Fitness trackers and eating disorders – is there a link?

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firemonkey
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22 Aug 2019, 8:18 am

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Fitness and health tracking devices are becoming increasingly popular and a huge variety of wearable tech and apps now exist. Indeed, many smartphones and smart watches now come primed and ready to track our activity, sleep and nutrition.

Research has for a long time highlighted how monitoring behaviours can help to lead to positive changes in our lifestyles. It can be an effective way to help increase physical activity, and to achieve weight loss.

But monitoring physical activity and food intake may not be useful for everyone. Indeed, people with eating disorders often have unhealthy relationships with food and exercise. Obsessive behaviours such as calorie counting, rigid, driven exercise and unhealthy perfectionism are common among those with eating issues.


https://theconversation.com/fitness-tra ... ink-121663



Fnord
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22 Aug 2019, 8:27 am

No.  Autism  Eating disorders existed long before  vaccines  fitness trackers were invented.

This is a typical case of an old disorder being blamed on something new by people who either want to stir up controversy or who are desperately trying to find something to blame.


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BenderRodriguez
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22 Aug 2019, 9:53 am

Fnord wrote:
No.  Autism  Eating disorders existed long before  vaccines  fitness trackers were invented.

This is a typical case of an old disorder being blamed on something new by people who either want to stir up controversy or who are desperately trying to find something to blame.


QFT - particularly anorexic people used to obsessively track food intake etc long before trackers existed. Now they use an app - same difference.

In my experience, most people (grossly) underestimate how much they eat and (grossly) overestimate how much they exercise. Trackers can help even the most clueless of them get a realistic idea of what they need.


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firemonkey
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22 Aug 2019, 10:07 am

My question would be "Have eating disorders increased as a result of fitness trackers being available ?"



shortfatbalduglyman
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22 Aug 2019, 9:02 pm

firemonkey wrote:
My question would be "Have eating disorders increased as a result of fitness trackers being available ?"




Yes but no controlled experiment


My guess is that , people with eating disorders tend to waste more money on fitness devices, than people without eating disorder


When I was 23 the nutritionist refused to let me use her body fat analysis scale

So I bought my own

36 and still use it