen or the numbers in that book or the numbers Wherever you're tracking, it's always going to be about numbers and not about how you feel and intuitively So if we take a look at food, for example. When you're monitoring you are going to be targeting yourself to a certain amount of calories or a certain The carbs, fats, proteins. You're going to have set levels that your target So if your calories are set at actually, no, I'm not going to give you a number of calories that you're not You're going to have levels of macros that you're not and you become so focused on those numbers that that Now, when you start tracking on these apps, most of them will give you a starting point where you get it will spit out this number that tells you what And these numbers are typically very very low. In my opinion, the number that but even right from the beginning of the process, So when I say that, what I mean is you put your details in at the beginning. It asks you what your It asks you what your target weight is, It asks you how quickly you want to lose weight. And you put your options But the problem is that most people are going to choose They're going to go for the quickest weight loss, because that's what we're Most people using these fitness trackers will be looking to lose weight So you're going to choose the options in that app that give you the and the quickest results are going to be gained, as far as these apps are concerned, by you So you've chosen the very lowest option for your calorie intake, resulting in the quickest weight loss now you've chosen in that app, and then the obsession begins. You end up obsessing over food. You end up counting and tracking every last morsel that you Even that is a bit of a guessing game in itself, really, because to log this from a list of foods that's already in their database So if you're choosing from this database that they've got, you are taking what's You're taking it as correct. So you might eat a packet of crisps and an apple, and then you go into the database and you and an apple of your chosen varieties and you add and you think, right, that's it, that's that data collected that's, But often these database entries that they've got in their lists are things that So what if the original person has entered the data for that bag of crisps or What if they've typed the numbers in the What if they just misunderstood what they were reading on the packet and they've put There's all kinds of things that can go wrong with a human being entering data into a computer, which is And then if you're entering that yourself, is there Do you know what you're putting in. Now, I'm not saying that you're not capable of doing that, but we're all human And sometimes the things on these packets are not clear. They're really difficult to get the information from. And so when you're putting the data in yourself manually, maybe sometimes it's not correct. I mean, let's face it. Who knows without going to the Internet, how many calories an apple has and how much fat and how many This isn't stuff we just know. This is stuff And if you're not in the field of nutrition, how do you Really? How do you know what So first off, what we have is potential for incorrect data. That's where I'm going with that. And as the day goes on, the variability of the information that has been put in is suddenly gone from super who knows how far out the number of calories I've tracked are compared to the number of calories Then also, let's go back to our good When it's in the body a calorie is not just a calorie. One calorie in through your mouth is not necessarily one calorie converted Depending on what you're eating, your body will be able to use some of the calories But the body has to break down these foods in different ways. So you will get a different level of energy out of the calories in, than you will in a kernel of sweet corn. I mean, sweet corn is infamous for not being broken down We know that, don't we because we see the results about 24 hours later, if you know what I mean. If you don't know what I mean, lucky you. So basically what I'm saying here is the calories you eat, the calories that are on those labels on the packets logging, is not necessarily the calories that your So you've got the errors in actually logging the data. You've got the fact that your body doesn't use 100% of the and so already you've got this variance in what you've logged compared to what you've but this obsession begins as you use these apps. You're constantly checking. How many have I eaten? How many have I got left? How much food can I squeeze into my allowance? You always start to look for ways to use less calories but feel like you've eaten. It becomes a complete numbers game. You lose any kind of intuition around eating. You aren't guided by how your body feels. You're guided by the number of calories that You don't think about what you want to eat and what your You start thinking of what you can eat according to how many You stop eating when your calories run out if you're So for me it's a little bit like I get to that point and I cannot eat anymore because I must stop now. But then the flip side is the days where I've gone I get this all or nothing to hell with it mindset and because I've gone over, I'm just going to keep eating. So for me it's one extreme or the other. I'm either really on the numbers or it At no point am I thinking whether I'm still hungry or not. I'm not satisfied by the food that I'm tracking because I am tracking food to make it fit within my calories, So come the end of my calories I am either still hungry and making myself stop eating I'm eating everything and I've blown those calories Neither option is good or healthy. What is healthy is being guided by your intuition. Are you hungry? Are you full? Do you need to eat something because your body is telling you that you need Or actually, do you not