I know I am not the only one who has a love/hate relationship with the gadgets in our lives. The ones I hate most are the ones that I have accumulated most recently; the ones associated with weight loss and fitness.
The one most of us learn to hate first is the scale. No one makes a good one. They are inaccurate at best and hugely unreliable. Yet if you have ever had any type of weight issue at all, you probably have been addicted to one at some point. We know the evil shortcomings of this gadget, yet we give it so much power over us. What can make a sunny day turn immediately to crap? A bad reading on the scale of course!
Sometimes I think using Medifast just accentuates the crazed relationship between human and scale. You tend to lose weight so quickly on Medifast that weighing yourself can become your favorite spectator sport. Dropping 5 pounds over night can do that to you.
But woe unto you the day the scale doesn’t tell you what you want to see. You have been on track and are losing a pound a day….but suddenly it’s only half a pound! GASP! Never mind you are still losing and never mind that you are on plan…all you know is your random target wasn’t met and life has turned sad and grey.
Truth is you’d be one happy camper if you didn’t give that stupid piece of equipment so much power.
It gets even worse if you deviate even a little from Medifast. I’ve mentioned it before; something I call “the Medifast bounce”. That bounce being the 5-10 pounds you seem to put on over night the minute you eat more than the amount of carbs suggested by Medifast (<100 grams a day). I can’t be the only one this happens to. Logically you know that it is not 5-10 pounds of fat but that really offers no solace when you see the scale go up. But the scale draws you in once again as that phantom weight melts off the minute you stick to the program again.
I now have a similar relationship with my MIO watch. This baby is my exercise secret weapon. It monitors my heart rate and in doing so calculates my caloric burn for any activity. What a joy it can be, especially when you feel you might have had a bad workout. It can be a wonderful pat on the back to know even the lousy workout you just had burned 600 plus calories,
But MIO can also be incredibly frustrating and counter productive. It is far from being 100% accurate and as such can really mess with your numbers crunching. All too often it cannot get a reading on your heart rate. There is no way to discard the bad reading and take another one. So if you just swam 10 laps and attempt to get a reading and it is wrong or won’t take one at all you are screwed. Well of course you aren’t really. You swam those laps no matter what MIO says. But oh boy does that take the wind out of your sails.
I once thought about getting a BodyBugg or one of its iterations. You wear this gizmo 24/7 and it measures your metabolic rate throughout the scope of your daily activities. I can’t believe I actually thought that would be a good idea! I can only imagine how neurotic I’d become with that kind of information at my fingertips. That would just be far too many standards to live up to.
And for Pete’s sake don’t get me started on body fat monitors, BMI charts, target heart rate calculators, and blood pressure monitors!!!
I realize we don’t have too much of a choice. We have to be able to gauge our successes somehow in real time so these numbers and measurers are the most direct way to do that. I’m just saying, I could live without the agita.
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