I was intrigued by a recent article on the BBC website about
the efficacy of fitness trackers. I’ve been wearing a fitness tracker for about
six months now and I’m pretty convinced about its benefits, it’s not that I
think it’s some sort of a miraculous panacea, but I find it very useful for
encouraging me to keep active. I keep track of my step count each day and if I haven’t
been active enough I make an effort to put in a bit extra, or if I fall short
one day I try to catch up the next. I also use it to log changes in my weight
each week and to keep an eye on how much sleep I’m getting.
It is true that the majority of my weight loss in the last
twelve months came before I started wearing a fitbit, but it would be wrong to
take that as evidence that not wearing one is more effective that wearing one.
I lost more weight at the start because at my starting point I was heavier and
my overall fitness was lower, by the time I started wearing one I’d already significantly
improved my basic fitness (from a very poor base line) and incremental improvements
where always going to be more challenging. To go from homeworking most days to
commuting was a step change in activity, but I can only walk to the office once
in a morning, and back to the station once in the afternoon and I only get one
lunchbreak to take a walk. So there are practical, physical restrictions on the
scope for exercise, if not the effectiveness. What the fitbit has done is
supported my ongoing progress, helping me to avoid slipping backwards.
One thing in the BBC article that did get my attention is
the idea of genetic testing to aid weight loss. I’ve long had a suspicion that
there are insights into my diet that could unlock more effective weight loss
strategies, at least beyond the usual boiler plate of eat more rabbit more and
do more exercise (not that such generic prescriptions are worthless, they’re just
very limited). I like the idea of customised dieting advice based on scientific
evidence; it’s a bugbear of mine that the various NHS practitioners I regularly
come into contact with hassle me to lose weight, but without ever offering any
practical, customised support. I don’t hold it against them, I understand
resources are tight, but the official Government driven approach appears to be
all stick i.e. sugar taxes and treatment rationing (including rationing based
on pseudoscience like BMI), and no carrot i.e. making customised nutritional
advice more readily available to obese people like myself. I can’t help but
feel that the official approach to obesity related health could be more cost
effective long-term with a bit more investment and focus short-term.
I’m seriously considering paying for a service like the one
offered by DNAFit, I just need to find the one that will offer me the most
useful benefit for the fee. What I really want is some customised guidance
around what food/nutrition I should avoid and what I should favour. I’m not
really interested in the “value added” parts of the products (value added being
business speak for boosting profit margins by selling lower value bolt-on
products at a price that suggests they are actually high value products); I don’t
want recipe books, eating plans or exercise plans, I can work things like that
out based on my own preferences once I have the underlying nutritional insight.
Nor do I want to be flogged ongoing fitness services or be benchmarked against Olympic
athletes, or any of the stuff that probably delivers the most profitable
customers.
I’m really just looking for a company that will offer basic
but comprehensive diet testing. I’m sure all the “value added” stuff might be
useful if I was a fitness nut, or even if I was still playing organised sport
like I was ten years ago, but these days it’s simply about being healthy and
getting my weight down to 100kg. But most
importantly I want anonymity, whatever my test results are they need to be
completely confidential. I don’t want them shared without me choosing to do so
proactively, nor do I want the risk of being required to disclose them to some
third party (such as an insurance company) at a later date simply because they
exist. I know there are pretty good data protection laws in the UK, but that
doesn’t mean a company cannot be hacked, nor does it prevent a situation where
one day I’m legally coerced into sharing them. Ideally, I’d like the process to
be completely anonymous, with my sample and the records from it destroyed within
a sensible time frame.
I think I have some research to do, but this blog post lookslike a useful start…
No comments:
Post a Comment