SunLive – Is it healthy to track our health?

If you have ever tried counting calories, you will understand that it can be effective, but it can also be exhausting and even dangerous.

I started the ketogenic diet to lose some of the weight I gained after the birth of my first child.

The ketogenic diet (short for ketosis, a state in which the body burns fat instead of glucose) involves limiting your intake of carbohydrates to less than 10 percent of your calories, about 60 percent of your calories from fat, and about 30 percent of your calories from protein.

Every night I carefully planned my calories and macronutrients (fats, carbs, and proteins) for the next day. My app allowed me to subtract calories burned during exercise, so I started doing that.

It was oddly satisfying to follow and encouraged me to reach my daily goal. And it worked.

But it also made me fear carbs for years to come. By carbs I mean nutrient-dense foods like carrots, potatoes, and legumes, as well as bread, rice, and croissants. After a few months, the diet became unsatisfying and stressful, so I stopped, and some of the weight I had lost came back.

These days, we can count a lot. A fitness tracker can tell you how many steps you’ve taken each day and estimate how many calories you’ve burned. Gadgets can provide feedback on the quality of your sleep each morning.

Dr Alex Bartle Photo: Supplied.

We can count calories, macronutrients, and even use continuous blood glucose monitoring to keep an eye on our blood sugar data (these devices were designed with diabetics in mind, but some wellness influencers are using them to optimize their health).

But is all this data making us healthier? We spoke to experts in nutrition, fitness, and sleep to find out how tracking can help and hurt our health.

Sleep measurement

At-home sleep quality can be tracked with a smartwatch, or you can get much more data with the Oura ring, which costs about $800. Both devices will tell you something about your sleep with varying degrees of accuracy, according to Dr. Alex Bartle of New Zealand’s Sleep Well clinic.

Understanding how you slept is one thing, but knowing what to do about it is another thing entirely.

“It’s really interesting to know what’s going on,” he said, “but if you expect it to actually help you sleep better, if you think you’re sleeping badly, you need to go to someone who specializes in sleep.”

Bartle says that sometimes patients come into the clinic with a ton of sleep data, but a better indicator of sleep quality is how you feel when you wake up, as well as whether you feel consistently tired throughout the day.

Some sleep aids can provide valuable information on how to sleep better, such as limiting your exposure to blue light (ironically, often from devices like smartphones) or cutting out caffeine earlier.

For people who don’t see improvement, finding medical or professional help for sleep can be difficult because “there aren’t a lot of people who actually deal with sleep issues,” Bartle said.

Counting nutritional values

Counting calories for weight loss has been around since the 1920s. Bathroom scales first appeared around the same time.

As we learn more about nutrition, counting what we eat has begun to include these macronutrients: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Scanning the nutritional information on food packages with apps on our phones has made this easier and more accessible.

Continuous blood glucose monitoring provides immediate information on how your body responds to different foods, via a tiny fiber placed in your skin.

Lisa Bojarski Photo: on board.

But achieving holistic health doesn’t have to involve using health tracking apps or scales, says Lisa Bojarski, an Auckland-based therapist who works in nutritional psychology and intuitive eating.

“How can information about nutrition and wellness move beyond this old narrative that we’ve been talking about for a long time, which is it’s about calories in and calories out,” she asked.

Many of Bojarski’s clients come to her with concerns about counting apps and home scales taking away their joy of eating while simultaneously losing touch with their bodies’ natural signals about food.

“I prefer to work with my clients to build real awareness of their bodies, their feelings, their needs, their hunger and satiety signals…” Bojarski said.

Like sleep tracking, learning healthier habits and motivation through nutrient counting or weight tracking can have benefits. But too often, the result is self-loathing, punishment and deprivation, Bojarski said.

Counting calories, macronutrients or other metrics strips food and nutrition of its cultural and social value, says Professor Carol Wham of Massey University and the NZ Nutrition Foundation.

“(Food) shapes our identity. It strengthens our social relationships. Eating together is really important,” she said.

Personal trainer Brittany McNabb. Photo: provided.

Brittany McNabb, a personal trainer with a background in psychotherapy, tracks clients’ calories, focusing on protein intake, until they reach their health goals. McNabb’s clients are mostly women trying to lose weight.

She said the knowledge you can gain from counting calories or macronutrients can help you make better decisions. For example, one of her clients drank a smoothie from a chain every day. Despite the aura of health the smoothie gave off, the calories were equivalent to a typical fast food.

“My goal for my clients is to get them educated and calorie-aware enough to make decisions on the fly, because that’s freeing, and that’s what I do,” she said.

Exercises

At the extreme end of the scale, counting calories and measuring our exercise can be a gateway to eating disorders for some. It even has a name: technorexia, a compulsive behavior normalized by the popularity of medical technology.

McNabb is fully aware of this. She suffered from severe bulimia as a teenager. Some of her clients became obsessively exercise-tracking, and she worked with them to wean them off of it.

A big red flag, McNabb says, is when a client “doesn’t stick to the plan, and you become ashamed, guilty, and self-critical.”

“I always remind my clients that deviating from the route is part of the plan.”

Many of her clients come to her already tracking their steps, and she works with that. Tracking steps is a form of non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, which is a long, convoluted way of describing spontaneous physical activity that doesn’t rise to the level of deliberate exercise.

Getting 10,000 steps a day has become a popular goal for many people, and a 2022 study found that it’s great for cardiovascular and brain health. If a client comes to McNabb with an average of 3,000 steps a day, they gradually increase that number over time.

Measuring steps and achieving small goals “puts deposits in the basket of confidence, like, ‘I can do this, and therefore I can increase it over time,’” McNabb said.

McNabb says that while smart devices accurately measure step counts, they aren’t as smart when it comes to measuring calories burned.

“Fitness trackers significantly overestimate calorie burn.”

If you or someone you know notices any worrying behaviors related to tracking, eating, or well-being, please contact Eating Disorders Association of New Zealand 0800 2 EDANZ or (09) 5222 679

–RNZ