Episode 283: Are Tracking Apps Harmful?
Are tracking apps harmful?
For the longest time, I didn’t know how to listen to my body.
In this episode, I discuss how tracking apps gave me data - completely personalized insights that helped me understand my body in real time every day.
I share how they taught me how to quantify my body functions in ways that aren’t obvious, ultimately helping me gain self-awareness and body awareness—not how some magazine, social media influencer, book, or TV show tells me how I “should” feel.
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“Sometimes, we start to do things subconsciously, where we don’t even realize what we’re doing. Tracking apps help me check in with myself and build self-awareness. I don’t use them all the time, but they help me when I feel disconnected from myself, when I feel a little bit out of control, and when I feel like I need a little bit more awareness of what’s going on so I can make informed, mindful decisions moving forward.”
Read the Transcript:
Hello there, and welcome to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura, and I'm really happy to be here with you today.
Today’s show will bridge the gap between some health topics and how Human Design fits in.
If bridging this gap is new to you, please check “Healthy by Human Design, a self-guided video-on-demand that’s now available, and while you’re there, check out my other video-on-demand training, like Human Design Essentials.
Today, I want to talk about tracking apps and discuss if they’re harmful. What do you think? Are tracking apps harmful?
There are two spectrums on this debated topic - whether apps like My Fitness Pal and similar tracking apps are harmful or helpful.
I believe the problem isn’t in the app itself but our mindsets toward them. It’s how and why we choose to use them.
Most people will use an app like My Fitness Pal to track calories for weight loss because this is how the app is marketed, which leads to a whole conversation about how we feel about ourselves and our bodies and how society conditions us into what we’re “supposed to” look like.
I've been a health coach for nine years now and never once have I marketed my health coaching services for weight loss. It felt icky when I first started it feels icky now.
I do not work with people who have weight loss as their goal. It’s not my area of specialty, nor do I want it to be.
My work involves uncovering what’s happening underneath the surface and connecting the dots to figure out what’s at the root of your complaints. If this is new to you, Healthy x Human Design, one of my video-on-demand training courses, goes into detail on peeling back the layers and this approach to health.
It’s about what’s going on in our bodies, as well as in our brains, minds, and emotions.
What we’re talking about today is not shaming about the apps you choose to use or not use or counting calories.
I've seen far too many people shame people on either end of this discussion and those somewhere in the middle.
You do what you must, but I want you to be very clear about your “why.” What’s your true motivation for whatever you want to do? Are you holding yourself to a standard that someone else has set, that society has set? I want to really evaluate and question your motivation and what's correct for you. This is about peeling back the layers to get to the true root of your motivation.
With that, this is also about being open to reframing your mindset and intentions. For the sake of this episode, reframing tracking apps: Are they harmful? Or is it your mindset around the way that you've used them that's actually harmful?
The first tracking tool I used 20 years ago wasn't even an app. It was a website called Calorie King. I had just joined Gold’s Gym, and at that time, I was not, by any means, living a health-conscious life. I didn't even know what that meant.
I had started working with a personal trainer at the gym who’d talk to me about what I was eating, what I ate, and when I ate before my workout. I had no concept of healthy eating or how much I should or should not be eating according to the goals that I wanted to achieve. I didn't even know what goals were realistic for me.
My trainer introduced me to Calorie King. It was an eye-opening educational experience that taught me about macronutrients. It taught me about fuel to feel my workouts and how to make sure I wasn’t underfed.
It taught me about portions because I thought eating Kashi cereal was healthy but didn’t know that eating an entire box in one sitting wasn’t ideal, especially for blood sugar. I didn't know any of this, so it started as an educational tool.
Unfortunately, I eventually developed an unhealthy relationship with it - I let the numbers dominate my life. Everything became about “calories in versus calories out.” I became fixated on that.
It led to obsessive tracking. Whenever I ate out, I’d spend hours doing the math to break down the recipe so I could log the calories. I also became obsessed with the “calories out” part of the equation and could not go a day without working out, even when exhausted and burnt out.
For those of you who know my backstory, Live FAB Life started as a pursuit of living a “fit and balanced” life after overtraining.
I didn’t know it was possible to exercise too much or that it could actually hurt me instead of helping me.
Now, was CalorieKing harmful to my health? Or was it my mindset determined by a lack of education and awareness?
Twenty years later, my mindset has shifted. I’m no longer hung up on “calories in, calories out.” It’s about whether I'm nourishing my body and giving it what it needs. Am I eating meals that keep my blood sugar balanced? Am I properly fueled for my workouts and sufficiently recovered from them?
