Fact check: do fitness trackers help you lose weight?

From wristbands to smart running shoes, wearable technology is transforming the way we monitor our physical activity.

But are fitness trackers really helping us reach our weight-loss goals? The Week looks at the research.

What do the experts say?

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Fitness trackers automatically log the number of steps the wearer has taken, their heart rate, how many calories they have burned, and even the quality of their sleep.

Having an accurate daily record of physical activity can help open people’s eyes to how little exercise they’re getting, says Dr Seth Martin, a cardiologist at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

“It gives people information and empowers them to start making changes,” he says. “And often, their activity level was not something they were paying attention to before they started tracking.”

But experts caution that fitness trackers should not be viewed as magic bullet for weight loss.

“Trackers are a reliable measurement of our activity, but we can’t rely on them completely,” Andrew Lane, professor of sport psychology at the University of Wolverhampton, told the BBC.

“We can’t expect just to buy one and that's it - some of the responsibility sits with us too. We still have to get off that sofa and complete those 10,000 steps a day.”

If used inappropriately, fitness trackers may even start to have a negative psychological effect, Lane argues.

“What if we start consistently not reaching goals set for us by them? Ultimately, it would lead to us feeling demotivated - the opposite effect they are supposed to have,” he warns.

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What does the research say?

A large-scale trial at the University of Pittsburgh investigated whether using wearable technology helped people lose more weight than slimmers following standard weight-loss programmes.

The study, published in 2016, tracked more than 470 overweight or obese people between 2010 and 2012.

All of the participants were asked to diet and advised to increase their physical activity, but only half were given a fitness tracker, six months into the study.

At the end of the trial, the participants who were given fitness trackers lost an average of 7.7lb (3.5kg), while those who didn’t have access to the technology lost an average of 13lb (5.9kg).

Researchers also found that the participants who used the trackers were no more physically active than those who did not.

Based on these results, the authors concluded that the devices “may not offer an advantage over standard behavioural weight-loss approaches”.

In a separate study, researchers at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore tracked 800 office workers to see whether using fitness trackers improved their health.

Participants were assigned to one of four groups – a control group that had no tracker, a group with a tracker, and two other groups that were given trackers as well as different financial incentives.

Over the course of the year-long study, which began in 2013, the subjects who wore fitness trackers increased the amount of physical activity they did by an average of 16 minutes per week.

However, the authors found no evidence that the devices promoted weight loss or improved blood pressure or cardiorespiratory fitness, either with or without financial incentives.

Researchers also noted that nearly half of all participants with fitness trackers stopped wearing them after six months.

These results are “pretty embarrassing for companies that manufacture fitness devices - not to mention disquieting for the people who wear them,” says Robbie Gonzales, senior writer at Wired.

But he argues that this doesn’t mean you should ditch your fancy new fitness tracker.

“The fact is, most existing studies on fitness trackers […] hinge on devices that are several years old,” Gonzales says.

“And while peer-reviewed research on the latest wave of workout gadgets is still sparse, signs suggest newer wearables are finally becoming more addictive.”

What’s the consensus?

The available data suggests that fitness trackers do little to promote weight loss and may only result in moderate increases in physical activity.

However, these studies were carried out using older fitness trackers and further research is needed to determine the efficacy of the latest devices.

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