Can wearable fitness trackers be trusted to be accurate and help you meet your exercise goals?

Explore the benefits of wearable fitness trackers for weight loss and health, and examine their accuracy.

How can wearable fitness trackers support you in your journey?

Wearable fitness trackers are popular tools in the quest for fitness or health. Whether it's a Fitbit, Apple Watch, or Garmin, these devices offer a window into your daily activity patterns—and potentially encourage you to move more.

Motivation and accountability

Fitness trackers' greatest strength may be in boosting awareness and motivation. By providing real-time feedback on step count, calories burned, active minutes, heart rate, and more, they give insight into your daily habits and remind you to move more or ramp up your workout.

Many trackers include challenge and goal-setting features as well as reminders—helpful nudges to move or complete a workout.

A review of interventions using wearable activity trackers published in The Lancet Digital Health concluded that physical activity use resulted in approximately 1800 extra steps per day, 40 minutes more walking per day, and a reduction of about 1 kg (2.2 lb) of bodyweight compared to interventions without activity trackers.

Data-driven weight-loss support

Fitness trackers can be powerful tools in supporting weight-loss efforts, particularly when paired with food tracking apps like MyNetDiary.

For instance, you might assume you are very active because you work out most days, but a tracker may reveal that your total daily movement is otherwise low. This insight enables more accurate calorie budgeting and encourages more movement throughout the day or reevaluation of portion sizes.

Many devices also measure heart rate variability, stress levels, and sleep quality, helping you recognize patterns and make adjustments, such as how poor sleep or stress can lead to overeating or skipped workouts.

What about fitness tracker accuracy?

Device accuracy depends on the brand, model, and what’s being measured.

• Step count: Wristband devices are generally quite reliable during walking or running. However, activities like cycling or strength training may be undercounted.
• Heart rate: For steady-state activities like walking or jogging, sensors that use light to measure pulse tend to be accurate within 5% for heart rate. However, high-intensity or erratic movements (like weightlifting or interval training) may reduce accuracy. Other factors, like skin tone and tattoos, can affect measurement accuracy.
• Calories burned: Tracker accuracy is less reliable for calories burned. Stanford University researchers noted that energy expenditure estimates were off by 27% to 93%, depending on the device. Factors like body composition, fitness level, and type of activity can influence the error margin.

Tip: Fitness trackers tend to overestimate calories burned, which is one reason you might consider not adding back all exercise calories to your daily calorie budget if weight loss is a goal.

Despite these limitations, the data is usually good enough to note trends and support behavior change.

Tips for getting the most out of wearable fitness trackers

1. Set realistic goals: Choose daily step and activity targets that are achievable and build up gradually.
2. Pair with food logging: Syncing your fitness tracker data with your MyNetDiary account helps bridge the gap between movement and nutrition. See below for tips.
3. Don’t obsess over precision: Use the data for trends, not perfection.
4. Track progress over time: Look at weekly and monthly patterns rather than daily fluctuations.

Using your tracker with MyNetDiary

MyNetDiary lets you directly integrate with many popular wearable fitness trackers, including Apple Watch, FitBit, Withings, and Garmin devices.

If your fitness tracker can send data to Google Fit, iOS Health, Health Connect, or Samsung Health, you can establish an indirect link between it and your app.

Suppose your activity tracker includes its calories in daily totals. In that case, MyNetDiary will receive these calories as part of the daily total, so you should not log exercise separately into MyNetDiary to avoid double-counting the calories.

Perhaps your activity tracker does not register your exercise for some reason (e.g., you were not wearing it, or it's a static activity like yoga). Then, you can manually log it into your activity tracker or log it directly into MyNetDiary.

Wearable fitness trackers can play a powerful role in supporting weight loss and overall health

These trackers work not because they’re perfectly accurate, but because they help us pay attention. They offer a helpful edge in our health journey by increasing self-awareness, encouraging consistent habits, and giving a sense of control.

Ultimately, the best tracker doesn’t have to be the most feature-laden or expensive; it just has to be the one you’ll use consistently.

Still new to MyNetDiary? Learn more today by downloading the app for FREE.

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