But I'm not immune to a good deal, so last summer when I saw an ad offering 20 per cent off, I was wavering. And the tipping point: The Fitbit now came in slate blue, a colour I like. I placed my one-click order.
Two days later my Fitbit arrived in the mail. From the get-go I liked how it looked on my arm. Yes, it might be true that I rolled up my sleeves more often than I had before, just to make sure others noticed I had joined this elite club. (You may have seen owners of Apple Watches with a similar tic, frequently raising their arms to check their watch - but really to make sure you get a better view of it.)
Off I went in pursuit of my 10,000 steps. And pretty soon I was an addict-in-the-making. In spin class I tied my Fitbit through my shoelaces to make sure every spin or step counted. Zoe, my Jack Russell terrier, never had so many walks in her life. She seemed as excited by my new toy as I was, especially when it vibrated and flashed in celebration when I reached my daily goal.
My Fitbit honeymoon came to a crashing end after about eight weeks, when it became clear that my regular dog walks were barely getting me to the 10,000-step mark - as my Fitbit "told"me. If Zoe and I missed one walk, I missed my goal - and that left me unhappy. Worse, since my Fitbit couldn't count pool laps, it proved useless in tracking the exercise I did on half the days of the week.
I started doing crazy things to hit 10,000 steps
Like others who came up short of the daily goal, I started to do crazy things. I'd take Zoe (who, for the record, is 13 years old) for yet another tour of the 'hood. For the first time in her life she didn't seem at all excited when I uttered the words "Wanna go for a walk?" Instead of bounding for the door. she'd dig further under her blanket, certainly reminding me of the aphorism "Let sleeping dogs lie."
Sometimes just before bed, I'd walk around the house just to hit my 10,000 steps. Others tell me how they march in place, swinging their arms, to make their goal. No, I was not happy. Fitbit and I definitely had hit a rough patch in our relationship.
Perhaps you know where this is going. Was the Fitbit good for my heart? Yes. Fun? Less and less so. Sustainable? I didn't think so.
As the fall days got shorter and I'd been wearing the gizmo (I now saw it as a gizmo) for about 12 weeks, there were some days when I forgot to put it on and others when I chose not to wear it. "It feels too heavy and cumbersome," I'd think to myself. Or, "It doesn't go with that shirt." Just before Christmas, I started a trial separation.
Yes, I'm fully aware that many have benefited by wearing health trackers. Mike Fredericksen, a 58-year-old friend of mine, told me his fitness tracker has helped him lose more than 20 pounds, eat healthier and sleep better. "I've gone from borderline diabetic to a safe zone," he said, and he's now a regular exerciser. That's fantastic, and I hope he continues. But others told a different story.
Fellow Fitbit haters
Another friend, a woman in her 40s, explained: "I realized that there were a couple weeks where I took it off because it was making me feel bad when I was 'failing,' so why do that to myself?" A spin instructor at a studio near where I live in Durham, N.C., told me most people in his classes now wear fitness trackers "and all through a spin session they're glancing at them. Sometimes a participant will tell me my routine was - or was not - difficult based on calories expended or miles cycled. Never mind their own physical input or lack of it: The success of my class is measured" against the fitness tracker readout.
My negativity corresponded with the findings of the Duke study. When I asked Etkin, the study's author, how she'd come to examine the role of fitness trackers, she explained that after giving her father a Fitbit, "he became much more stressed about how much he walked, focused on those quantitative outcomes, when previously he'd just walked for fun." The problem, she said. is this: "Even though tracking output can encourage us to do more, it also sucks the fun out of activities we previously enjoyed, which makes us enjoy them less and be less likely to keep doing them in the future."
That had proved true for my terrier, and finally for me. So I gave it up, which is to say my Fitbit and I broke up.
In the weeks since then, I've slowly came to another realization about measuring my athletic activity. In high school I'd been a competitive swimmer, but I really only knew how to swim against the clock in a 25-metre pool and to count my strokes per length. I graduated with my varsity letter but then stopped swimming entirely because I'd come to hate competing.
I didn't swim laps for more than a decade.
Then, missing the water, I tried a new approach: No clock. No counting. What a mess that was at first: I floundered; I crashed into the wall doing my turns; I gulped in water instead of air. I realized, after several clumsy attempts, that I simply didn't know how to swim without measurement or quantification. At that moment I didn't want to think about what this meant more broadly for my life, but I recognized that for swimming, there had to be another way. And slowly I learned how to measure my own breaths, use my eyes to navigate and, finally, manage my speed by swimming to the beat of my own heart.
For the first time in my life I discovered that I loved swimming, feeling untethered from the world and at one with the water and the sky (at least when in an outdoor pool). From then on, I started to swim farther and more frequently. But don't ask me how many strokes, laps or miles I've done. I couldn't tell you. I wouldn't even want to know, because it doesn't matter to me - because I'm having fun. And staying healthy in the process.