“Pics or it didn’t happen” is the mantra of the internet sceptic, and without the validation of a ‘like’, somehow your hard-earned sweat is hollow or incomplete. Technology has become the uninvited piece to the puzzle of why we as humans like moving our bodies.
Instagram is the self-established home of fitness and it’s changing the way we exercise. It is not enough to merely drag your body out for a run, or subject it to complicated and elongated dumbbell tidying. Now social media knows all about it too.
This has been true since the birth of Web 2.0 adding to the growing overlap between personal and digital spheres. It used to be that people would straddle the two for social validation, but as wearable technology has become more prevalent, the currency of likes and shares has been replaced with earning your calories.
Where before apps and social media gamified our existence with arbitrary yard sticks, counting calories is inherently more tangible. The units of energy are used by your body regardless, but now a £300 watch acts as the sentinel checking them in and out of our systems.
We now are justified when we burn a set number of calories throughout the day, and jolted to do better when we don’t. Our lives have been turned into a videogame with a macro-nutritional points system and that makes it harder to stop playing.
Last week the World Health Organisation officially recognised ‘Gaming Addiction’ as a psychological issue. They laid out the mechanics that prompted the addiction; tracking progress, unpredictable reward systems and psychological prompts to try and beat a previous score.
Burn and earn
It’s the same reason a calorie counter can start to dominate a fitness routine. The device is nonplussed by the specifics of your exercise, just how many calories it earns you. Buy into this mindset and you start to avoid exercises that may be beneficial because they don’t reap the same hefty rewards.
Say there’s some incentive to walk 10,000 steps a day. You could already be running a four-minute kilometre each day to work, but this is a far smaller step count than required. On that arbitrary measure, you’re going to fall short. And whilst both are good for you, the running prompts a far greater level of fitness.
Calories have a real-world application in that they are the measure of how hard something is to do, or more, how much fuel we need to achieve something. 70 calories walking to work, another 300 at the gym, 25 sprinting for the tube doors, some for digesting and some for breathing – every action has a calorific value. If we burn more than we consume, we lose weight and vice versa.
At rest, your body will burn a certain amount just keeping itself ticking over. Known as your BMR, it’s higher than you might think – around 1500 for women and 1700 for men.
The problem arises because this number, and the number of calories burnt by any activity, is just so hard to calculate. Medical grade calorimeters are hugely expensive and far too unwieldy to sit neatly in the fruit-based aluminium square on your arm.
So instead, wearables use whatever data they can collect and a complex algorithm that estimates calorie count. Heart rate, electrical impedance, movement and speed – essentially as much as can be told from your sweaty wrist – all are totted up to give a ballpark figure.
As you might have guessed from the stingy secrecy of tech companies, the intricacies of the algorithms fluctuate wildly, and so too do the results from each device.
A recent study from Stanford University found that we can trust in the guiding of an Apple watch, Fitbit or jawbone far less than would be fair to assume.
The heartrate monitor was no more than 5% off for each trial and pedometers are getting better each day. But the calculated calories burned could be up to 60% out. Over the course of your morning jog you might have burned 500 calories, however your wrist assessment might be telling you only 200, or as many as 800.
Don't count on it
There are mounting concerns that these inaccuracies can lead to weight gain as people justify spending there mistakenly earned calories on unhealthy foods. Inversely, people are pushing their bodies in pursuit of burning extra calories they never needed to.
Part of the reason social media has gained ubiquity is because of the dopamine goldmine in shares and likes. Studies show that the content of posts is sometimes irrelevant if that social currency is earned. The same is true of counting calories – if it becomes the sole end of a workout then the natural endorphin rush of fitness-feelgood is diminished – and as the process becomes more engrained the more a person relies on a tracker rather than their own body.
Instead we should ensure that every number that ticks across our screens is taken with a pinch of salt, as a guide to an effort that we had already perceived as ‘blooming hard’, or ‘could try harder’. It’s a move lead by an increasing number of cyclists and triathletes as they ditch their power meters and fitness trackers when training to teach their bodies how an 80% effort feels.
We do not have to refuse the tech entirely, but merely be more reliant on our own limbs to guage when we have had enough or can take a little more. The popularity of calorie counters is likely to increase – although sales are slowing ever so slightly – but that doesn’t mean we bow down to the robo-revolution just yet. Count the drops of sweat in your eyes, the speed of your legs or the weight in your hands, not how many fractions of a cauliflower steak it took to do it.