Losing Weight with Weight Loss Gadgets

The business world - and not only - keeps searching for the Holy grail to lose weight!! The magic pill to swallow does not exist… at least not yet. The elephant in the room is the Apple Watch. We all have such days in our lives when we end up not taking the 10000 steps due to deadlines and eating food that amounts to bad calorie-count. Eventually, the calorie counters and fitness trackers just end up being de-motivating. Self-knowledge is the first step towards self-improvement. With all these weight loss gadgets, many of us are still overweight and some even obese. Why? Simple math, we consume more calories than we burn. Some of us are so fit at our heavy weight we burn fewer calories than less fit people to do the same activity. The math is still the same, we need to eat fewer calories than we burn or we gain weight. Tech can help you monitor your heart rate and keep it at the right rate for burning calories while exercising e.g. 80% MHR. In that way it can help you lose weight. 

But…

Loss of weight is far from the reductive mathematical view

Why should we use technology only for making our lives easier? Why not using it for completely replacing our own autonomy? Why should we make the effort to remember and control what we eat if a $300 gadget can automatically analyze our own troubles and tell us we should eat less beef? Why would we prevent ourselves from having the opportunity of uploading our pictures to Facebook in order to let people compare their own trouble with ours? We could like other’s health troubles, send them a kiss or just comment them, building a better connected society. Trackers are not the answer to weight losses but are a good help to motivation to the human factor fighting the weight. Not understanding how losing weight just got easier by eating nutrient dense foods?

Kind of crazy that stuff:

Fitness trackers are about behavior change to evoke a positive change in people’s lives. They did this for you and you made substantial gains and learnings from using these devices. These trackers have paved the way for the next gen that track biometric in real x plus steps etc. Using app tech more to metrics to b added monthly! You may be at a point where those learnings have peaked and you need to move on but for millions of people, the learnings, the triggers (reminders to move, to eat better, to sleep better) and the new tiny habits that they form are powerful. Things wont get interesting until we have digestible or embedded sensors which measure blood sugar, etc. The nutrition (or lack thereof) component outweighs the fitness aspect. Even a friendly reminder of eating too much or too much of the wrong thing will influence behavior. 

Sustainable weight loss is a lifetime matter and not a sprint!

You need to increase your muscle mass to accelerate your metabolism. If you do only cardio you will become skinny but without muscle so maintaining your weight will be too difficult. 10000 steps a day it is more about heart health and not about loosing weight. You can do it for some time. It depends so much on our metabolism. We are unfortunately not equals in front of food… Some of us have a more forgiving metabolism than others. If you can accurately determine what you are burning on a consistent basis then you have half the equation. If you want to lose weight you must commit to balancing the “food in” and “calories out” equation, so eating the right foods is just as important as exercise. Track your calorie intake and track you burn. After you get into the habit tracking your balance, you will find yourself eating better foods and exercising more efficiently. More efficiently is closely related to purposefully. It is far easier to determine how many calories you are burning when walking purposefully. Once your body adjusts your metabolic rate to your daily routine, you are in for an impossibly difficult struggle with your own DNA.

Here is the deal:

The Fitbit is about educating people on what they consume and that calories in should be exceeded by calories out if you want to lose weight. You are supposed to wear it on your non dominant hand so you don’t get false readings. Weight-loss is 80% diet and 20% exercise, and the biggest culprit is sugar. If you are not reducing your sugar intake, those 10,000 steps are just wasted time anyways. Your pancreas will still be overloaded, redirecting all that excess sugar into fat storage, which simultaneously prevents stored fat from being consumed. Stop eating the sugar — you’ll be losing weight, andyou won’t even have to exercise. The best “FitBit” would measure how much sugar is in your blood stream at any one time, so you could see in real-time how eating the wrong meal spikes your blood glucose beyond safe levels. 

Competitive Gadget:  Amazfit, which can track the many activity, running, sleeping, cycle, etc.

Sports Watch is better for training

As we progress from the quantified self to more actionable data and quantified direction the experience will improve. There’s no one-size fits all and our technology needs to become smarter and more dynamic to be effective long-term. Activity trackers are just that, activity trackers. There are some out there that didn’t even care about 10k steps a day and will adjust automatically to what you normally walk, some others would track intensity minutes, stress levels, etc. Sports people usually use sport watches which track much more than steps or even heart rate. But as with any piece of technology or tool, the results you get with them depend on how and why you use them. On themselves they can only tell you if you’re moving or not. To lose weight you need to still get nutritional advice and sport advice from specialists.People are wired up to move from pain towards pleasure. Some people are internally motivated others are externally motivated. Sports trackers are great to assist those that are externally motivated. Pavlov’s dogs?

Featured Gadget: Steel by Nokia

Fitness trackers have not matured yet as one can see there are lots of discrepancies when it comes to their tracking efficiency. Some are bad at heart rate monitoring, some with steps, climbing and almost all of them suffer from one or the other major glitch when it comes to tracking the outcomes. Another core issue is the core target segmentt for the trackers. Simple step counters and basic heart rate monitors were targeted for casual trackers who jump onto the fitness bandwagon but are off it quite quickly also. Same as with the apps. The targeted users are the fitness freaks who more or less will use it to track, gather, measure their outcomes. For a few people exercising doesn’t help them lose weight - its genetics and they will always struggle, for others it does help them lose weight. However for all of us, exercise has measurable health and wellbeing benefits. Anything that can help a person be mindful and aware of what they are doing and in particular with their movement and exercise has to be beneficial.

Health Watch for Health Monitoring

It’s not about losing weight these trackers are to improve one’s health by activity! Because Toshiba just came out with the first ever wearable life sensing device/saving device. It also monitors blood glucose blood alcohol levels and has electronic mosquito repellent. The EKGs and heart sensing are incredibly accurate and can send it to your doctor. More and more peoples need a mum to tell them what you eat, when to run, when to sleep. Once healthcare companies and doctors figure a way to tap this data, it will change the healthcare market as we know it. The old basic trackers are dead or dying. But new technology like the HELO LX is setting new standards with the ability to do an EKG or monitor blood glucose. Doctors will be able to dial in care like Amazon dials in its recommendations. These devices will continue to evolve, and in turn so will a health care delivery.

Related: Biostrap is one good product

Soon AI will tell you who to meet, what to do or not and give you points a ranking. You like that? Maybe you need to be a slave of the GAFAs are you’re now addicted to these piece of trouble. It’s time to wake up and use your brain, be responsible of your acts and decisions. At the end of the day, losing weight is simply the result of an energy balance, Energy IN - Energy OUT = Energy accumulated, if you are serious about losing or maintaining weight, tracking your caloric balance will definitively help. On another level the motivational factor is hard to dismiss, if you have a goal of n steps, or n calories and you haven’t achieve it at a certain point in the day, it is good to know. If we are going to continue to integrate more technology into our lives that aids us in one aspect, but impairs us health-wise, then why shouldn’t we have a device that reminds us to be active.

What’s the bottom line?

The only device we need is a Time watch - easy and simple

Let’s not forget Galbraith’s 50-year-old and still relevant definition of technology: “systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.” What do Fitbits, pocket pedometers, timers, apps like Noom or MyFitnessPal, or others, do? Do they MAKE us lose weight? No.Most humans expend the same total calories in a day regardless of effort. It’s counterintuitive but the recent “doubly labeled water” studies suggest that our set point is genetically fixed. The takeaway is: You exercise for fitness and wellbeing. You watch what you eat to lose weight. Let’s detech/detox reconnect more really lovingly simply Humanly. Lesser the better. Greed has bitten our nature. Tech can help us do many things — losing weight is probably not one of them.

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