Fitness Trackers are all the rage right now, with devices from companies like Fitbit selling in huge numbers and being pretty ubiquitous. Wearing a Fitbit is as much a fashion statement as anything else. This is a way of communicating to the world that you do fitness and are up to scratch with modern technology.

What’s less clear is just whether or not a device like this can help you to lose weight and get into better shape. Read on, and we’ll look at how something like a Fitbit stacks up in real-world testing and how you can use it to your advantage.

The Good

First, let’s take a look at what fitness trackers do well. Motivation and awareness are the first and most important things you will get from your fitness tracker. At their most basic, fitness trackers are devices that can count steps (pedometers) and tell you roughly how many calories you might have burned.

This can then bring home the reality of your current activity levels. Many of us will be shocked, for instance, at just how little we move during the weekends. Those who work in offices and drive in the mornings find that they don’t move much Monday-Friday.

Seeing this reality written in plain English can make it hard to deny and encourage you to move a little more and increase your general activity levels.

This gets even more powerful when you consider the social elements that many fitness trackers come with. Many fitness trackers will also let you see how your friends, family, and partner are doing regarding their fitness goals – or challenge them to see who can move the most in a set amount of time.

This, too, can be an excellent tool for encouraging more activity and getting you to head outside and move more.

Then there are the additional tools and features, such as following guided workouts and HIIT routines.

The Bad

There are downsides to fitness trackers, too, however. The first is that they are not usually remarkably accurate. Heart rate monitoring is only possible to a degree if you aren’t wearing a chest strap and even then, it is only somewhat correlated with calorie burn.

A fitness tracker can’t pick up many activities at all. While the notion of making sure you burn more calories than you consume can also be an overly simplistic way to monitor your diet, that doesn’t consider such things as your micronutrients or your hormonal balance.

In short, a fitness tracker is a fantastic tool for helping with weight loss and can be beneficial. However, it is also important not to rely on them or to perceive them as any ‘silver bullet’ that will help you magically lose all your weight.