Your Fitness App is Making You Fat, Here’s Why - Nir & Far

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business, behavior and the brain. On this show, I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior. I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and Reviews and ask me a question. By leaving a review, I promise to read it and possibly include your question in a future episode. So please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com.

This podcast is brought to you by X AI. You know, a lot of times when you listen to a podcast, the host will recommend a product because they're the sponsors. And that's as simple as that. Well, I want to tell you about a product that I actually use. I've used it for about a year and a half now. It's called X AI. X AI is an artificial intelligence virtual assistant that will schedule your meetings for you. So every time I schedule a meeting, I don't play the email ping pong game back and forth. All I have to do is CC MyVirtualAssistan with a simple email address and the artificial intelligence will take care of the rest. It's a great product, highly recommended. And right now you can get one month free by going to X AI nearandfar. And you want to enter in the discount code and near and far. Now remember, NIR is spelled like my first name, N I R. Check that out at X AI near and Far. Your fitness app is making you fat. Here's why. By Nir Eyal and Red by Nir Eyal Fitness apps are all the rage. An explosion of new companies and products want to track your steps and count your calories with the aim of melting that excess blubber. There's just one problem. Most of these apps don't work. In fact, there is good reason to believe they may make us fatter. One study called out the Dirty Secret of Wearables, citing that these devices fail to drive long term sustained engagement with the majority of users. Endeavor Partners research found that more than half of US consumers who have owned a modern activity tracker no longer use it. A third of US consumers who have owned one stopped using the device within just six months of of receiving it. While the report mentions several reasons why people don't stick with these tracking devices, my own theory is simple. They backfire. Here are three surprising reasons why fitness Apps may be making us less happy and more flabby one Not Just Calories in and Calories out the first reason fitness apps make us fat is that almost all of them are based on a pervasive myth. These gadgets and apps attempt to push people to eat less and exercise more. They ask users to track what they eat and record their physical activity in order to quantify whether dieters intake a surplus of calories for the day. Eat too much or move too little, the thinking goes, and you'll get fat, right? Not exactly evidence that the calories in calories out theory is too simplistic is plentiful. For example, doctors have known for some time that certain medications cause patients to gain or lose weight by changing hormones levels in the body. If putting on pounds was just a matter of energy balance, then these medications shouldn't make people heavier. But they do. Drugs aren't the only thing that can change hormone levels. Certain foods prompt the body to store fat by spiking the release of hormones like insulin. According to Peter Attia, co founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative, all calories are not created equal. The energy content of food calories matters, but it is less important than the metabolic effect of food on your body. To most fitness apps, a calorie of high fructose corn syrup is the same as a calorie of protein, despite the fact that science and our bodies tell us otherwise. Clearly, a calorie isn't just a calorie. And by perpetuating this untruth, fitness apps help people tack on the pounds instead of shedding them. Number two, you won't exercise yourself. Thin exercise is probably bad for you. Did you hear that right? Let it sink in for a minute. For one, exercise causes many people to overeat by giving them permission to indulge. This phenomenon is called moral licensing, the psychological tendency to splurge in one area of our life when we're being good in another. Moral licensing is why a study found people are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing environmentally green products as opposed to conventional products. It's why other studies found participants who believed multivitamin pills were providing significant health benefits also exercised less, were less likely to choose healthy food, and smoked more cigarettes. The phenomenon accounts for why many runners gain weight while training for a race. They expend more calories during their runs, but by rewarding themselves with indulgences throughout their day, like an insulin spiking post workout sports drink, they ultimately negate many of the health benefits of exercise. There's another reason people rarely exercise themselves thin. According to science writer Gary Taubes, the one thing that might be said about exercise with certainty is that it tends to make us hungry. