Activity Trackers May Undermine Weight Loss Efforts (Video)

Wearable activity monitors can count your steps and track your movements, but they don’t, apparently, help you lose weight. In fact, you might lose more weight without them.

The fascinating finding comes from a study published today in JAMA that found dieting adults who wore activity monitors for 18 months lost significantly fewer pounds over that time than those who did not.

The results suggest that activity monitors may not change our behavior in the way we expected, and raise interesting questions about the tangled relationships between exercise, eating, our willpower and our waistlines.

There have been tantalizing hints in a few studies recently that new technologies such as wearable activity monitors, which tell us how much we are moving and how many calories we have burned during the day, might help some people to drop pounds.

Those studies, however, had typically been small scale and short term, so it was still unclear how much activity monitors might aid in weight loss.

So for the new study, University of Pittsburgh scientists from the Physical Activity and Weight Management Research Center and their colleagues gathered almost 500 young, overweight men and women who wanted to lose weight. The recruits ranged in age from 18 to 35 since, presumably, these younger volunteers would be familiar with and competent using technologies such as activity trackers and any learning curve would be slight.

The volunteers were weighed and their general health and fitness assessed.

Fitness trackers are big business these days, which is why a study done at the University of Pittsburgh is so surprising; KDKA’s David Highfield reports.