Welcome to my monthly(ish) email for mental health providers that focuses on how to support your clients with food, movement, and body image related difficulties. Here’s a link to the past installments.
Hi everyone!
This past weekend, my sister-in-law kindly offered me her old FitBit and I immediately thought, I do not want that thing near me. I almost felt disgust towards the device. Dramatic, I know.
My heightened response got me curious about why I’m so anti-wearable-health-tracker in all forms—steps, calories, sleep, heart rate, glucose (for non-diabetics), etc.
The obvious answer is that I’m a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders and I’ve worked with hundreds of clients who struggle intensely with obsessive food/activity tracking. And I’ve observed how peaceful and free my clients feel when they finally break free from tracking. Plus, my own history of obsessive calorie/carb tracking has made me careful to avoid obvious triggers like FitBits for myself.
But could wearable health trackers be helpful for people without a past or present disordered relationship with food or their bodies? Side note: does anyone actually personally know any of these supposed “normies”? (Kidding! … mostly)
I think I can understand why wearable health-trackers are so alluring:
Christy Harrison, registered Dietitian and author of Anti-Diet, once wrote, “I think a lot of [health] surveillance is based on a lack of trust in your body and the notion that you need to closely monitor many different bodily functions in order to be OK… But the reality is that your body can be trusted to take care of you without surveillance, and that you can get in touch with your body without over-intellectualizing everything.”
Harrison’s quote sums up my concern with health tracking very well. The rise of tracking reinforces the belief that you can’t trust yourself to know if you’re walking enough, standing enough, sleeping well enough, eating enough, relaxing enough, etc. Therefore, you must look for data to tell you what is going on in your own body.
When we trade intuition for data, we are further dis-incentivized from listening to and being curious about our bodies. We stop asking questions like, How well-rested do I feel this morning? How hungry am I? How full do I feel at the end of this meal? What kinds of foods are filling and satisfying? How does my body feel when I’m more or less active? What kinds of movements do I find fun and energizing? Is my body asking for a break from exercise today?
We end up feeling even more disconnected from and distrustful of our bodies.
These types of interoceptive questions are concerned with one’s intrinsic experience of living whereas trackers prioritize the extrinsic outcome of “good” data points. The potential problem with this is that extrinsic motivators are more likely to be short-term and the outcomes aren’t always consistent with the end goal of feeling good and being healthy. For example, if your goal is to burn as many calories as possible, you might convince yourself to do HIIT workouts—even if you don’t actually enjoy HIIT. As a result, you’re less likely to feel great during/after the workout and less likely to continue with them long-term!
This email is already long enough so I’m not going to get into the ways in which health tracking can lead to perfectionism and obsession, or how the data can be pretty darn inaccurate. Thanks for reading this far if you’re still with me :)
I absolutely do believe it's possible to have a healthy relationship with health tracking that doesn't shut out the wisdom of the body, but I wonder how often people find such a balance. Please please please write to tell me about your own relationship with health tracking, especially if it’s positive! I want to learn more about what works and what doesn’t for different people.
Be well,
Laura Silver, MS, RD, CDN
