SHOCK: FITNESS TRACKERS AREN’T WORKING LIKE THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO

It turns out the wearable activity monitors that count your steps and track your movements aren’t helping you lose as much weight as you could if you didn’t have one. In a study published in JAMA, dieting adults who wore activity monitors for 18 months lost significantly fewer pounds over that time than those who did not. In the study, University of Pittsburgh scientists gathered almost 500 young, overweight men and women who wanted to lose weight. For the first six months of the study, the subjects followed a straightforward, low-calorie diet designed to provide steady weight loss and were urged to start moving more. By the end of six months, everyone had lost weight. And then the actual experiment began. Half the group was told to start logging their daily exercise sessions onto a study website. The other half were given a fitness tracker for step counts, calorie expenditure and so on. After 18 months, most were thinner than at the start of the study. Those who had not worn activity monitors were, on average, about 13 pounds lighter. But those who had worn the monitors were only about 8 pounds lighter. The data from the monitors shows that those wearing the trackers generally exercised less than those in the other group. The thinking is that those using the monitors might have been so inspired to exercise that they moved a lot, developed large appetites, and overate, blunting any weight loss from the workouts. Or, those wearing the trackers realized they would not reach their daily exercise goal and simply gave up.
* Fitbit keeps your buttfat.
* But technology always makes things better, no?
* Boy, it’s not every day you find out an entire category of consumers are a bunch of suckers!
* What we need is an activity monitor that gives you a cash prize if you lose weight.
* Or – for every pound you lose, you get an hour with a hooker?
* Anybody have the phone number for Shark Tank?
* Of course, knowing you’re in a study will have no bearing on how you act so the behavior is all genuine.
* So it all comes down to 5 pounds difference but that was partially the weight of the monitor.
* What we really need is a grant money monitor.
* How does this compare with criminals wearing ankle monitors?
* In the most extreme cases, the people actually removed their activity monitors and ate them.