Do fitness followers have an impact on eating disorders?

Disclaimer Regarding Content: This article contains details and personal anecdotes about eating disorders.

Tracking workouts, steps and calories with wearable devices and apps has become the new standard. Take a look around the next time you go to the gym or jog in the park. Most people who work make a laptop on their wrist or a phone on their arm.

The number of wearables connected worldwide will reach 74 million this year and is expected to reach more than one billion by 2022 – wearable health technologies will be a big part of it.

At the moment, there are wearables for casual sportsmen, like the Fitbit Inspire HR, at the serious ones like the race, like the Garmin Forminer range.

Even devices that are not marketed solely for their health-focused features, such as the Apple Watch, tend to incorporate step counting, calorie burning, and exercise tracking as standard. This means that even if you have not bought a wearable or smartwatch to track your activity, the data on your body is often just a few steps away.

However, more and more evidence suggests that wearable devices can not help everyone to become healthier or better. Instead, some research suggests that they may eliminate the pleasure of fitness, be useless after six months, or hinder long-term weight loss.

In addition, a few recent studies also suggest that having instant access to your health data at your fingertips could cause anxiety and trigger or exacerbate eating and exercise disorders in some people.

Given the continuing rise of wearable technology and the fact that health-oriented devices are being introduced in gyms, in the "wellness" programs of companies and marketed to children and young people, it is important that we better understand how activity, food and weight tracking could do more harm than good.

The link between monitoring of physical fitness and eating disorders

We spoke to Carolyn Plateau, a professor of psychology at Loughborough University, who studied the effect of fitness tracking and health-focused applications on habitual users.

His latest study aimed to explore the differences in eating disorders, disordered exercise and mental well-being among users of fitness monitoring programs and applications to record their food intake and those who do not. do not consume it.

"Our results were interesting because they indicated that those who were following their activity or eating had higher rates of eating disorders and physical activity than those who did not." said Dr. Plateau at TechRadar.. "In particular, higher levels of purge behavior (eg, excessive or forced exercise to control or change weight or shape) were found in the follow-up group."

We interviewed Amanda Perl, a psychotherapist and member of the Directory of Counseling Specialized in the Treatment of Patients with Eating Disorders, about this link. "Counting calories, following a strict diet and doing excessive physical exercise are all symptoms of eating disorders," says Perl. "Monitoring devices can exacerbate these symptoms because they are focused on all these things."

This concern about health indicators and goal setting also leaves little room for balance, says Perl, "follow-ups can increase feelings of failure, self-loathing, and loss of self-esteem. loss of control."

Even those who do not show disordered eating habits may be subject to extremely high standards. "Apps and devices can take over and promote perfectionism," she tells us, "an unattainable illusion that fosters feelings of vulnerability until depression."

Although participants in the Plateau study who followed their activity and food consumption showed higher levels of eating disorders, she explains that we can not infer any cause and effect and say with certainty that the trackers cause eating disorders – more research is needed over a longer period.

"It could just be that participants with disordered dietary and physical patterns are more likely to want to track their food and fitness," she told us.

The results suggest, however, that tracking with apparel applications and health-focused applications may exacerbate or maintain disordered eating behaviors.

"It's possible that control of activity and food consumption inadvertently encourages some of the characteristics of eating disorders and physical exercise among vulnerable people," says Plateau. "It is also possible that this contributes to the obsessive and highly self-critical perfectionist tendencies that we observe in people with eating problems."

Plateau emphasizes, however, that many factors determine a person's vulnerability to eating disorders, as well as the likelihood that their behavior will turn into a complete eating disorder.

The darkest side of calorie counting and nutrition applications

Although health-focused wearable technologies provide automatic real-time tracking that can lead to a concern about exercise and health data, applications used alone can also validate the same type of behavior, but more emphasis on food consumption.

A number of recent studies have shown that applications containing large databases of foods with detailed nutritional values, such as MyFitnessPal, are widely used in the eating disorder community.

Hayley Pearse, who is recovering from an eating disorder and documents her journey at Brunch Over Bones, tells us that she has been tracking calories in a notebook since 2012, but that the increase in the number of follow-up apps has aggravated his messy eating habits.

"As technology progressed, the ease of tracking each macro, calorie, and even my body fat percentage became easy," says Pearse at TechRadar..

She discovered that she was using many apps, but she was still looking for better options allowing her to better control what she was eating. "It started with an obsession with my body fat percentage and my physical performance, with each meal being divided into macros – that's what the apps told me to do."

"The more applications I used, the more I started criticizing them because they had not yet each the food there, "says Pearse. "I found that my list of safe and fearsome foods had also doubled and if a certain food was not included in the app, it was not going either in me! "

This is the granular data available on applications that, according to Pearse, have fueled its fixation on food. "Apps has brought nutrient knowledge to foods and also the" skill "to visually badess the number of calories on the plate in front of me," she says. "It's too easy to get your hands on this level of information."

"Although I no longer monitor my consumption in the same way, I've always downloaded these apps on my phone as a comfortable cover," she says. "But I learn to listen to the needs of my body rather than those of an app."

Perl tells us that it is an important step in recovery. As part of the therapeutic process, it helps people "naturally respond to the physical cues of hunger and satisfaction" rather than relying on metrics or notifications of a health-centric or portable application. .

Ask yourself: why do I need a fitness monitor?

For anyone who believes that a health-focused technology can exacerbate eating disorders, another may use exactly the same application or device to set and achieve goals in a healthy way.

"A lot of the literature on behavioral change tells us that self-monitoring is an effective way to get behavioral change, and most people will find the tracking devices helpful," says Dr. Plateau.

It is difficult to predict the type of experience of a tracking device. That's why Dr. Plateau suggests to anyone who has one to learn about the goals they set for themselves with their laptop or app.

"If a person is very worried about the comments provided by a physical activity monitor or is constantly under the obligation to reach specific and growing targets (for example, the number of steps, the number of calories burned), this probably indicates that their relationship with the device is not as healthy as possible. this could be the case and it may be wise to stop using the device, at least temporarily, "she says.

She also recommends considering the reasons for using a fitness equipment in the first place. Research has shown that the use of a health-focused device solely for weight-related or fitness-related purposes is linked to more troubling attitudes toward food.

Although, the reasons for using health-focused devices can easily change. "Someone can start using a fitness machine to learn a little more about his level of activity, maybe to get a little healthier and a little bit more fit," says Dr. Plateau. . "It may be that over time their motives change and the weight or shape goals become more important."

Regardless of your experience with health-based monitoring, Dr. Plateau suggests that everyone pause in the comments and monitoring provided by an app or portable device: "I would suggest that we all consider no longer using technology from time to time. "

For more information on eating disorders and eating disorders, plus tips on how to get help for yourself or for a loved one, visit please. Beat in the UK or NEDA in the USA.