Category Archives: Media

Is Fitbit the best?

My guilty pleasure is Quora, which I dip into if a question intrigues me. Sometimes I “archive” the more interesting topics here.

“Is Fitbit the best fitness tracker, or is it just the best known brand?“

Fitbit was early to market with wearable trackers. Wearable pedometers had been around for a while but were mostly a niche product (even after the release of Manpo-Kei, a Japanese product with a punning name that is the origin of the “10,000 steps a day” recommendation). There was also a chest-strap-based Polar product, paired with a watch-style display, that was released in the 1980s – Polar is still a top heart-rate monitor brand. The availability of small accelerometers helped launch the wearable fitness tracker market in earnest, and Fitbit was the first to market a small wearable (a clip-on, if I recall correctly), dedicated to fitness tracking, using this technology (a couple of years after Nokia incorporated it into a phone and around the same time Apple incorporated it into a miniature iPod – also a clip-on device).

The combination of being so early to market, launching the product at a tech conference attended by an extremely interested demographic, and a savvy marketing approach, which included actively reaching out to corporate wellness programs, gave its devices both a ready group of enthusiasts and wide distribution. Add to that some notable PR nightmares – like users’ sexual activity being exposed in people’s online public profiles in 2011 and a US Senator, a few years later, calling Fitbit out by name for its casual approach to user privacy – and Fitbit definitely acquired a brand awareness that would be hard for any other tracker to match.

Arguably, the best fitness trackers are in the Garmin product line – the first Forerunner model was released some 4 years before the Fitbit was just a model circuit board in a wooden box. However, Garmin’s early focus was on portable GPS devices, and Garmins were long of interest only to niche groups like competitive athletes and other people interested in navigation support (sailors, pilots, multisport and remote outdoor athletes). Also, their devices were fairly large and expensive in the era when Fitbit was gaining traction. They were simply not aimed at the same groups of people. Now, of course, both companies have much larger product lines, with overlapping devices.

My answer at Quora

How much exercise is enough?

My guilty pleasure is Quora, which I dip into if a question intrigues me. Sometimes I “archive” the more interesting topics here.

“Is walking for 45 minutes a day enough to not have a sedentary lifestyle if you sit behind a desk for 7 hours a day?“

Medically, we don’t really have a clear, single definition of “sedentary lifestyle,” beyond knowing that a society in which a large number of people work in a sitting position means people do need to make purposeful effort to ensure they have adequate movement during the day. Most studies and government-issued guidelines around sedentary behavior cite health risks as being more common above a threshold of around … 7 hours a day (perhaps the reason you mention that number), although some suggest it is lower.

There are, of course, definitions of sedentary behaviors, and there are studies of health outcomes with respect to different kinds of sedentary behaviors. For example, there is research showing that hours of television watching is associated with poorer health outcomes, but the evidence for sitting to do other activities “behind a desk” (more cognitively demanding, such as work or using a computer for something other than just watching video) is not as negative, so we can’t even necessarily think of the mere fact as sitting across time as defining a “sedentary lifestyle.”

In the US, the guideline for adequate weekly activity to improve health outcomes works out to about 25 minutes a day of walking – less for vigorous exercise like running. The data we do have about exercise indicates that health benefits continue to accrue as exercise level increases, to a point that far exceeds 45 minutes a day. For people who like evolutionary explanations, investigators who work with societies that still practice hunter/gatherer lifestyles tend to find they are active on the order of 3 to 5 hours a day, of which over an hour is moderate to vigorous physical activity, so about triple the recommended level, and almost double 45 minutes a day. Very importantly, their activity levels don’t drop off with age as much as the activity levels of people living in westernized societies; they remain quite active throughout the life course.

This still leaves us with the question of what we should aim for. Studies that look for associations with better outcomes at different levels of steps per day keep finding more up to about 16,000. At that level, it’s hard to analyze effectively because there are not enough people who do it, or not enough people with different characteristics who do it. For example, it is possible that people who routinely walk more than 2 hours a day are different in many ways from people who walk 5,000 to 10,000 steps a day, and so it would not be possible to compare the two groups solely on the basis of walking volume.

From what we do know, 45 minutes a day, assuming that covers at least 5000 steps, will certainly be helpful, and it greatly exceeds the US activity guidelines (which are more of a starting point than a limit). More is almost always better. From a healthy aging perspective, being active consistently and daily – and including some strength training – is a key to a higher quality of life, and greater independence, for longer.

