Don't belittle us Fitbitters

My husband had a medical appointment on the fourth floor of a building I’d never visited before, and the receptionist suggested I wait for him at the café one flight up. I followed her directions to the elevator, and when I got there, found myself thinking, “Most buildings have a staircase right near the elevator; I should find it and walk.” Not surprisingly, the staircase was easy to find, and once I was in the stairwell, I had another thought. “If there’s a fifth floor, there’s probably a sixth floor. Maybe a seventh and eighth floor. Let’s go see.”

So I started walking upstairs. It turned out the building was nine stories tall.

Not so long ago, this would have seemed like a rather frivolous use of time to me. But now I’m a Fitbit user, or Fitbitter, as I prefer to say, and no amount of physical activity is too frivolous to pursue.

Other Fitbitters understand exactly what I mean. By way of explanation for those not yet familiar with this new piece of gadgetry, a Fitbit is a small device that you can wear either as a pendant or as a bracelet. As you go about your day, it measures your steps, miles covered on foot, minutes of high aerobic activity, stairs climbed, and calories burned. And we Fitbitters find ourselves doing the nuttiest things to boost those simple numbers.

Some of this information – the metrics surrounding physical activity – is not new to me. As a long-time runner, I’m quite accustomed to measuring mileage. And as a daily “streak” runner, I’m accustomed to counting days of my streak as well.

But Fitbit is different because you don’t set it just for exercise. There’s no on/off function to denote when a particular activity begins and ends. It measures literally every step you take during every 24-hour period. If I’m up at 3 a.m. to use the bathroom, it registers the 18 steps from bed to the bathroom and back. At work, if I walk from my desk to the photocopier, Fitbit credits me with the steps. If I walk upstairs to get something, forget what I’m there for, walk back downstairs, remember what I wanted, walk upstairs again, retrieve the item, and return downstairs, Fitbit counts every step and each staircase as well.

And this is what makes us Fitbit users a little crazy. Whereas once we might have tried to economize on, say, trips from aisle to aisle in the supermarket, now every time we double back for an overlooked item gives us a few more steps. No parking spaces near the door? No problem – the extra walking means extra steps! One Fitbit user complained that her newfound obsession had the unintended consequence of making her teenage sons even lazier: now they know they don’t need to get up and fetch their own glass of water, because she’ll do it just a score a few more steps.

Back in my 20s when I began my pursuit of fitness, much was made of the fact that the human body has to spend at least 20 minutes in the target zone of 70% above resting heart rate before any fat is burned. Therefore, to be productive, we insisted back then, aerobic activity has to go on for at least 20 minutes.

This vague grasp of exercise physiology resulted in my unwittingly internalizing the thought that by extension, activity that goes on for less than 20 minutes is useless. If I couldn’t fit in a run or even a walk that lasted at least 20 minutes, I wouldn’t bother to run or walk at all.

And while the exercise physiology hasn’t changed – it does still take 20 minutes in the target aerobic heart rate zone for the body to burn fat rather than muscle – the Fitbit makes even the shortest journey on foot count for something. Last week, I arrived at work ten minutes early, so I took a ten-minute walk, knowing it would earn me a few hundred more steps on the daily meter. Not long ago, I wouldn’t have considered a ten-minute walk worth changing my shoes for.

But the appeal is philosophical as well as practical. The message of the Fitbit is that every little bit counts. Maybe you can’t do a five-mile run, but you can still get a few hundred steps in by taking a ten-minute walk. That’s a message about exercise, sure, but I would argue it’s also a message about life.

Good deeds, courageous acts, and noble gestures can’t be measured by a digital timer on your wrist the way steps can. But the Fitbit reminds me daily that doing just a little bit, whether it’s steps or something more altruistic, is better than nothing. Do what you can, even if you can’t do all you might wish. A little bit can still help. Anything is more than nothing. And far beyond calories burned or fitness goals achieved, that’s a lesson well worth learning.

Oh those creeping pounds...

One of my favorite fitness sites ran an article yesterday that made me smile and roll my eyes at the same time: “How to slow down weight gain.” There’s something so wryly defeatist about that title. Not how to prevent weight gain, not how to lose weight, but how to slow down the inevitable gain, as if whoever wrote that is finally ready to just throw in the towel on the idea of losing or maintaining weight.

And it’s something I could have written myself, since I too am about ready to face up to a new goal of slowing down weight gain rather than losing or maintaining.

Ever since I turned forty, I’ve been surprised by how different my metabolism is than it was in my thirties. The same amount of food no longer allows me to maintain my weight. And it’s not like I was a big eater before. But I felt like I had taken years to figure out what kept my weight pretty steady and even – and then after I turned forty, that all changed. Now instead of feeling good that my weight hardly ever changes, I’m forced to welcome a new pound or two aboard every year, it seems.

Sometimes I just can’t be bothered to care. I eat a mindful if certainly not abstemious pesco-vegetarian diet. I ride my exercise bike for 45 minutes every morning, and I run anywhere from one to five miles every day. So I’ve got the cardio workout part covered. Yes, I should be doing weight resistance at my age as well – for bone mass as well as weight maintenance and toning – but I just don’t have any desire to add more exercise time to my day. I’d rather be reading. Or writing. Or cooking. Or eating. That’s the other thing: there’s so much good food in the world. To make myself continuously turn away from it seems like a show of ingratitude to the Universe for all the delicious things it puts in front of me.

