Do You Lie to Your Fitness Tracking App?

It’s an ongoing effort to impress someone (even an inanimate object) with your efforts.

Awareness and accountability are two essential ingredients in creating and following through on any health or fitness goals. In large part, food journals and exercise graphs have been replaced with fitness tracking devices and fitness tracking apps. They’re convenient, fast and provide a lot of useful information. Whether it’s a tracker you wear on your wrist, an app in your phone or a complicated tracker on your computer, chances are, if you are into diet and fitness, you are using something to track your progress.

Garbage in, garbage out! Yes, fitness trackers will keep your eye on the prize as you make your way through the busy days, weeks and months of your busy life. That is — as long as you feed it accurate information. It should come as no shock to anyone that you cannot expect accurate reporting from your fitness tracking device if you are massaging the data you input. Before you think you couldn’t possibly be guilty of any of these transgressions, consider some of the “little white lies” so many of us use regularly.

• Entering standard portion sizes without regard to exactly what it is you were eating. Just because a portion of grilled chicken is shown as six ounces on the tracker, it doesn’t mean your nine ounce chicken breast carries the same nutritional and caloric profile. You need to weigh, measure and adjust accordingly.
• “Forgetting” to record toppings, condiments, breading, sauces, butter or oil used in preparations, or any other “adder” used to create the magnificent dish in front of you. Every ingredient carries its own nutritional baggage. You can’t just skip over these items as if they weren’t part of the recipe. A plain, grilled chicken breast is not the same thing as chicken Alfredo.
• If your tracker shows you the proper number of calories you should be consuming to lose/maintain your goal weight, have you ever stopped listing your food consumption for the day once you reach or are close to that number? It’s tempting to “forget” to record that late night pizza when you know you already reached your maximum calorie consumption at dinner time.
• How about the exercise you record? Have you ever stretched the length of your workout or activity to improve the total number of calories you burned? Are you recording the total amount of time you spent at the gym instead of the amount of time you actually spent exercising? Have you highlighted a higher level of intensity because it made it look like you worked harder? Have you ever flat-out lied to your fitness tracker about your exercise just a gain some extra calories to cover what you actually ate that day?

You can tell the fitness tracker you climbed Mt. Everest if you want to but, in the end, if you only spent thirty minutes on the treadmill, your body only benefited from the thirty minutes on the treadmill, not the Herculean effort to climb a mountain. Remember, the tracker doesn’t care what you record. You are only hurting yourself when you manipulate the facts and figures to show yourself in a more favorable light than what you actually earned. The tracker is not impressed with your progress — or lack thereof. Your fitness tracker should work for you (not the other way around) — giving you the added information you need to make healthy choices and changes in your life. It only works when you are being honest with your fitness tracker — and with yourself.

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