It seems there is a million fitness apps and gadgets out there at the moment. Everyone wants a piece of the pie (attention: ironic wordplay)

My Fitness pal
Fitbit
Jawbone
OptimizeMe
Runtastic
Etc

They all promise tracking of your habits and activities. Good or bad. You’re exposed. No more hiding. No more lying to others and yourself. A virtual kick in the butt if you’re spending the weekend in front of the Tivo.

If I work the remote hard enough I clearly must be losing some calories

Sounds fantastic. But there’s one problem – the usefulness of those apps and their data is heavily dependent on the honesty and frequency of the data entered.

The theory

Every time you do exercise, move, eat or drink something, you need to somehow update the app(s). Some apps and gadgets do stuff automatically, some require a quick tap on the device to activate certain modes (e.g. FitBit’s sleep mode) and some require good old-fashioned manual data entry (e.g. food intake for MyFitnessPal). Sounds easy enough but the problem becomes apparent when you look at how much interaction is required to keep all those things up to date.

Reality

Here’s how a day looks like for me:

The alarm goes off in the morning. Double tap on my Fitbit to deactivate night mode.
My morning routine includes a glass of water first thing when I wake up. Need to log this in the Fitbit app (which thankfully synchs that automatically to MyFitnessPal if you choose to let it). If I don’t it now, I will forget it later
Coffee in the morning. Enter in MyFitnessPal
Another sip of water from my desk site water bottle. Was this one glass or two? Whatever, let’s just say it was 2.
Lunch time. Out with my colleagues. We order, we eat, we pay the bill. Hang on guys, I need to enter this in my app coz otherwise I’ll forget it. So I had a salmon steak with potatoes and a salad. With dressing. And some bread for starters. The dish is called Salmon aux whatevercozidontspeakfrench and of course it doesn’t exist in MyFitnessPal’s database. Ok, no prob. I’ll just have to enter it piece by piece.
- One salmon, steamed: 200 cal
- Potatoes. Normal ones? Sweet potatoes? No clue. I’m picking the 1st one in the list.
- Etc etc, you get it
- 5min of co-worker ignoring phone fiddling later and I’m done
- Oh nice, someone brought chocolate to the office. Let me have one. Oh right, I need to enter it.
- Afternoon coffee. With sugar. Entry made

Did anyone find ‘Minestrone a la creazione Milanese’ in the database?

And so it goes on and on. Meals are turning into phubbing fests and much to the annoyance of the people around you, you’re always busy keying in those calories.

Of course you could argue that once you do this for one week, you have established a good baseline and then the process becomes a lot faster. Granted. But you still need to enter stuff in your phone every single time you put something in your mouth. I just find that exhausting after a while. Don’t get me wrong. I believe it is eye opening for most of us to see how much junk we consume and now those little cookies here and there amount to almost a full day’s worth of calories. For that alone it’s worth to log data for a while. I just don’t see how you can keep this up over a longer period of time.

The latest hype in the fitness app-gadget world seems to be sleep tracking. The idea is simple. Just wear your device at night (or place your phone on your bed) and it will tell you how you slept. Restless? Moving around a lot? Woke up? Great stats and graphs. Value? Uhm okay so I’m restless and now what? What do I need to do not to be restless anymore? Maybe it’s the phone under my pillow that makes me restless?

Last but not least there’s always the problem, that yes, you may know what you’re doing wrong, but you just simply choose to ignore the data. Yup, I only got 56 calories left for today but fuck it, I really want to eat that chocolate bar now.

Any advice is only good if you listen to it.

Big brother

Last but not least we all need to ask ourselves how much of our fitness data we really want to share online. Will it only be a question of time before insurance companies jump on board and premiums will be based on your fitness stats?

Conclusion

As with most gadgets and apps, the key seems to be to engage the user in a way, that he continues to use the product even after the novelty effect wears off (which in my case usually seems to be around the 2-3 week mark)

All the negative things aside I do believe that there is one good thing to all of them. The constant in your face reminder to get off your butt and do some exercise.

Whether you choose to listen to the voice of guilt or ignore it, remains a problem that dates to pre app days. After all even the best gym membership is pointless if you don’t make use of it.