Adding a fitness
tracker to your weight-loss routine might not help you shed pounds faster,
researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are cautioning. In fact, they
recently found that people who used wearable technology actually
lost less weight than
those who logged their exercise manually.
Their study,
published this week in JAMA, concludes that such devices “may not
offer an advantage over standard behavioral weight-loss approaches.” But the
researchers also point out that the way people use fitness
trackers is very individualized. Their findings suggest that using them to
slim down won’t work for everyone, they say—not that it won’t
work for anyone.
John Jakicic, PhD,
a distinguished professor in the department of health and physical activity,
designed this study to see what would happen when wearable activity trackers
were given to people who were already involved in a weight-loss program. So he
and his colleagues recruited 470 overweight men and women, ages 18 to 35, and
gave them instructions about limiting their daily calories and getting more
physical activity.
The participants
met for weekly check-ins for half a year, during which they all lost weight.
“We generally see really good effectiveness for the first six months on these
types of programs, then things start to slip away,” says Jakicic. “We thought
if we added an activity tracker to what we know is an already pretty good
intervention, that would make it better—that it would boost the effectiveness.”
But they actually
found the opposite: When they divided the participants into two groups, and
asked them to either wear an activity tracker or record their physical activity
manually on a website for the next year and a half, the latter group came out
on top.
People in the
fitness tracker group lost, on average, 7.7 pounds since the start of the study
two years prior, while those in the self-tracking group lost an average of 13
pounds. “We were pretty shocked,” says Jakicic.
Another surprise?
Those who wore fitness trackers didn’t even get more physical activity than
those who didn’t. Both groups did see improvements—in body composition, fitness
level, diet, and the amount of exercise they got each week—but there were no
significant differences between the two.
But, Jakicic
stresses, these results only focus on the overall picture. “That doesn’t mean
that fitness trackers aren’t beneficial to some people,” he says. In fact,
there were individuals in the study who lost lots of weight using a wearable
tracker, just as there were people who didn’t lose much in the self-tracking
group.
“There are a lot
of people out there who live and die by these things,” he says. “They love it
and it engages them and keeps them involved, and that’s really important. We’re
not saying don’t use it if it’s working for you.”
If, however,
you’ve been wearing a tracker and you’re not losing weight,
this study may serve as a wake-up call of sorts. “We think it could be that
people are paying so much attention to the tracker that they’re losing sight of
all the other things that need to happen,” says Jakicic. “Maybe your tracker is
telling you you’re doing well, so you take the liberty of eating another cookie
or another cupcake.”
Another
possibility, he says, is that people who play an active role in recording their
fitness data—by keeping track and physically writing it down or typing it into
a computer—may hold themselves more accountable than those who use trackers.
“When you use a
program like the one we used in our study, you’re taking responsibility,” he
says. “You say, ‘I exercised for 30 minutes today,’ and you’re engaged in that
process; you’re not relying on a device or a machine to do it for you. So maybe
you have to be engaged and hands-on at that level for it to really be
effective.”
The fitness
trackers used in the study were BodyMedia Core Fit armbands, which connect to a
website where users can view their progress. The self-tracking group used a
computer program set up specifically for the study, but Jakicic says it’s
similar to commercially available apps and websites like MyFitnessPal.
The researchers
are now analyzing their findings more closely, to look for patterns among those
study participants who did seem to benefit, from a
weight-loss standpoint, from wearing fitness trackers.
“We don’t know yet
what makes these people different from anyone else,” say Jakicic. “If we
can identify people with certain characteristics that will really be motivated
by these devices—and other people who won’t—then we can hopefully make some
really helpful recommendations.”
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