If Carrie Arnold had gotten her hands on an activity tracker 10 years ago, it could have been “a complete disaster.” At the time, the freelance science writer in Richmond, Virginia, was struggling with an eating disorder — so fixated on counting calories in and out that she could think about little else all day. A device to help her do that? “It would be a dream and a nightmare all wrapped up in one,” says Arnold, author of “Decoding Anorexia: How Breakthroughs in Science Offer Hope for Eating Disorders,” who’s been in recovery for about three years.
Laura Porter, a student at George Washington University, feels the same way. A few years out of treatment for bulimia, Porter now spends considerable effort avoiding numbers, including her weight, food calories and calories expended during exercise, in order to stay focused on what really matters: her overall physical and emotional health. “It feels so freeing to not have to rely on calories, but it’s a constant battle because they’re everywhere,” says Porter, president of GW’s chapter of Students Promoting Eating Disorder Awareness & Knowledge, known as SPEAK GW.
Arnold and Porter are among those who don’t benefit from — or worse, may be harmed by — the technological race to quantify every dimension of our health and fitness, says Mary Pritchard a psychology professor at Boise State University who studies disordered eating and exercise behaviors.
“[For] anyone who has any existing eating disorder or excessive exercise tendencies, using a fitness tracker is a very bad idea because it just makes them even more obsessive and compulsive about the fact that they’re not meeting their unrealistic goals,” she says.
Concerns about the dangers of activity trackers are often muted by the hype around the devices — much of which is deserved, Pritchard says. In our increasingly overweight and sedentary society, the gadgets can help users become more aware of how much energy they’re consuming and how little they’re expending — and motivate people to change.
“They’re particularly helpful for bringing about self-awareness and having that immediate feedback at your fingertips,” says Amanda Visek, an assistant professor of exercise science at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
But for people who are already all too aware of how many calories they’re putting in and sweating out, the trackers might do more harm than good. “My concern is it would never be good enough for me,” says Porter, who steers clear of trackers, calorie counters and scales. “My weight could never be low enough and the amount I worked out could never be high enough. It would just set me up for this feeling of ‘I’m not good enough.'”
Fuel for Harmful Behavior
About 20 million women and 10 million men have a clinically significant eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorder, at some point in their lives, according to the National Eating Disorder Association. Many more have unhealthy eating and exercise patterns that aren’t diagnosed.
Fitness trackers are particularly dangerous among this population because they fuel some of the defining characteristics of eating disorders: perfectionism and the need for control. They also perpetuate an eating disorder mentality that more exercise and less food is always better, says Ryann Smith, a registered dietitian at the Coconut Creek, Florida, branch of The Renfrew Center, a residential eating disorder facility.
“[With] an eating disorder, it’s sad because there really never is an end goal destination. It’s not, ‘You finally got to the weight, now you’re good.’ It’s, ‘Oh, you lost 5 pounds, we need to go another 5 pounds and another 5 pounds,'” she says. “The apps, they hold all of that information there, and it really fuels that mentality even more.”
Smith and others would like to see features on activity trackers that flag energy input and output that’s far off balance or that suggest, say, a rest day after consecutive days of intense exercise. Porter says people who already have eating disorders might benefit more from a tool that freezes accounts or sends links to a help hotline when users consistently overexercise and undereat. A notification for exceeding a goal “would be a reward for doing well in my eating disorder — not a reward for actual health,” she points out.
Calorie counters and activity trackers also counter what Smith works every day to help patients at The Renfrew Center do: Listen to their bodies. People with eating disorders, she says, are experts at tuning them out. “We’re trying to completely train them to go back to listening to their bodies and trusting their bodies,” she says. “And that’s really pretty scary and difficult when you’ve been relying on external sources to guide you.”
Misplaced Motivation
People with disordered eating and exercise patterns aren’t the only ones who should be wary of activity trackers. In fact, it’s in everyone‘s best interest to at least be aware that many fitness apps aren’t evidence-based, Visek says. “That’s not something that the average layperson is necessarily cognizant of and looks for,” she says. “You just assume … it’s a product and it works.”
But in reality, the average weight-loss app includes only a minority of the behavioral strategies found in evidence-based weight-loss interventions, according to a 2013 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that reviewed 30 weight loss apps. While the apps commonly included such research-backed weight-loss techniques as goal setting and activity tracking, researchers found they often excluded other key strategies such as problem-solving, relapse prevention and time management.
Even people who benefit from the devices can experience their pitfalls.
Mary Phelan, a Baltimore-based blogger at the Sisterhood of the Shrinking Jeans, for one, has been more active since winning a Fitbit in a raffle in 2011. But when a car ran over it, she was stuck Fitbit-less for a month. It wasn’t until then that she realized how much she was attached to the device. “I barely did any exercise because I kept thinking to myself, ‘Well, I’m not getting any credit for it,'” Phelan says.
Sarah Angelozzi, 29, a health care technology company vice president in Red Bank, New Jersey, also admits her Fitbit “obsession” can sometimes be a downfall. If she arrives at the gym without it, she’ll go home without working out. If she discovers her Fitbit’s battery died midday, she’ll regret having moved as much as she did.
That type of motivation to exercise is unsustainable, says Kelly Coffey, a personal trainer and coach in Northampton, Massachusetts, who teaches an online course built around the message that physical activity and healthy eating can, and should, be enjoyable.
“For everybody who should be doing more activity, the only way they’re ever going to develop a relationship with [an] activity so that it’s sustainable over a lifetime is if they learn to enjoy it,” she says. “And if you’re focused on a number, a goal, and that’s the point of the activity you’re doing, you’re not allowing any space available to develop a relationship to what you’re doing.”
Trackers can also hinder users from finding their own motivation to exercise, something Coffey teaches clients to do in her course.” That “pleasure principle,” she says, encourages clients to be mindful of the in-the-moment happiness that exercise and healthy eating can induce. “Being focused on the end result with the tracker would be decidedly not focusing on the present,” she says.
The bottom line is to make sure numbers — if you use them at all — aren’t the only way you’re measuring your health and well-being. “Don’t base your value on numbers because you’re more than a number; you’re more than just what a fitness tracker says you are,” Porter says. “Really consider your emotional well-being and your overall health.”
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The Dark Side of Activity Trackers originally appeared on usnews.com
