Thursday, September 22, 2016

Wearing a Fitness Tracker Won’t Necessarily Lead to Weight Loss

Adding a fitness tracker to your weight-loss routine might not help you shed pounds faster, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are cautioning. In fact, they recently found that people who used wearable technology actually lost less weight than those who logged their exercise manually.

Their study, published this week in JAMA, concludes that such devices “may not offer an advantage over standard behavioral weight-loss approaches.” But the researchers also point out that the way people use fitness trackers is very individualized. Their findings suggest that using them to slim down won’t work for everyone, they say—not that it won’t work for anyone.

John Jakicic, PhD, a distinguished professor in the department of health and physical activity, designed this study to see what would happen when wearable activity trackers were given to people who were already involved in a weight-loss program. So he and his colleagues recruited 470 overweight men and women, ages 18 to 35, and gave them instructions about limiting their daily calories and getting more physical activity.

The participants met for weekly check-ins for half a year, during which they all lost weight. “We generally see really good effectiveness for the first six months on these types of programs, then things start to slip away,” says Jakicic. “We thought if we added an activity tracker to what we know is an already pretty good intervention, that would make it better—that it would boost the effectiveness.”

But they actually found the opposite: When they divided the participants into two groups, and asked them to either wear an activity tracker or record their physical activity manually on a website for the next year and a half, the latter group came out on top. 

People in the fitness tracker group lost, on average, 7.7 pounds since the start of the study two years prior, while those in the self-tracking group lost an average of 13 pounds. “We were pretty shocked,” says Jakicic.

Another surprise? Those who wore fitness trackers didn’t even get more physical activity than those who didn’t. Both groups did see improvements—in body composition, fitness level, diet, and the amount of exercise they got each week—but there were no significant differences between the two.

But, Jakicic stresses, these results only focus on the overall picture. “That doesn’t mean that fitness trackers aren’t beneficial to some people,” he says. In fact, there were individuals in the study who lost lots of weight using a wearable tracker, just as there were people who didn’t lose much in the self-tracking group.

“There are a lot of people out there who live and die by these things,” he says. “They love it and it engages them and keeps them involved, and that’s really important. We’re not saying don’t use it if it’s working for you.”

If, however, you’ve been wearing a tracker and you’re not losing weight, this study may serve as a wake-up call of sorts. “We think it could be that people are paying so much attention to the tracker that they’re losing sight of all the other things that need to happen,” says Jakicic. “Maybe your tracker is telling you you’re doing well, so you take the liberty of eating another cookie or another cupcake.”  

Another possibility, he says, is that people who play an active role in recording their fitness data—by keeping track and physically writing it down or typing it into a computer—may hold themselves more accountable than those who use trackers.

“When you use a program like the one we used in our study, you’re taking responsibility,” he says. “You say, ‘I exercised for 30 minutes today,’ and you’re engaged in that process; you’re not relying on a device or a machine to do it for you. So maybe you have to be engaged and hands-on at that level for it to really be effective.”

The fitness trackers used in the study were BodyMedia Core Fit armbands, which connect to a website where users can view their progress. The self-tracking group used a computer program set up specifically for the study, but Jakicic says it’s similar to commercially available apps and websites like MyFitnessPal.

The researchers are now analyzing their findings more closely, to look for patterns among those study participants who did seem to benefit, from a weight-loss standpoint, from wearing fitness trackers.

“We don’t know yet what makes these people different from anyone else,” say Jakicic. “If we can identify people with certain characteristics that will really be motivated by these devices—and other people who won’t—then we can hopefully make some really helpful recommendations.” 

This article originally appeared on RealSimple.com.



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Diet and Exercise Work for Weight Loss, Even If You Have the ‘Obesity Gene'

Time to scratch another excuse off the list of reasons you can't lose weight: According to a new study, improving diet and getting more exercise helps people lose weight—regardless of their genetic makeup.

Yes, there is a so-called “obesity gene." People who carry a specific variant of the FTO gene have been shown to be an average of 6.6 pounds heavier than those who don’t, and are 70% more likely to be obese. But when researchers at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom compared people who had the FTO gene variant with those who didn’t, they found that it had no effect on how well participants responded to weight loss interventions.

In other words, said co-author and professor of human nutrition John Mathers, PhD, in a press release, “you can no longer blame your genes.”

The new report, published in BMJ, is a scientific review of eight previous studies from around the world, involving more than 9,500 people in total. All eight studies were randomized, controlled trials of weight loss plans that included diet, exercise, medications, or some combination of the three.

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When the researchers combined and re-analyzed results from all of the studies, they found that changes in body mass, weight, and waist circumference were not significantly different between people with different FTO variants.

They also found no differences between gene types when they looked at results based on gender, ethnicity, age, or the type of weight loss intervention. (They do point out, though, that most study participants were Caucasian, and that more studies should be done on more diverse groups.)

These findings contradict those of a 2012 review including some of the same studies, which found a small genetic influence on weight loss efforts. But, the researchers say, the new analysis included more participants and more individual data, and they only looked at studies that carefully ruled out or controlled for potential factors that may have influenced the results.

“This is important news for people trying to lose weight as it means that diet, physical activity, or drug-based weight loss plans will work just as well in those who carry the risk version of FTO,” Mathers said.

It also suggests that a genetic predisposition to obesity “can be at least partially counteracted through such interventions,” the authors wrote.

While the FTO variant seems to play the largest genetic role in a person’s weight, it’s not the only gene that’s been implicated in weight gain or obesity. The gene IRX3, for example, has been found to also play a role in regulating body mass, and a variant of the MC4R gene may make people more prone to overeating.

RELATED: 57 Ways to Lose Weight Forever, According to Science

The authors acknowledge that their study only looked at one obesity-related gene, and that the effects of others are still unknown.

But many experts say that in the grand scheme of things, genes—all of them—likely play a very small role in obesity. In an editorial published with the new study, Alison Tedstone, PhD, writes that “the causes of obesity are multiple and complex,” and that the Newcastle study adds to evidence “suggesting that environmental factors might dominate over at least common obesity-linked genes.” 

Tedstone, who is chief nutritionist at the government organization Public Health England, also writes that weight-loss programs marketed as being customized based on a person’s genome “may not pay off, at least in the short term.”

Instead, she says, obesity research should focus on “whole systems approaches” including environmental causes and solutions, in order to benefit more people of all genetic makeups.



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