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Though Taubes cites extensive evidence backing his claim in multiple books on the topic, the idea also makes intuitive sense. However, most fitness apps ignore the fact that we work up an appetite when we exercise. The bloodstream is drained of glucose, so the body activates an uncomfortable sensation to get us to refuel. Hunger pangs, or the fear thereof, drive our search for sustenance. For roughly 95% of the 200,000 years our species has existed, food was relatively hard to come by. Today, however, sugar laden calorie bombs are cheap, delicious and readily accessible. Whereas our ancestors laboriously cracked nuts with their hands and primitive tools or gnashed animal carcasses with their power powerful jaws, we sip pre masticated Mega Mango Smoothies at jamba juice with 52 grams of sugar in the smallest 16 ounce size. Exercise does us in by making us hungrier throughout the day. And since our food is so full of stuff that makes us fat, we become more likely to over consume without thinking. A few extra bites at lunch and an extra piece of fruit after dinner and We've negated the 300 calories we burned running for 30 minutes on that treadmill. I'm not saying all exercise is bad for all people. I enjoy running 3 days per week and we've all heard the countless studies supporting the benefits of exercise. However, people don't live in a behavioral vacuum and there are deeper psychological and physiological influences we must be aware of. Not only are we hungrier, but we are more likely to yield to temptation thinking we've already paid for our sins. In the gym. Too many fitness products emphasize sweating the pounds away without establishing a proper base of nutrition. People look to their fitness products as authorities for what's good for them. But unfortunately, most fitness trackers perpetuate behaviors that backfires in ways we don't even notice and certainly don't intend. Number three Want to not have to what's the best workout in the world? The answer is the one you actually do. However, most people don't sustain their lofty exercise goals. When they fail, people blame themselves instead of the poorly designed weight loss system. The cycle of yo yo dieting and subsequent self loathing makes us fat. Most fitness apps fail because they miss a critical component of what it takes to change long term behaviors. For my recently published book Hooked, I studied some of the most successful consumer technology companies in the world. I looked into what makes Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the iPhone so good at changing user behavior. My hope was that what I learned could be utilized by those who seek to change habits for good. I discovered these products and services had several common attributes, among them the fact that using them is fun. In contrast, by and large, fitness apps are a drag as the data regarding long term usage of these services shows. Fitness trackers that make people do things they hate doing fail to change long term behaviors. The psychological phenomenon of reactance tells us people tend to resist doing things they feel coerced into completing. Attempting to form habits for behaviors people feel they have to do instead of want to do just doesn't work over the long term. Sure, we can starve ourselves for a while or pay homage to the elliptical machine for a few weeks, but eventually we give up if it's not fun. That's why the only people who sustain using these bossy services are those who were already tracking their activity and nutrition before they started using the app, or the relatively few who somehow learned to enjoy the behaviors for their own sake. To date, the burgeoning fitness app industry has relied too heavily upon game like incentives to motivate behavior. But games invariably come to an end when the novelty of extrinsic prizes like points, leaderboards and steps counts wear off, the experience becomes monotonous and users quit. The next generation of fitness apps need to focus on helping users enjoy the activity itself instead of making artificial and often frivolous goals. The aim as for me, I run because I enjoy running, not because an app tells me to learn to love exercise without setting strict fitness goals. Instead, I found minimum enjoyable actions. I could fit into my schedule regularly because I enjoyed the exercise itself, though I've taken fitness trackers to task. Herein lies the opportunity for the future of health tech by finding ways to help people learn to love physical activity. More licensing and reactants are kept at bay and users are more likely to continue to do the activity in the future. In addition, products that help us eat the right foods, not just fewer calories, are needed. Someday, a host of new technologies will finally fulfill the promise of helping us maintain a desirable weight and conceivably live better, longer lives. We're just not quite there yet. Until then, we should be cautious of products that attempt to change our bodies without first understanding our minds. Thanks for listening to this episode of the near and Far Podcast. You can always find more at my blog, near and far.com and don't forget, if you have a question you'd like me to explore in a future episode. Leave me your question. The former review for the podcast on itunes.