Fitness Trackers and Listening to Your Body

Recently I decided to welcome back a wearable fitness tracker into my life after a decade-long break from one. This topic brought up a lot of questions for me. While the decision to stop or start wearing a tracker is very personal, I want to bring to light a few of the questions that have surfaced for me in the hopes that they can help you out when making this call for yourself.

Key Takeaways

If You Are Considering Stopping, Or Starting, Using a Fitness Tracker, You Should:

1. Examine the pros and cons of fitness trackers and how they play into your personal relationship with your body
2. Find a tracker that suits your lifestyle and provides you with the data you are curious about
3. Keep listening to the signals of your body as your guide to what your body needs

Getting Curious About Your Body Patterns

It took me over ten years to get to the place where I am confident enough to listen to my body signals to be curious about the patterns and trends that a wearable fitness tracker can provide. 

How my recovery is correlating with my heart rate variability, menstrual cycle, and fatigue are incredibly interesting to me. The key is to not be so reliant on these numbers that you stop listening to your body and only listen to the numbers on an app.

It’s All About Balance

Wearing a fitness tracker is an incredibly personal decision and depends on your ability to combine the data from a tracker with the signals your body is sending you. While most of us don't have the same relationship to data, such as heart rate variability, as we do to the numbers on the scale, it is still something to be sensitive to. 

An app can never tell you everything that is going on in your body. The question is, does the data from a fitness tracker help you reinforce the way your body feels, or distract you from it?

How do you feel about your relationship with fitness trackers? Do you believe they are diet culture? Share your thoughts with me in the comments on the episode page.

In This Episode

• Why I decided to start using a wearable fitness tracker again (4:48)
• The pros and cons I see when using a fitness tracker (9:10)
• How to deal with fitness trackers if you have an all-or-nothing personality (20:38)
• Which tracker I am using currently and why I personally like it (23:42)
• Explore if fitness trackers are in fact a part of diet culture (29:04)

Quotes

“I am not in an all-or-nothing situation with training anymore, I am able to really listen to my body, but I am curious about bringing some sort of fitness tracker back into my life.” (8:37)

“I am not here to present my argument necessarily for or against, but if it is something that you have kind of been thinking about, maybe these will be some interesting points.” (14:34)

“There is a tendency to become too reliant sometimes on external trackers at the expense of also developing a sense of what your training and recovery feel like overall so that you get to know your body a lot more intimately.” (19:27)

“If you have started looking at data, do you sort of tune out what your body is telling you? Or are you looking where they overlap and using both to make decisions? Or can one help you make decisions about the other? Can having data help you connect to how your body is feeling? In some cases, potentially yes, but it is really about you individually.” (23:20)

“I don't think fitness trackers are in the same league as the scale and tracking body weight. However, could they potentially become an issue for some people? Potentially. So this is where it is really important to know yourself.” (32:18)

Featured on the Show

 

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