Fitness Device Companies Lie

This week: “my device says I’m 30% bodyfat.”

This is coming from a client who lost 120lbs of fat and went from sedentary to squatting nigh 500lbs over the course of 3 years. The device is not even remotely close to an approximation, even if we were exceedingly forgiving.

A few weeks prior: “my device showed my VO2 max.”

This came from a different client whose device is a wristband.

Device companies, please just stop lying. If your device has no way to measure different tissues and cell types in the body, please shut the F$&@ up about body comp. If your device doesn’t directly measure oxygen exchange, please shut the F$&@ up about VO2. If your device doesn’t monitor heart rate variability, don’t opine on stress and recovery. If your device doesn’t weigh my food, stop lying about my food. Device companies, just stop lying. Just stay in your lane. Please.

Leave measurements to the appropriate measuring tools. If I pointed to my yardstick or ruler to tell you the kilograms of your hard drive, you’d probably look at me sideways. And rightly so. If I pointed to my food scale to tell you how many terabytes are left in your cloud storage, you’d probably just dismiss it. But for some reason, when a venture capitalist hires some keyboard warriors to generate fitness device software, everybody starts bowing to the golden calf and critical thinking goes on hiatus.

Just leave wellness expertise to actual wellness experts. It’s probably best to ignore digital bots and not place our physiological metrics in the hands of app programmers, no matter how good their computer science degrees are.

I don't use my analog scale to portend the future of digital technologies. Don't use your virtual reality pretense to diagnose actual real live physical phenomena. I get it. There are cases where experts slightly overstep their purview, mistakenly. Then there is what's going on with device companies: they are just straight up lying in order to make it appear like the device has more functions to sell you on.

I'm not even harping on how fitness devices have worsened American health and fitness outcomes. Since their launch, severe obesity DOUBLED (https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/a-very-very-uncomfortable-truth). That's right. With the advent and popularization of digital fitness, health and fitness got worse at a faster rate than all of prior human history. Life expectancy took its first decline in a century. 

But we shouldn't be surprised. The primary sales effort of fitness device companies is lies; so why would productive outcomes even be a part of their business models?