

#Fit bits for a good price license
Lardner says that simply tallying up steps isn’t a license to eat more and doesn’t automatically make you healthy. This is important to remember when it comes to that "calories burned" screen on your tracker. “Unfortunately, we can eat calories a lot faster than we can burn them.” “It is helpful to be aware of our tendency to become more lax with food choices because we feel like we have ‘earned’ some extra bites,” explains Brandice Lardner, a NASM-certified personal trainer and nutrition coach with One by One Nutrition. But take that data with a finely tuned algorithm of salt. Maybe you love the rush that comes with notching a personal step record, or maybe you can't get enough of that calories-burned number lighting up your wrist. Racking up stats doesn't offset choices you make in other areas of your life When you add in the fact that you need to be incorporating strength training into your weekly routine - which most activity trackers aren’t equipped to track (or do so in a clunky way) - the effort to achieve 10,000 steps seems even more Sisyphean.

Here's what they do say: “Adults need at least 2 hours and 30 minutes (150 minutes) of moderate-intensity aerobic activity (i.e., brisk walking) every week and muscle-strengthening activities on 2 or more days a week that work all major muscle groups (legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms).”įitbits and other activity trackers become unnecessary when you realize that the base recommendation for adults is 150 minutes of brisk walking over the course of seven days.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doesn’t think in step counts when developing guidelines to keep Americans healthy, unfortunately for the fitness-tracking industry. There are better sources of fitness recommendations So you're better off spending your money on vegetables, or putting it toward a gym membership. After that, they were divided into two groups, one with fitness trackers and one without, and despite the fact that everyone had undergone diet, exercise, and psychological treatment, the fitness trackers failed to help people drop extra pounds. Both groups were given six months of low-calorie diets, increased physical activity, and counseling both groups then had access to telephone and text support for six months. In fact, participants who wore fitness trackers during the study lost less weight over two years than those who didn't. Wrong! Researchers wanted to know whether wearable fitness trackers like Fitbits, helped people lose weight compared to other behavioral weight-loss techniques, and the short answer is: They don't. Maybe you simply want to drop a few pounds, and figure the extra motivation of owning a fitness tracker and having fun, if ultimately meaningless, numbers to hit can't hurt, right? OK, sure, the number of steps you walk doesn't matter so much, but achieving 10,000 steps each day isn't necessarily the goal. Fitness trackers don't help people lose weight