My answer on Quora

Sitting or standing, which is best?

My guilty pleasure is Quora, which I dip into if a question intrigues me. Sometimes I “archive” the more interesting topics here.

“Is sitting or standing better for health, and in what amount? I’ve seen articles suggesting both.“

The idea behind recommending more standing rests on the high modern prevalence of being expected to be seated quietly for long stretches of time, and the observation that this is associated with poorer health outcomes. Newpapers and magazines know that a lot of their readers have sedentary jobs, so they tend to emphasize the results that recommend less sitting. Standing does involve more activity for the body in term of maintaining balance, and so on, but standing for long periods, especially with minimal movement otherwise, is also associated with health risks.

The research question, for the people doing the studies, has never really been “What should a person do all day, sit or stand?” Or at least, I don’t think any investigators have seriously asked that question. The questions investigators ask have always been more like “Hmm, it looks like people who sit a lot have more heart disease than people who are on their feet a lot [eg, in the classic London Transport Workers Study (1949–1952), comparing drivers and conductors] – what is the specific mechanism for this? How much is too much? Are there easy ways to mitigate this for people in jobs requiring being seated” and, separately, “Prolonged standing is associated with back pain and vascular problems in the lower leg – what are the specific mechanisms here? How much is too much? Are there easy ways to mitigate this for people in jobs requiring long durations of standing?”

Studies are usually constructed to address very specific questions. The idea is to make the participants in the control and treatment groups as similar as possible so you can identify a dose-response relationship: you know the thing is having an effect, because different amounts (or the presence vs absence of it) are reliably associated with a particular outcome. But you want to minimize “confounding” – factors that could be contributing to a different outcome and whose relationship to the treatment are unknown or hard to determine. In practice, that may result in exclusions or controls that are strict enough to make generalizing to actual real-life behavior quite difficult. For example, the studies of pharmaceuticals that are submitted to the FDA to support approval, even those intended for use in very serious conditions, often exclude participants who are using a large number or specific forms of other medications, even though in real life, anyone eligible for the medication under study might also need those other medications. Studies are, therefore, best thought of as contributions to an overall picture, rather than definitive answers to broad questions.

It is common for a new study with surprising results or for the most recent very large study of a specific question to be reported in general-audience media more or less on their own, with little if any context. General-audience publications often report the latest results in isolation, creating the impression that “they” used to say one thing, and now “they” are saying another, when that is very rarely the case. It’s also common for general-audience publications to see things in terms of two sides or some other binary opposition (“sitting is bad, so you should stand instead”). But from the point of view of clinical practice, a single study is only valuable as a point of information in a larger whole. If the conclusion is surprising, investigators don’t usually think “see, everyone was wrong before!” They think, “maybe there is another question we should be asking so we can tell the difference between when we can expect this result and when we can expect the other result that this seems to contradict.” That interplay rarely makes it into a newspaper article or blog post.

Most clinicians will tell you that when it comes to almost anything, “the dose makes the poison.” It’s good to drink plenty of water, for example, but it is possible to drink too much and have serious health consequences. That is true of standing and sitting as well. Doing too much, especially with minimal other movement, of either one is associated with poorer health outcomes. That said, a lot of people don’t really have the flexibility to switch between sitting and standing during their work day, so telling people to mix them up is not very helpful. Fortunately, there is another set of guidelines that can help all of us: getting at least the minimum (ideally more) recommended physical activity – a combination of sustained activity, like walking or running, and muscle-strengthening activities, like climbing, pushups, or lifting weights.

My answer on Quora
US Physical Activity Guidelines

Oprah, Weight Watchers, and “Impossible”

Ready to head back? Cartoon by Robert Leighton (2003)

So Oprah is on Weight Watchers. She recently bought WW stock, which then appreciated like gangbusters, so she has that going for her, which is nice.

I’m seeing a lot of posts chewing over this news, many with disappointment and general comments about the “impossibility” of losing weight. Even if you are Oprah, and rich, and capable, and surrounded by opportunities for help and support.

It’s not impossible to lose weight, but it’s difficult, frustrating, and draining to do things you dislike for reasons that are tied to sadness. If you are mired in a belief that “inside every overweight woman is the woman she knows she can be,” then your framing is your prison. Because if that woman is “inside” you, she IS you.

You can’t take good care of something you hate.