A week ago, I decided to take a break from scale-watching. The continuous creep was just getting too discouraging. Moreover, I felt like I had enough to worry about when I arose in the morning – deadlines, family life, global issues – without giving myself the entirely avoidable added stress of seeing that another pound had hung on overnight. So I simply decided to stop weighing in every morning.

But that took its own kind of courage. What if I gain, like, five pounds because I’m not keeping track of it? I worried. Well, my clothes wouldn’t fit and I’d notice that, I reasoned back with myself. Okay, but what if I start gaining slowly but surely and it just keeps piling on? Well, yes, that’s what’s happening anyway. Why not spare myself the cold hard evidence?

So I gave myself a week off from the scale but followed the same guidelines for weight control that I always do: reasonable variety of food, restrained portion sizes, lots of exercise, avoid eating after 7 PM if at all possible.

And the results? When I finally weighed myself this morning after a ten-day break, it was okay. I hadn’t gained anything new at all.

I really want to think weight doesn’t matter to me, and that the pound-a-year acquisitions that arrived with my 40’s can be reversed. But this headline has me convinced the best I can do right now is slow it down. And then I reached the last paragraph, which starts with these words: “Finally, don’t be afraid to” – gain a little bit of weight as you age, I expected it to say. It’s an inevitable part of growing older, and it’s just not that big a deal.

No such luck. This is a fitness site, after all. They have product to move. The sentence actually read like this: Finally, don't be afraid to maintain and increase the number and volume of high intensity workouts as you age.

Oh, okay. I was looking for encouragement to let my body do what it does, but instead I found more ways to combat it. Don’t be afraid to increase my number of high intensity workouts? Thanks for that permission. I’m sure it will come in handy if I ever decide to start doing high intensity workouts. But for now, I’ll just face the scale every morning and do what the headline says: try to slow down that nearly inevitable post-40 weight gain.

When moms go for cosmetic improvements, is the message all bad?

Beth Teitell wrote here in today’s Boston Globe about the conflict mothers of growing children face when they – the mothers – want to get plastic surgery. In effect, Teitell’s question is this: How can we promote the message to our fashion-hyperconscious and eating disorder-prone daughters that you’re just perfect the way you are if we are running off to get tummy tucks and face lifts?

Though cosmetic surgery is not an issue I’ve personally confronted, I see it a little differently from some of the moms in the story who worry about setting the wrong example. I don’t necessarily see it as a problem to communicate to our children that it’s okay to think about your appearance and it’s okay to strive to improve it. Especially if we can tie it in to with aging and make the point that our skin, our hair and our bodies tend to change a little bit once we are well into adulthood, and that children are lucky not to have to worry about gray hair or wrinkles.

When I was growing up, my parents were unflagging in communicating to us that everyone is just fine the way they are. At the opposite extreme is a mother like the one in the book I am reading right now, The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Poor 23-year-old Skeeter is tall and slender, and her Southern belle of a mom constantly urges her to diminish her height by slouching.

There’s no question that a mother as critical as Skeeter’s is detrimental to her daughter’s mental health, yet I would argue that the “perfect as you are” message in families like mine might go a little too far in the opposite direction. As late as college, I was still looking to my friends to pick up basic grooming tips and to remind me not to leave the house in clothes that were missing buttons. My 17-year-old niece clearly knows more about cosmetic enhancement than I did at her age – not in the form of surgery but certainly in the form of beauty products -- and I so admire the poise and self-assurance that appears to have carried her throughout her teens. I suspect that having the acumen to use a little bit of makeup and get a good manicure ultimately has a more positive effect on a girl’s self-esteem than being told over and over again that she looks just beautiful the way she is.

Not long after turning 40, I became increasingly bothered by wrinkles around my brow. Botox is simply not in the family budget right now, but some kind of cosmetic enhancement is definitely something I’ll be open to if and when our finances improve, and if that happens I think I’ll be fine with explaining it to my daughter. After all, she’s the one who just last weekend peered closely at my face and commented that the wrinkles around my eyes made me look a little bit like a grandma. I don’t think it will be all that difficult to explain to her that sometimes our skin and bodies age and make us feel older than we are, and it’s okay to try to fix that. (No doubt I’ll also insert a hearty endorsement for the importance of sunscreen into this same discussion.) Moreover, I can claim to my children that I go running every day for reasons of health, and they do understand that a toned body is probably healthier than a flabby one, but I don’t mind if they also know that I’d rather look lean than chubby and I work out in order to help attain that look.

So: by seeking cosmetic improvements, what’s the bottom line in terms of what we’re telling our children? Is it that our bodies are not good enough the way they are and our kids should probably start saving now for liposuction in order to compensate for what nature gave them?

I don’t think so. I think we’re showing them that we are empowered by taking opportunities to make ourselves happier and more confident, whether those opportunities arrive in the form of getting a new job, running a marathon or coloring our hair. And if in my case that’s erasure of the wrinkles between my eyebrows, all the better.