I have recently been obsessed with fitness magazines-online and offline. The magazine that I read most online is called Shape Magazine and they have a number of articles ranging from fitness trends to reviews about workout clothing. They are pretty great!
I was scrolling through the main page where all of their various articles are and I came across an article that I found not only fascinating but extremely relatable. One of the big hypes that come along with fitness are the tools to track your progress, i.e., fitness bands, watches, apps for phones, etc. Shape Magazine’s article, “Should You Really Be Tracking Everything?” discusses the mental thoughts behind workout tools and the main question, “do they actually work?”
The main summary is that most of them DON’T work! Trackers are a mental thing mostly. They give us the impression that we can track our productivity and track our exact calorie shed, but according to the article, fitness trackers aren’t to be used more than one week out of every month.
Now, as most of you can guess, the big time fitness trackers like the Garmin Vivofit Fitness Band, The Nike+ Fuelband SE, and the Jawbone Up24 are quite expensive. Garmin’s is $130, Nike’s is $149, and Jawbone’s is $125. When you have student loans, rent, and food-among other things-to pay for a tracker that actually doesn’t work very well doesn’t seem all that worth it.
Bands like these are designed to show an individual their calorie shed, steps they have taken, and some can even record your sleep. When they are on for more than they are accessible to, they can easily mis record your sleep patterns, causing you to feel less energized, and calorie shed, which can lead you to believe you have burned less calories. A big one for especially members of my own family are the step trackers. The article discusses that the mental aspect of it is that one can look down at their tracker and say, “Oh I have taken 1,000 steps today I am losing a lot of weight,” when in actuality that leads to the individual then not getting up and actually working out.
By then not working out, your body stays at the current state it is at and many people then have the impression they can eat whatever they want. I know this has happened to me multiple times. I have gone out and gotten a tracking watch that I figured would be worth it because it would ultimately help me lose weight and become fit but in reality, it didn’t help all that much and I spent more money than I wanted to.
The main take away that I received was trackers are not necessarily going to give you the best results you want. I personally don’t think it is worth it to spend $149 plus tax to get a gadget that in the long run won’t help me and that I will again have to replace in a shorter period of time because of overuse.
Another fitness tracker that goes along with the same idea of this article are the apps that are designed for the iPhone or any other smart phone. I personally have tried an app called “Lose It!” It is free on the App Store through Apple and it has an interesting set up.
This is the basic look of the app when you are going to download it. Once you have downloaded it, you go through a process where you put in your weight, your gender, and how much weight you want to lose or what weight you want to maintain.
Once all of that is done, then the page will look like this:
It shows you your log for the day and what type of calorie “budget” you have then you can get started adding in foods you ate and what exercises you have done for the day (or lack there of).
The app uses many different ways to try and find out what food you are specifically eating so that it can track the amount of calories to the T. The feature that I found that did this the best is the barcode. You can pull up the barcode feature and scan the barcode that is one the item of food you have purchased from the store and it will tell you what the calorie count is from whether you ate half the can of corn or the whole loaf of bread (I promise I didn’t do this even though I love bread).
Here is what the barcode feature looks like:
The biggest thing I learned about this app: it is extremely disheartening. You can look at your favorite unhealthy food like a frozen pizza and see that one slice holds 1,245 calories and you realize you shouldn’t be eating it very often. This is problematic for me because frozen pizzas are not only delicious and one of my favorite foods, but they are also very cheap. You can get a Jack’s brand pizza at the store for around $2-$3. But once I saw the calorie count I was then unsure of how I should approach the next step.
The other thing I found with this app is that it does have the set amount of calories you should be consuming for the day and that should make you want to eat more healthy types of foods, but it also gave me a chance to be sneaky about how I stayed in my budget. I felt like sometimes I could eat whatever I wanted like chips and salsa as long as I played around with how many chips I should be counting out of the bag to get the smallest amount of calories. It is like the other fitness trackers, it’s a mental thing.
While yes, the app is free, as are many other fitness food tracking apps, it’s not worth it. It is more important to just make foods that you know are healthy instead of wasting all that time counting calories and finding out ways to “cheat the system” to be able to buy foods that are unhealthy. The biggest upside to this app was that it was an eye opener for me-it gave me a chance to see that I should move towards a healthier lifestyle through food and exercise.
Health on a Budget 