Acceptance in its various forms is often denigrated as passivity, as giving up, as the sweatpants and pint of ice cream of the soul. But sweatpants and ice cream are a perfectly enjoyable part of anyone’s life, and then you put them away, have a good night’s sleep, and get dressed for work and have an apple or whatever and life goes on. You can choose to make a habit of healthful living, and you can choose to make a habit of self-care and enjoyment, too.

Ultimately we are what we repeatedly do. If you keep punishing yourself for some notional failure, trying every 30-day fix out there in hopes something will stick, what will stick is restless program-hopping and the sense of failure. Give yourself the gift of walking away from that. Don’t try to change everything at once, but instead choose one small thing and practice it until you don’t have to think about it anymore. Then build on that track record of success.

“Ready to Head Back?” by Robert Leighton (2003)

“Move More” Is About More Than the Obesity Epidemic

doughty-lumbersexual

White men have been fretting about losing their *mumble*something* for at least 100 years. (Nitpick: I guess ‘lumbersexual’ is a play on ‘metrosexual,’ but it sounds too much like homo/bi/heterosexual to me, possibly because it’s so compatible with the hypermasculine archetypes in the gay community, so I keep thinking the lumbersexuals should be the ones lusting after these Bunyanesque figures.)

As silly as this particular instance is, I feel like this might have a useful connection to other conversations, like boys doing worse in school as more schools do away with recess and popular — and sometimes data — support for stereotypes like men being more likely to die doing something stupid.

As a society, we have recently been putting too much emphasis on sitting quietly (or at least being reasonably orderly) — first, explicitly, with public schools, designed as a method for pre-training a ready workforce, and even more so in the last century as the manufacturing economy gives way to cubicles as far as the eye can see. Women have an advantage in such constricting environments by being socialized to “go along to get along,” but it shouldn’t surprise us when men, who retain “boys will be boys” socializing in spite of these macro changes in our social environment, have more trouble “adjusting.”

I’m not advocating going along to get along — I think rejecting that expectation is healthy, and it’s explicitly a form of privilege to feel free to reject it. I feel like we are seeing a wide range of signs that are telling us we need to move more, do more hands-on activity, inhabit our environments more actively. Women, too! We just don’t have the handy stereotypes to model on.

The Atlantic article goes on to explain that the romance of the lumberjack image was deeply at odds with the hazardous and tenuous life of actual lumberjacks, especially as the industry expanded. Logging remains one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States, a lot of risk for barely $35k a year. This makes the appeal of the mythos greater, of course, rather than less — however you feel about logging today, the historic image is one of honest work to help build a growing nation. Even for people who also enjoy knowledge work, that is a powerful draw — getting up, getting your hands dirty, having a physical object to show for it, a feeling of righteous exhaustion, all in the service of something tangibly useful. You don’t have to wear plaid to split wood, and you don’t have to split wood to enjoy making things. We clearly yearn for more than cubicle life, so let’s make sure we get out more.

The Perfect “Body”

vs-perfect-body

What are we to make of a campaign image like this one? Victoria’s Secret is of course well aware of the politics around terms like “perfect body,” and I am sure it is at least as well versed in the intricacies of Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign as the people who created it. (VS might be reading too much into negative media and critical responses to Dove’s campaign this year and last, too, though.)

I don’t even have the energy to be outraged by this kind of advertising. It seems self-evidently prescriptive, unkind, and elitist. It would be a great jumping-off point for a university seminar on advertising or internalized sexism — beauty standards seems too obvious.

But it is very hard to see this kind of imagery as anything other than a deliberate taunt. Apparently “the perfect body” (by Victoria) comes in several color ways (as any well-developed product line does) but, judging by the different types of bras listed beneath the models, is one that varies primarily in a woman’s preference for displaying her breasts.

Then again, what else should we expect from the promoter of the world’s most expensive bra?

UPDATE, November 10: Tagline changed to “A Body for Every Body,” but the art is exactly the same. So now instead of saying their waifish models are “perfect,” they are actually claiming they represent “every body.” This is worse, a truly remarkable display of tone deafness.

abodyforeverybody

Paul Ford Builds It

And almost 2000 people show up immediately.

If you are respectful of others, you will be welcomed, and people will be excited to see your web pages and to meet you. This is not a special characteristic of tilde.club; this is a basic characteristic of decent humans that somehow has become atypical on the Internet.

I got online in 1992, and this piece is making me so nostalgic, even though everything about what he made sounds distinctly nicer than most of what I encountered then. Wait, is that what nostalgia is? Being suffused with a sense of what the good old days could have been if they actually had been good?