One thing I currently struggle with is eating a balanced amount of protein. I use MyFitnessPal these days because I use it from time to time to check in and see where I’m at in balancing macronutrients—carbs, protein, and fat—and translate that to how my body is feeling and functioning.
If my digestion feels a little bit off or I have trouble sleeping, I look at these data points to make correlations between how I’m feeling, what I’m eating, and how my body is functioning.
Sometimes, we start to do things subconsciously, where we don't even realize what we're doing.
These tools help me check in with myself and build self-awareness. I don’t use them all the time, but they help me when I feel disconnected from myself, when I feel a little bit out of control, and when I just feel like I need a little bit more awareness of what's going on so I can make informed, mindful decisions moving forward.
Now, I have an Undefined Sacral Center, which means that I don’t have an inner self-regulating system. In Human Design, those who do have a Defined Sacral Center always know when enough is enough. They know when they’ve had enough to eat, enough to sleep, and enough exercise—they have this gift of an inner self-regulatory system.
With an Undefined Sacral Center, I do not have this gift.
So tracking apps help remind me that “Hey, eating an entire bag of Hu Chocolate-covered Almonds isn’t the best idea, and this is a good amount for you.” I can log it and record that I ate it earlier in the day. Even though it's my favorite candy, maybe I should find a better option for an evening snack, even if Hu Chocolates has a better, healthier quality.
So, tracking apps help me manage my Undefined Sacral Center in not knowing when enough is enough.
It also helps me manage my Undefined Head Center by relieving mental pressure.
The Head Center and the Root Center are pressure centers in Human Design. When they are undefined, this tells you that you don't manage pressure well.
I have both of these centers Undefined. I can function under pressure but not well, nor is the output my best work. When the energy of pressure centers isn’t managed well, it can cause you to feel stress and anxiety.
I use a few tracking apps at various times to manage different aspects of my life. Some months, I’ll use this and other months, I’ll use that, but there are two apps that I use all the time and have for years. I depend on these two apps daily and want to share them with you.
The first is a wearable device and an app – my Oura ring.
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve seen and heard me talk about my Oura ring. It’s like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, but it's a ring, so you wear it on your finger, not your wrist, which I love. I don't like to sleep wearing a watch, so a ring is my perfect solution.
The Oura ring tracks my sleep, my body's readiness, meaning how it recovered from the day before. I wish I had a tool like this during my marathon training years because I didn’t know how to listen to my body.
I've done several episodes on this, which I'll link to in the show notes at livefablife.com/283 for Episode 283.
I didn’t know how to listen to my body for the longest time. Using tracking apps gives me data to quantify how my body functions in ways that aren’t obvious to me. This is what I mean by it helping me gain self-awareness and body awareness—not how some magazine, social media influencer, book, or TV show tells me how I “should” feel.
It’s completely personalized insights that help me understand my body in real time every day.
My Oura ring tracks my sleep, not just my sleep but also the quality of my sleep and my sleeping trends.
It tracks my resilience, which ties back to how well I have recovered, or not recovered, from the day before. What’s my readiness based on my resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and body temperature?
By the way, for the ladies listening, body temperature is a big factor in your menstrual cycle, so it gives you insights into that, too.
Of course, it tracks my activity. If there’s an abnormal day where I overextended myself or did a lot more activity than usual—and I’m saying “activity” and not “workout” because it tracks just your everyday movement—if you’re moving boxes. You do a workout; it tracks all of that movement. All of it matters—not just the workout.
So, it tracks activity. Then, in relation to my activity level from the day before, how well did I sleep? All this data combined tells me how active or inactive I should be the next day.
There have been many instances where I had an active day, and the next day, the markers (resting heart rate, sleep, HRV, body temp) aren’t optimal, which indicates that my body hasn’t fully recovered. Therefore, I should take it easy that day instead of pushing myself when it’s already depleted.
I wish I had this kind of insight and awareness during marathon training because I didn't know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to take rest days. My ego got in the way, and I’d push myself to the detriment of following my training plan, pushing my body to finish the assigned workout because I didn't know how to listen to my body. I have an Undefined Sacral Center and don’t have an inner spidey sense of knowing when enough is enough.
So, my Oura ring now helps me develop body awareness. We're often told to listen to our bodies, but no one teaches us how. We have nothing to compare it to.
