Fitness Trackers

What if I told you Your fitness tracker cannot tell you who you ...

I see a lot of people wearing various body tech to help out with fitness - step counters, heart rate monitors, calorie counters, etc.

Overall, while they are pretty cool, there hasn't been much to show that they help people achieve meaningful changes. That's not to say that they don't work for some people, but if your goal is to make a meaningful change (run a marathon, lose 10 lbs, walk more) then a fitness tracker is a good way to get a baseline and track changes initially but then we usually reach 2 cognitive traps:

- Fatigue: Sometimes you just don't want to keep wearing something or keep monitoring the reports because of the extra effort it takes, even if it's minimal, because you stopped seeing benefits to justify it

- Too much focus on Quantity: We have a tendency to reward ourselves for meeting certain goals, I.e. hit 10,000 steps today so I can have an ice cream after dinner. I think this even goes beyond conscious choices too when we look for something beyond the goal to be our reward.

Do I recommend them? Depends on what your goal is but for most people, I think they end up being more of a distraction. What's better? Something with a human touch to it - think of all the successful habit changing groups out there - one common thread is having a human to help you achieve success.

Here is an article I found about the performance of wearable tech versus something like a training partner or group that helps hammer things home a bit more.

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin. When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop. I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine. You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

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