Yesterday morning I picked up my old Fitbit sensor and plugged it back in for the first time in about two years. If I’m going to do this thing, I want to do it right — record all food eaten, record weight and body fat each morning, etc. And ostensibly Fitbit supports this. But it is stunningly opaque. It flashes up calculated data such as calories burned that fluctuate wildly throughout the day. So I’m eating based on its estimate of 2300 calories, and at the end of the day when I sync it up I’ve walked 11,000 steps and 5 miles, and the little flower tells me I’m being active, but my “activity” score is 15 (out of 1000?) and my calories burned are down closer to 1800, way lower than it was predicting.

And “whoops,” it tells me, “you’re over your daily calorie goal.” Well, I wouldn’t have had that cookie after dinner if you had just given me some consistent data! I think this is why I gave up on Fitbit pretty quickly last time — I don’t want your faked up data, I don’t want your opaque “scores,” I don’t want your meaningless graphs that say I’ve been sedentary all day and seem to ignore the walks I took and stairs I climbed. The hard truth is that these pedometer-based fitness tracking systems are all hopelessly inaccurate and seem to verge on pseudoscience. If all you care about is footsteps, go nuts. For anything better, you’re going to need something much more sophisticated.

Funny, you would think the amazing tiny pocket computers studded with sensors that we all carry around nowadays and refer to as “phones” could help with this problem!