I recently broke my foot (as mentioned in past episodes). I'd never broken a bone before. I didn’t know how my body would respond to broken bones. So, using a tracking app like the Oura Ring and keeping a little journal helps me to collect data to help me build self-awareness, but it is also a great way of collecting data that can be shared with your doctors and medical teams.
This is how my mindset has shifted around tracking tools. It’s helped me build self-awareness so that I know myself better my body better, and how to listen to my body by recognizing and interpreting the messages it sends me. I know what to look for, which helps me make more informed, personalized, healthier, and correct choices.
The other app I want to discuss is a different tracking app. It's called “Don't Break the Chain.”
I've been using this app for a few years. When I started using it, it was free – I don't know if it still is, but check it out in the App Store.
It's a habit tracker, so it's not attached to any wearable device. It doesn’t track metrics like sleep, macros, or resting heart rates.
It’s like a “to-do” task list where I check things off when I’ve completed it because I get personal satisfaction from making that check mark.
I started using it to track my workouts, but as I started doing various workouts, I've since created sub-trackers to track different kinds of workouts that I do. For example, I have one tracker for kickboxing, one for strength training, one for yoga, and a lot more. You get the idea.
When deciding what workout to do, I’ll scroll through Don’t Break the Train and think, “Hmm, I haven't done a HIIT workout in six months—maybe I should do that today.”
Sometimes, if my body feels stiff, I’ll look at my yoga tracker and see that I haven’t done yoga in over a week.”
Over the years, how I use the app has expanded to track other things - like naps. As a projector, rest is important for me. I never used to be able to sleep during the day. Still, after learning about my Human Design Type of Projector and understanding how my energy flows, I’ve put more effort towards napping, when my schedule allows for it, and I like to track when I’ve taken a nap. It's another data point I can turn to for correlation of when I felt good and what I did during that time that contributed to it.
I use it to track my beauty routine. As a Beautycounter brand advocate, when we have new products released, I like to track when I started using them and build a habit of using them to test for product efficacy—how effective has it been for me?
I've used it to build new habits. A few years ago, I’d fallen out of the habit of flossing my teeth at night before bed, so I started it with this app. Now, I have a chain of 900+ consecutive days and counting. And guess what? I don't want to break the chain, so every night, no matter how tired I am, I floss because I need to keep the chain going.
I now use it to track medication, not just when I take my medication and supplements but also when I give Coco Pop her medication. It’s come in handy on more than one occasion when speaking with my doctor or Coco’s vet, as I can refer back to important dates.
It’s how I work with having an Undefined Head Center because it relieves mental pressure by not having to track all of these things in my head. I don’t have to panic and ask myself, “Gosh, did I take that medication today? Did it give Coco her medication today?” As soon as I administer our medications, I check them off in the app. So, if I wonder about it, I just look at the app and see that it’s already done.
I take an injectable medication every two weeks, alternating where it’s injected. This app makes it so easy to remember which week I’m supposed to track it and where to inject it.
I also used it to track chores like watering my plants. When my plants start to limp, I check the app to see if it’s time to water them again.
As I said, it relieves mental pressure by tracking everything in my daily and not-so-daily life.
One last thing—I've recently started using it to track my grocery shopping and gas purchases. I can add a little note of how much each item costs, so it’s been helping me track my spending on these things.
It’s all about taking pressure off my shoulders and collecting data to build more awareness around myself, my habits, my body, the upkeep of my home, and my finances.
So, let me ask you again: Are tracking apps harmful or helpful? Has your perspective shifted in any way?
Leave a comment on the show notes for this episode at livefablife.com/283, or find me on Instagram at @livefablifewithnaomi.
It's an interesting conversation, particularly when considering your Ajna Center—the center of opinions, beliefs, and points of view. I have an Undefined Ajna Center, so I see different perspectives and the validity of different points of view, and I’m curious as to what yours is.
Before I leave you, don’t forget to check out the self-guided video-on-demand training on my website. I’m pleased with how they’ve turned out thus far, and I hope you watching and learning from them as much as I’ve enjoyed creating them for you.
With that, take care, have a great week and I’ll see you back here next time! Bye for now!
Naomi Nakamura is a Health x Human Design coach who’s creating a healthier society through aligned energy.
She blends a bespoke mix of Functional Nutrition and Human Design to help others shift into alignment to leverage and correctly manage their energy to support their body, mind, and spirit.
She believes that when we embrace our authenticity and lean into our bio-individuality, we naturally live a life of freedom, empowerment, and optimal health.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
Connect with Naomi on: Instagram
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