Digital Diet: Are fitness and diet apps helpful or ushering in a new era of online shaming?

The current fitness landscape provides endless ways to track your every mouthful, workout and calorie burned. As Lisa Jeans knows, the outcome isn’t always healthy.

Sweaty and breathing hard, I pulled out my phone and opened MyFitnessPal. After morning Ashtanga yoga and a sunset run along the Vancouver Sea Wall, my “calories remaining” count was 1,000. I was ecstatic—I had burned more than I had eaten. An advisory in red letters popped up: “Based on your total calories consumed for today, you are eating too few calories.”

“I’ve been caught,” I thought. I may have started using the app to help me train for a 10k run, but I have struggled with an eating disorder in the past, and at times I fall back into the vortex of anorexic thinking.

Technology is democratizing the fitness industry. While you might not be able to work out with a celebrity trainer, you can sweat like Serena Williams (in theory) with the Nike Training Club app. Smartphone and tablet users have access to hundreds of custom get-fit programs, meal plans and activity monitors to keep them on track and provide a social media cheering section. But they have their limits. “An app is you working on this project by yourself,” says Dr. John Berardi, co-founder of Precision Nutrition, a health coaching company that has developed an online tool to help serve its clients—he calls the new paradigm Fitness 2.0. “You don’t get wisdom, you get information.”

For an app to work, you have to engage with it. “In the beginning, when you get to the end of the day and see you’re a couple of points short [of your goal], you’re doing jumping jacks in the living room,” says Berardi, who’s skeptical that most app users will maintain that vigilance. Elisa Smith*, 39, an Ottawa artist and consultant, lost weight using the app Calorie Counter for 10 months—until she went on vacation. “At some point, you reach a threshold of monitoring and you just want to eat,” she says. When she went “free range,” she started gaining weight, so she has been tracking on and off ever since.

Smith’s experience is backed up by psychological research: Self-control requires a goal, a motor and a conflict detector. “I can exercise and withhold eating—these are low-order goals that I set to meet my high-order goal, which is losing weight,” says Dr. Michael Inzlicht, associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. “When what I’m doing is not in line with what I want to be doing, there should be some alarm bell going off.” That would be the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, which makes you rethink your actions. “If you have chosen goals that are worthy, doing them for yourself alone, this cortical alarm bell is more likely to go off when you engage in behaviour that may put you at risk of failing.” As Inzlicht spoke, I had an epiphany: For me, thinness was linked to my high-order goal of becoming an actor. I so hungered for it that my brain’s alarm bell rang at the mere thought of food, keeping it off my plate and out of my body.

There are lots of toys to help you keep track of your behaviour and goals: Wristbands like Fitbit Flex measure how you sleep and move, while the Withings scale tracks weight, body composition and heart rate. They send data to your phone, and can tweet or post your results.

Fitness apps and websites tend to offer one of two disciplinary incentives: the carrot or the stick. Fitocracy, with its video game-style rewards, takes the first approach. Others act as deterrents: GymShamer “fail-casts” on Facebook or Twitter when you don’t check in on Foursquare to record a workout; GymPact takes your money and redistributes it to more disciplined members; and StickK banks on the fact that you’ll never miss your 6 a.m. bootcamp if you donate $50 to a neo-Nazi group every time you hit snooze.

The post Digital Diet: Are fitness and diet apps helpful or ushering in a new era of online shaming? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.