feel very good and you don't want to eat anymore because your body is saying, hang on, Whereas I'm all for eating when you're ill to keep sometimes your body says, hang on, I don't need to eat. Just stop. And on those days where you're tracking food in an app, you override all of these that are telling you whether you should eat, whether you want to eat or not, what you want to eat, All of those signals get pushed down and are just totally overalled by this I even used to use it alongside the So Slimming World, for those who haven't done it, It is guided by a list of free foods and a list of stuff And the aim is that you eat lots of free foods and you don't eat too many So when I was logging my food diary, for Slimming World, I was also logging it in a fitness app to see how Well, that wasn't the plan. That's not what Slimming World says to do. But I got so obsessed with knowing what I was eating and the calories in it And that's how ridiculous these things can get. Let's also remember that eating a certain amount eating under a certain amount of set calories, does not well. It doesn't mean that you're eating healthily. You could eat a lot of one type of food because That doesn't mean you're getting a good All it means is that you're under this level So tracking your calories does not necessarily mean that you it just meaning you're cutting food out of your day. And where do these numbers even come from in Have you ever asked yourself that? These numbers that you're set, the numbers of calories that you're set, the number that an app or a plan will tell you to use, is kind There are lots of calculations around that can be done to figure out that what somebody of your weight loss goals, that sort of thing could be eating to have results But these are very general calculations, and they're They were discovered. No, not discovered. They were created a long time ago and to my knowledge they don't really But these calculations are based on a fictional average person made up of the It doesn't know you. It doesn't know your biology, your genetics, your history with food, your lifestyle, It doesn't know about all of those things. So how can it be accurate? How can the numbers be accurate if they do not tailor And as I said before, these numbers are so low. And it's a business They want people to buy the apps. They want people to use their free apps even, but then they're going to make lots of money off the advertising inside of the The upscaling to a premium version, for example. They want people to get results so that they It's all about business. It's not about you, which actually, I think it's one of those things that, again, we're fighting diet culture, and beauty standards, and it's So, yeah, know that that is what happens They don't really care about you. There's nobody sat there in a chair somewhere going, oh, let's really, really help she's feeling bad about herself. Nobody's there doing that. If you're listening and your name is Julie, then that's I just plucked a name out of thin air. I don't mean you. Well, I do mean you, but I just mean people in general. Let's have a look at the exercise side So maybe you use these apps for exercise tracking Okay, so big thumbs up for not tracking your food in the app. Let's look at how you're using it to track your exercise, because that can become These apps can go from very basic step counting right up to things like heart So the degree in which you're tracking can vary. But let's start with steps. Let's start with the step counting. There is this magical figure that's not really magic. It's made up, and the number is 10,000. Everybody thinks, don't they, that 10,000 steps is the number of steps that you're supposed to hit to have moved a healthy But did you know that that number is made up? And it was made up who were developing a piece of kit off the back of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and off the back of that wave because people get inspired when things are on, When the tennis on, you want to play tennis. When the snooker is on, you want to play snooker. Well, they were riding the wave of the excitement of doing all these athletics this device that counted steps and they decided it was That's it. There's nothing scientific behind it. And yet when we are counting the steps on our app, when we've got our Fitbit on and we're checking we're still aiming for something like even though it's a made up number. Or maybe you're not going for 10,000 steps. Maybe you're doing some kind of plan that says if you do 15,000 steps in a day, you can So all of a sudden everybody's charging around trying It won't have been the first time that I have stood in the kitchen at 1130 at night, to get my steps up. To hit that top level of because somebody on an app somewhere has told me the food that I eaten that day, I needed to have hit And that is soul destroying. Jogging in the kitchen before you can go to bed very late you need to have earned the food that you've But we do it because we think that's what we have to do. But we don't. We don't have to do that. Again, there is no allowance for how your body feels. There is no allowance made for days when you're energised when you're feeling low and you know that you just don't take that into account. Nobody pipes up on your fitness watch in the morning and says, Hi, dude, Have you got energy? Have you got a bad day ahead? Have you got a long day of meetings and you're not steps in or are you going on a hike because then Nobody does that, do they? Nobody's ringing you first thing in the morning, seeing how you are, and deciding whether 10,000 steps is the right And this can quite easily lead to burnout. You are going to be trying everything you can You're going to get up from your desk every 20 minutes. You're going to go to the toilet that's the furthest one away. You are going to stand in the toilet and jog