A Fitbit Infatuation
“In a society that has us all counting money, pounds, calories, steps, likes and shares, be a rebel and start counting your blessings instead”. So true! I thought, pausing my newly purchased Fitbit to take a quick picture of the sign, before proceeding to stride down the high street.
I’d abstained from buying a Fitbit for a number of years, but was well aware of its inevitability. I never wanted to be a “Fitbit person”—partly because it was something I associated with in-spontaneity, lack of intuition, and tech addiction; and partly because they ruin any outfit—but the temptation and intrigue was also undeniable.
As someone with an addictive personality type, I knew that buying a Fitbit would be adding fuel to fire. I’ve always loved and needed movement—it’s an essential part of the everyday for me—but in recent years, that love starting morphing into something a little different, more sinister.
It took a while for me to realise that addiction doesn’t always come in the shape of bottles, pills or cigarettes. Exercise had begun consuming much more of my life than it should have, something I couldn’t bare the thought of going without. Thoughts of it plagued my every waking moment, along with the guilt of never having done “enough”. As much as I understood the necessity of rest days, I also couldn’t commit to them.
This addiction was a by-product of a vicious eating disorder that took me years to get a handle on. As much as that eating disorder was about manipulating food, it was also about manipulating exercise. As someone who’s never got along well with numbers, I was surprised to find my mind had become a melting pot of calculations—calories in vs calories out—so thick that there was little space for any other thoughts inside my head.
(It must be said that I usually resent any discussion of calories, whether that be in writing or in conversation, but it’s worth being open about for the sake of this piece. The word still makes me cringe, and I’m aware that calorie talk doesn’t make anyone feel comfortable, so please bear with me!)
This kind of hyper control developed as a result of very ill mental health; it was abnormal, and something I tried to keep concealed. But this behaviour is becoming increasingly commonplace; and with the wearable device (a.k.a fitness tracker) industry worth £40.2 billion in 2020, it’s hardly surprising. With an exponential surge in the popularity of fitness trackers, behaviour that would’ve once sent alarm bells ringing is now totally normalised. Fitness trackers actively encourage and facilitate extreme levels of control. You can now (albeit unintentionally) buy your way to an eating disorder for less than £100.
Fitness trackers are an enterprising response to the obesity crisis that our society faces today. In 2020, 39% of the world’s adults, and one-in-five children and adolescents, were overweight. Though exercise alone cannot turn these figures around, motivating and supporting people to move more can only do good. Fitness trackers are a great tool for people who are more sedentary and inactive, but in the wrong hands they can be dangerous. No-one checks your medical history and mental health or enquires about your motives before you purchase one. For those with addictive personalities they can be a tool for self-destruction, available for same-day delivery on Amazon Prime.
One day into my Fitbit journey and I’d already begun compulsively checking my data. Even the average 15 minute walk to the supermarket became something of a race against myself, trying to out-do yesterday’s pace, and a leisurely walk with friends would get overshadowed by the pedometer on my wrist, nagging me to go faster.. I was measuring every part of myself, ever part of my day.
When I was practising yoga—formerly a source of respite from technology and my racing thoughts—I found my mind to be persistently preoccupied with my statistics. Instead of focussing on calming down my breath, I was much more concerned with speeding up my heart rate, seeking out that little buzz on my wrist to tell me I’d entered ‘cardio zone’. As much as I tried to resist the urge, I would subtly flick my wrist mid-flow to steal a cheeky glance at the numbers as they flashed up on the screen. Yoga sacrilege, I know.
The Fitbit was noticeably twisting my relationship to movement, stripping it of its joy, and making everything into a means to the calorie-blasting ends. Movement was the central axis on which my day revolved, and everything else had to fit around it. I had become a slave to the wristband, exercise shackled to my wrist like a ball-and-chain; and, though the choice was mine, I found it hard to take it off.
Once again, the tech industry are using dopamine to get us hooked. At 10,000 steps you earn a spinning disco-ball across your screen. At 20,000 steps you’re awarded fireworks. Little rewards and gratifications that make us crave more; external validations that overrule our own internal sense of achievement and fulfilment.
When we use a fitness tracker, we outsource our trust and understanding of our bodies to technology. The innate connection we have to our own physiologies withers, supplanted by algorithms that tell us what our body should need and want. Wearing a Fitbit is the closest I’ve yet to come to feeling like a cyborg; with the little green light flashing on its back and the imprint it left in my skin, I felt as thought I’d been microchipped. It was all a little too Black Mirror-eque for me.
The functions of a Fitbit do not stop at exercise… Sleep. Mindfulness. Stress reduction. Food and water intake. Menstrual tracking. We can manage our every bodily system via the app. But why do we feel like we suddenly need this technological intervention to help up manage ourselves? Arguably, technology has played one of the greatest parts in getting us to this state of ill health in the first place, so surely what we need to do is strip it all back to the pre-tech basics?
We should cling on to that precious, delicate awareness that is intuition. It has kept humanity going up to this point in history, kept people fit and healthy without meticulously counting their steps and calories, so we should be wary of letting technology interfere with it or replace it. What’s more, our bodies are complex, unpredictable, unique machines, that we can’t expect to simplify down to a series of equations.
Isn’t it also ironic that technology—one of the biggest disrupters of our sleep—promises to improve our its quality? I’m skeptical that agonising over our sleep patterns sets us up for a peaceful night. And isn’t it ironic that we turn to technology for mindfulness, when it’s the constant alerts, buzzes, and notifications that take us out of the present moment? The very point of practising yoga is undermined when you’re constantly being distracted by your wearable.
Initially, I kept my Fitbit a secret. I was ashamed to be seen wearing it in front of my friends and family, hiding it beneath my jumper sleeve. I’ve always thought fitness trackers are a strange thing to see on someone’s wrist, with the desire for self improvement—something we tend to keep to ourselves—visible for the world to see, our intentions laid bare. Whether we need help getting into exercise or not, and whether it’s healthy for us to be working to lose weight or not, the intent behind a fitness tracker is usually unanimous.
My Fitbit affair was destined to turn septic before it had even begun. It didn’t take long for me to notice a reappearance in toxic thoughts and behaviour, and, just a few weeks into my new purchase, I was already contemplating whether I wanted out. Exercise and food can be a slippery slope, and a Fitbit is enough to send anyone on the downward slide.
Fitness trackers should be approached with caution, particularly for individuals that know they have an addictive personality. They work wonders for some, but the truth is that most of the people who buy them are already pretty far up the fitness scale. So I urge you to question whether you actually need one, whether it will contribute anything of positive value to your life. Because, though they may appear harmless and un-intrusive, their impact can be massive, and it’s all too easy to become attached.
I’ve also come to realise that wearing a Fitbit is contradictory to my outlook on life: the ways I want to spend my time, the things I want to focus on, the values I want to embody. It distorts life into something quantitative, when life is qualitative by its very nature. Fitness trackers are intended to liberate us, but, from my experience, they do the opposite. We end up measuring life rather than living it: the success of a run determined not by the beautiful route we took, or how good it made us feel, but by a series of (questionably accurate) statistics.
So if you’ve managed to steer clear of them up until now, keep going. When the whole world is driving itself crazy counting steps, you’re much better off just counting your blessings.