This is an interesting article about a study recently done that show people who wear fitness trackers don’t lose more weight than those who don’t wear them. They actually lose up to 5 lbs less over the course of a year than their non-fitness tracker wearing peers.

I think this is a case of people looking for something other than hard work, discipline, and taking responsibility to make weight loss happen. Relying on external forces like vitamins, pills, powders, patches, shakes, and programs that cost money are only complementary (at best) to actually using discipline, sticking to a good eating plan, and doing the work on physical activity. Fitness trackers fall into this same category, as far as I’m concerned.

I use a Fitbit Surge. I love it. It allows me to track my daily step activity, but more importantly for me, it alerts me to text messages, phone calls, alarms that I set, and it uses GPS without my phone to track my runs. It also tracks the efficacy of my sleep, which I use to gauge how alert I feel as well as to correlate my weight loss with. It’s a good tool to help me lose weight, but in and of itself did not make me lose weight. Heck, everything I’ve done so far could be done without a tracker. I just like data points and being able to quantify my physical activities.

Don’t think there’s anything out there that will make you lose weight without doing the work. It’s just not possible. There are aids that will help you, but not do it for you.