on the spot for five minutes thinking nobody knows And all of these things become an obsession, And then you end up burning out because you can't do what By the way, yes, that was me going the furthest away and jogging on the spot to get It doesn't automatically mean healthy. If you move 10,000 steps today, are you going to be healthier If you don't do 10,000 steps today, are you going to be unhealthier than No, absolutely not. Because that's not how it works. Life is made up of lots of different aspects. And getting some good movement into your life, some joyful, is much healthier, much better for you than just Now I say 10,000 steps because that's that number that we all that's the number we should aim for. But that's, I think the only time where it's okay So don't hold that 10,000 to account. Just know that that comes from the fact that it's But then the food and exercise combined is the worst So you then start down this route of right now I have to do this many steps, then I can have But if I do more movement, then I can eat more food. And oh no, I didn't eat enough today. I need to not do as much energy burning exercise. And no, today I didn't move enough. So therefore I will reduce the number of calories. God, is your mind pickled by this? Because this is how we can live when we've got these fitness trackers. How do we do it? And yet it still becomes the standard that you It's still the thing that makes you at the end of the day think that you have either been good It's the thing that in the morning can start you off on a good It becomes what we measure ourselves against. These made up numbers on an app become what Isn't that sad? Why don't we just become intuitive about it? Why don't we just listen to our body? What do we want to eat? How much do we want to eat? What type of food do you want to eat right now? Do I feel like moving today? Is the weather good enough for me to go outside? I mean, today is lovely. It's gloriously sunny and it's quite warm outside Some days when it's throwing it down, I am not And yet we judge ourselves by these things. So let's become more intuitive. Let's become more intuitive in our food and our exercise. Let's not be driven by these numbers on an app. Now I'm going to throw a little spanner There are some things that these apps can Would you believe it? Are you a person who drinks enough water? Are you? I don't think many of us do drink the water that we're So sometimes these apps can be set so that it prompts And it prompts you to look at how many cups of water you might have drank Little reminders like, have you had a cup of water or whatever it says? I don't know. That can be good because drinking more water is It helps us to be energised. It helps our digestion. It helps our mental clarity. Water is good for a lot of things. So to be prompted to drink more water can be Also, for some people, being encouraged to do If you can cope with a prompt that says, come on, you haven't moved for a while, then that can be good because who sit at a desk all day, maybe I could do with a nudge Maybe I could do with somebody coming up to me in the office once an hour saying, can you just go for a Can you just go and stretch your legs? I don't need somebody telling me how many steps I've done, I need somebody telling me just to go for a walk, just to refresh my energy. Just to get my body Because to be sat down all day long, not so good. So encouraging things like that can be really good if you're not the kind of person that is obsessed If you can manage that, then that can be a side of it I also had some responses to my question on Instagram. One person, for example, uses a tracker now She knows that she doesn't eat enough, and for her to stay she needs to be prompted to eat a minimum So that's what she uses it for. She uses it to track the food she's eating, so she knows There's also another lady that commented and said she uses it to make sure that she's fueled enough And somebody else said that they use it to help she knows that she needs to eat in a certain way These are great reasons why you might use a fitness but I think those examples are great examples of when you are you're using common sense to know that you might benefit so there are definitely some good aspects to them if you So at the end of all of that, it is your decision whether you use a fitness tracker, whether you use a food logging app. But as long as you're in it with your eyes wide open. to check in with yourself and know whether your healthy or not healthy. Mentally, are you Are you in a healthy place with a relationship with food Are you able to be happy when you haven't met your Are you allowing for life to happen at the same time? Are you still being intuitive? Because that is always the goal with any of this stuff. You need to still have this intuitive approach. You need to still listen to your body, listen to what you want to eat, listen to how If you can do that then go ahead and use the apps. But yeah, it's your decision at the end of the day. I choose not to. I can't deal with that but for others it's absolutely So I will leave you to decide whether that is Do follow me on Instagram because every now and again I will pop things like this up It helps me to put out better information for people. So do that. Come join the Facebook group if you haven't yet because I ask those questions And have you registered for the newsletter yet? The link is in the show notes, but you can also I'm off now to write an assignment. Yawn, I really love studying. I don't like assignment writing one little bit so thank goodness you're here to form the very best But now it's come to an end. I really do have to go and write my assignment. Have a lovely week. Have a really lovely week. I hope you have got nice things planned. And keep Just be awesome you. I'll speak to you next week. I really will speak to you next week.