Are you ready to remove the guilt and shame associated with food and your body?
Are you ready to rediscover how you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally?
This blog post is focused on unpacking whether your Apple Watch, or any fitness tracker for that matter, is helping or harming you. The impact of your Apple Watch, its helpfulness or harmfulness, is based on the intention behind its use, as well as your relationship with movement, fitness, and health.
We hear this question all the time—from clients, from prospective clients, from people following us on Instagram & TikTok, from comments on posts focusing on gentle movement, and from those trying to make peace with movement. A smart device is certainly not necessary for living a happy, healthy, food freedom life. But, in all honesty, there is no clear answer to this question.
The nuances of each individual’s relationship with food and movement reflects the nuances of whether or not your Apple Watch is helpful or harmful. Before delving into your relationship with your Apple Watch, Fitbit, or smart watch, consider your relationship with movement.
What is your relationship with movement?
What was the first word that came to mind?
Diet culture is a 72-billion-dollar industry that is built off of insecurities that tries to shrink our bodies, encourages us to take up less space, convinces us to burn calories past the point of enjoyment, and punish ourselves for eating something.
Shifting your focus to a life of intuitive eating means you’ve most likely heard phrases like “joyful movement.” If you are working on recovering from years of trying to shrink your body, you are not going to wake up and simply change from vigorous, unpleasant exercise to joyful movement. Holding feelings of fear and punishment are common emotions felt toward movement when in diet culture. Just as our ability to find food freedom requires having unconditional permission to eat, our ability to find food freedom requires having unconditional permission to rest.
Unconditional permission to rest can create fear or other negative emotions. You may fear the idea of becoming sedentary and your body evolving out of your control. The truth is, when you allow yourself to rest from movement, you get to a point where you recognize a desire to move or realize which movements bring you joy.
So, let’s dissect your relationship with your Apple Watch or smartwatch. Here are a few prompts to begin thinking about this:
- Why do you wear your Apple Watch?
- What do you like about it?
- What do you not like about it?
- How does wearing your Apple Watch make you feel when you get alerts throughout the day?
- Does wearing your Apple Watch affect your behavior?
- How do you feel when you forget to wear your Apple Watch? How about if you forget it during physical activity?
- Do you feel guilt or shame if you don’t reach a certain step count or if you don’t close your rings?
If you find yourself acknowledging any feelings of guilt, I want you to consider how you can expect to feel pleasant from something that makes you feel guilty.
This does not mean you can never wear your Apple Watch again! Instead, make efforts to alter your relationship with it. Consider changing the settings and notifications to make your relationship more pleasant.
After I got my Apple Watch, I was being hounded with notifications to move more. But, this programmed device had no idea what my life actually looked like! I was going through fertility treatments and my heart rate was not allowed to exceed a certain point. This meant that I was not allowed to do any type of vigorous activity and, obviously, was further hounded to move and work out.
I am in 100% support of full autonomy over decision making and am not telling you to get rid of your Apple Watch.
Instead, I invite you to be curious about how it makes you feel. Get curious if you can improve your everyday experience with it by adjusting notifications. You don’t have to limit yourself, rather, be honest with yourself.
It is so very rare when we are working with clients that they have a positive relationship with movement in the beginning of their journey. If you have not dug into your relationship with movement and found healing, chances are your Apple Watch is more harmful than helpful. Clients who have found joyful movement and healed their relationship with their body may find more help from their Apple Watch than harm.
When we make peace with movement, we start to move our body because it feels good, because we want to enjoy it, because you can, and/or because we are grateful for what our bodies can do. This returns to the importance of the intention behind movement. Discovering the root of your intention for movement will help you as you move forward with your interactions with your smart watch.
If this blog post resonated with you, click here to listen to our podcast episode “What is Intuitive Movement?” and delve deeper into your relationship with movement!
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