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...

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...

Pain

Sorry to be a pain I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance. Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance. We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child. For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that). But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was. Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke peopl...

Hey Doctor Scott ...

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