Can Fitness trackers help you lose weight? The answer is NO!

Update October 2016

When I wrote this post over 5 years ago, at a time when the fitness tracking market was picking up, I may have passed off for a luddite. Now I feel vindicated. A recent study tracking 470 overweight people over 2 years has demonstrated that fitness trackers are completely inefficient at helping users lose weight.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/21/fitness-trackers-may-not-aid-weight-loss-study-finds
My advice to you: don't spend hundreds of dollars on a gizmo whose only redeeming value is to make you look cool, use the money for a gym membership instead.My advice: don't spend hundreds of dollars on a gizmo whose only redeeming value is to make you look cool, use the money for a gym membership instead.

As an IT person, I am naturally attracted to the newest high-tech gizmos. So I could not ignore the growing trend in the fitness world consisting in using some kind of electronic monitor to measure one's physical activity and the corresponding number of calories burnt.

GOOD OLE PEDOMETER
The ancestor of all these sophisticated contraptions is the good old pedometer that can still be had today for less than $20. All it monitors is the number of jolts, i.e. steps the wearer takes within a certain period of time. Quite useful indeed for somebody whose sole notable physical activity is walking. But how much better (more effective) are those new activity monitors?

CAN TECH MAKE YOU LOSE WEIGHT?
Most of the modern cousins of the pedometer use several sensors to measure additional parameters like body temperature, heart rate, skin conductivity (level of sweating), speed and distance based on

Glutes: the neglected trouble spot

This post may not be relevant for overweight readers. As a matter of fact, excess fat can hide atrophying glutes (buttocks) muscles by giving an impression of plumpness, especially in women. Needless to say that I do not recommend being overweight. However this post will become extremely relevant as soon as an overweight person will have lost significant weight as muscle weaknesses will become exposed.

When one thinks of signs of an aging figure, the very first thing that comes to mind is a bulging midsection. However, barred a pot belly (that can be avoided simply by not overeating or drinking -easier said than done- ) nothing betrays an aging
figure more surely than a flat derrière. And in this case, no amount of dieting will help. 

Working out with back pain

This may be one of my most important posts date on FitandWise and here is why. Back pain is a major health and socio-economic problem in modern societies. The lifetime prevalence of back pain has been estimated at anything between 59% to 90%.
In other words, the vast majority of us will have back pain at some point in our life. And being over 40 does not help in that respect.

MY OLD PERSONAL NEMESIS
I think that my own personal experience with back pain is worth telling. I first encountered problems with my back in my early 30's as I started working behind a screen for several hours every day. As a matter of fact this risk factor has only worsened since with the emergence of the Internet. I remember my first visit to

Is a calorie a calorie or what apes can teach us

The debate has been raging on between opposite schools of thought since the word fitness was invented: is a calorie a calorie? In other words is the energy measure "Kcal" a purely fungible notion as physicists (and I) are inclined to believe or are "Kcal" (more often referred to as simply "calories") not born equal depending on what they consist in? (low-glycemic starch, high-glycemic sugar, lipids, protein...).

IS A CALORIE A CALORIE?
The definitive solution to this quandary would have dramatic consequences on the efficiency on just about any diet. If all Kcal are created equal, then the only relevant metric to lose weight is the number of Kcal consumed daily minus the daily energy outlay (basic metabolism + physical activity) If on the other hand, there are "good" and "bad" Kcal then the latter metric will be skewed and designing a diet will be a much more complicated affair.