Men’s Health and the Foam Finger

So this happened.

The article is short:

The Secret to Talking Sports with Any Woman

The things that interest you are unlikely to interest her, but you can still make a connection; here’s how

Not all women share your passion for sports, in case you hadn’t noticed. The reason? They need story lines.

“Most women don’t care about stats,” says Andrei Markovits, Ph.D., coauthor of Sportista: Female Fandom in the United States. So while you’re enthusing about Dominic Moore’s scoring record, she’d rather hear about how he supported his wife’s battle with cancer—and even took a season off from the NHL at the height of his career. Treat your heroes as people and not just players on a field, and you’ll suck her in.

Just don’t expect her to wear the foam finger.

My gut response is “why are you trying to sell me something I don’t care about? Why are you trying to talk to me if we don’t share any interests?”

I guess the real question is, “Why do we think it’s normal and OK that men and women who are intimate can somehow fail to share interests?” In fact, why do we even think it’s true?

But the worst part of this whole thing is that the advice about bringing a story into it is actually pretty good — the writer just chose an awful story.

Humans love stories.

Male humans. Female humans. Juvenile humans. Adult humans. Story has been a defining passion of humans for as long as we could record … anything.

And that applies to the most passionate statistics-collecting baseball fan. I don’t know a single one who’d claim it was just a bunch of numbers — for them the numbers tell a rich tapestry of stories over generations, stories about struggles and careers and disappointments and triumphs. And that’s no mere asterisk in that table! THAT’s a whole other story!

So tell her a story! Don’t try to dig up some trivia YOU don’t care about but are second-guessing she will. Tell her the story YOU see unfolding. Tell her how you fell in love with the game, how many happy memories you have going to see it played. Tell her about career-high and career-low events you witnessed or followed.

Maybe she’ll even want to know more! She may ask how a game progresses — pretty much no one cares about a sport they can’t follow. Use that opportunity to challenge yourself to think about the big picture instead of getting bogged down in a rabbit warren of little rules. At least at first.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up having something in common after all.

When You See Someone You Find Unattractive

[Fat|scrawny|ugly|whatever] people shouldn’t be allowed to wear [bikinis|spandex|yoga pants|whatever].

If you find yourself thinking this, you can solve this problem once and for all:

Don’t like someone’s body? Stop looking at it.

So easy! One simple step that anyone can take. Try it today!

But I’m entitled to my opinion!

Yes, absolutely. So take responsibility for it. Own it. Say “I don’t like the way bikinis look on that body type.”

But that makes it sound like it’s just about me, like no one has to care.

Right again! No one has to care about your opinion of their body.

But it’s not just personal — it’s about standards. People should have some pride in their appearance, and not look like that.

Nope. Wrong. Nobody has an obligation to please you with their appearance. (Unless you are a Drill Instructor doing an inspection, I guess. Are you?)

This isn’t just about appearance! It’s about health. Those people aren’t healthy.

Ah yes, the “just trying to help fat people” defense. That may be true, but you don’t know, you don’t know whether they’re working to change that, and you don’t know what obstacles they’ve faced.

You’re probably [fat|ugly|scrawny|whatever], too!

Yeah, probably. There’s a lot of people in the world, and I’m sure there’s plenty I don’t appeal to. Plus, all those terms are moving targets — they don’t have consistent uses among different people.

Anyway, now you know what to do about it!

Update: America the Beautiful

Coca-Cola had a pretty controversial Super Bowl ad this year. But it didn’t hurt the company.

During this year’s Super Bowl, Coca-Cola aired a one-minute commercial in which children of all different ethnicities sang America the Beautiful in their native languages. The ad sparked a xenophobic backlash on Twitter that within days had evolved into a large-scale defense of both America and Coke. “America the Beautiful” turned out to be the company’s most successful campaign in years. Young people ages 19 to 24 bought Coca-Cola products 20 percent more often than they did the month before. —From “Coke Confronts Its Big Fat Problem”

No surprises in this combination — that younger demographic probably just thought the different languages were neat.

This is practically an aside in that article, which is about Coca-Cola’s larger problem — an image problem with an uncomfortable history — of being so closely associate with the obesity epidemic. The CEO mostly, but not quite, skirts the coincidence of accelerating obesity with soda sellers’ pushes into larger and larger size bottles, but Coca-Cola probably has more to lose to competing products that are also sugary than from health concerns.