The unhealthy side of wearable fitness devices | Arwa Mahdawi

The Nike Fuelband. ‘Society is more and more embracing a trend that rewrites compulsive behaviour as healthier.’ Photograph: Hugh Threlfall / Alamy

Probably the worst chat-up line I have ever had the misfortunate of overhearing was when a guy in a Brooklyn bar sidled up to a girl and complimented her on her Jawbone. “I’ve commenced to put on a Basis as well as a Jawbone,” he sniffed, extending his wrist for inspection. “The Jawbone is elegant, confident, but the Basis is a much more critical piece of hardware. I genuinely like how its galvanic skin response sensor tracks my perspiration levels.” The lady made a polite little noise then swiftly eliminated herself to the other end of the space.

There are a couple of things to be realized from this unhappy story. The 1st is that enthusing about how you like to quantify your sweat statistics is not a great way to get laid. Even in Brooklyn. The 2nd is that the proliferation of wearable fitness products this kind of as Nike’s Fuelband, Jawbone Up, and the Basis band, coupled with the rising recognition of well being and fitness apps, has pushed self-monitoring from niche geek action and into the mainstream.

A recent examine by the Long term Laboratory and Confused.com identified that about 60% of 18- to 34-12 months-olds in the Uk have employed a self-quantifying app or support to keep track of their fitness amounts, mental well being and sleep patterns. These figures are mirrored across the pond. In accordance to a Pew report, 60% of US adults say they track their excess weight, diet or physical exercise regimen. And these numbers are increasing. Certainly, it is extremely probable that you or somebody you know will be have obtained or offered some kind of wearable fitness solution this Christmas season.

Evangelists of self-monitoring technological innovation proclaim that by way of information lies enlightenment. Measuring ourselves, they say, will aid us comprehend ourselves. We will all end up a number of percentage factors more healthy and happier. Nonetheless, I’m not positive this is appropriate. Even though it is accurate that self-monitoring can support push individuals into generating constructive lifestyles changes, it could also be argued that the growing popularity of this kind of technology is normalising neurotic behaviour.

When I was a teenager I went through a brief phase of compulsive self-quantification. It was known as anorexia. I counted every calorie, weighed myself obsessively and exercised fanatically. For about a 12 months my daily life was a running tally of power-in and power-out and I would diligently feed all these numbers into a type of anorexia algorithm regularly adjusting different variables in purchase to maximise excess weight-reduction efficiencies. The end result was that I weighed six stone and my hair fell out in clumps. I looked grim, but I did get a very good grounding in data analytics.

This was all a long time in the past and I am now totally recovered. This is in no tiny element due to the reality that I actively steer clear of weighing myself and attempt not to count calories. It took me a long time to quit seeing foods as a spreadsheet of numbers and commence thinking about it as nutrition. It would have taken me even longer if the type of self-tracking engineering that is ubiquitous these days was offered when I was unwell. Dr Kimberly Dennis, a psychiatrist who specialises in eating disorder therapy, estimates that about 75% of her younger-adult sufferers use their phones in a way that enables their consuming disorders. Apps that facilitate calorie-counting and food-logging are an anorexic’s best friend and worst enemy. With society more and more embracing a sort of “techorexia” that rewrites compulsive behaviour as healthy, it is getting to be simpler for people with serious eating problems to pretend there is nothing wrong.

All of this is not to say that strapping on a Jawbone or monitoring your foods consumption and workout with some type of mobile app is inherently harmful. Indeed, for some folks, this kind of self-tracking can be amazingly helpful. I just fret that as our lives turn out to be far more data-driven, we are becoming overly fixated on the worth of the variables that we can measure. In our developing obsession with counting every thing and anything at all, it is attainable that we are losing track of what truly counts.

The unhealthy side of wearable fitness devices | Arwa Mahdawi