Activity Fitness Trackers Do Not Help People Shed More Weight

Fitness trackers do not help in weight loss. Wearable activity monitors can count your steps and track your movements. In fact, you might lose more weight without them, says the study published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) . The study found that individuals who were on a diet and who wore the activity monitor for 18 months lost significantly fewer pounds over that time than those who did not.

The shows that activity monitors does not alter our behavior in the way we expected, and raise interesting questions about the tangled relationships between exercise, eating, our willpower and our waistlines.

There have been small scale and short term studies recently that new technologies such as wearable activity monitors, which tell us how much we are moving and how many calories we have burned during the day, might be truly beneficial for weight loss.

For the new study, University of Pittsburgh scientists from the Physical Activity and Weight Management Research Center and their colleagues gathered almost 500 young, overweight men and women who wanted to lose weight. The recruits ranged in age from 18 to 35 since, presumably, these younger volunteers would be familiar with and competent using technologies such as activity trackers and any learning curve would be slight.

The volunteers were weighed and their general health and fitness assessed.

For the first six months of the study, the volunteers followed a straightforward, low-calorie diet designed to provide steady weight loss and were urged to start moving more, aiming for at least 100 minutes of moderate activity each week. They kept daily food and exercise diaries and attended weekly counseling sessions.

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By the end of six months, everyone had lost weight. And then the actual experiment began.

The scientists now divided their volunteers in half. One group was told to start logging their daily exercise sessions onto a study website.

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The others were given a monitor designed to be worn on the upper arm that would track their physical activity and provide feedback about whether they were achieving goals for step counts, calorie expenditure and so on.

“We were pretty confident that the volunteers in the group using the activity monitors would exercise more, monitor their calorie intake better, and lose more weight than the people in the self-monitoring group,” says John Jakicic, a distinguished professor in the department of health and physical activity at the University of Pittsburgh and the study’s lead author.

For 18 months, the volunteers logged into the study website or wore the monitor on most days. Counselors occasionally checked with everyone by phone and sent encouraging text messages.

After 18 months — and two years after the beginning of the study — all of the volunteers returned to the lab to repeat their measurements from the start.

Most were thinner now than at the start of the study (although many had regained some of the weight that they had lost during the first six months).

At the end of the two years, participants who did not use the tracking device lost an average of 5.9 kg (13 lbs.), while those who used a tracking device lost an average of 3.5kg (7.7 lbs.).

The reasons for the difference in weight loss are not immediately clear. Theoretically, 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, he says.

But in fact, the data from the monitors shows that those wearing the technology generally exercised less than those in the other group.

So perhaps the monitors resulted in less motivation to move, Dr. Jakicic says. It is possible that when those wearing the trackers realized they would not reach their daily exercise goal, they simply gave up, leading to relatively low caloric expenditure on those days, and less weight loss overall than among those not using the technology.

The people using the monitors may also have assumed that, in some roundabout way, the technology removed responsibility from them for monitoring their energy intake, Dr. Jakicic says. “People may have focused on the technology and forgotten to focus on their behaviors and ate too much”, he says.

Dr. Jakicic and his colleagues hope to conduct follow-up studies that will directly examine how activity monitors affect exercise motivation and subsequent weight loss.

It seems to start with the idea that fitness-tracking devices carry what is known as a health halo. Wearing fitness trackers gives people a sense that they are doing something good for themselves, even if only subconsciously, by the very act of owning and wearing it.

“What these results say to me is that we still have a great deal to learn” about how monitoring technologies affect real-life actions, Dr. Jakicic says. People’s responses to a monitor strapped to their arm may not always be rational and could result in behaviors that are the opposite of those that the monitor would be expected to encourage.

In other words, humans are strange and often our own worst enemies, especially when it comes to trying to increase our exercise or reduce our weight.

Source-Medindia