A couple of years ago, I was doing a workout at home when the band of my Fitbit broke, revealing the tan line of my wrist which for many years has been covered with some sort of fitness tracking device.
At the time, I reflected on how it felt to move “Fitbit-free” and the ways in which my attention turned inward, along with all of the other neuroses around appearance that settle in once I hit 30 and the grays, fine lines, and other various “imperfections” began to collect on my suddenly weathered body. Here is what I wrote at the time:
I found an old journal scribbled with numbers the other day, a relic of the mind I occupied for about a decade of my teens. The numbers began programmatically logged under the "gods" of BMI, before becoming contraband by the same authorities, and eventually relegated to the backs of napkins — a safety blanket, like going home for holiday breaks and knowing your bed would still be there. When I turned 31, I told myself, "I’m probably in the best shape of my life." Perhaps by some other god of muscle mass index, I was. I could lift and push heavy things, almost in a way that startled me. Prior to that, I had run my first half marathon, a feat that now I basically shrug and say, "Bodies are crazy." I never did get that body fat/muscle mass thingamajig test at the time. At 33, I'm sitting with questions about appearances. Should I whiten my teeth, get Botox, color grays, get cherry angiomas removed, and lately: have my loose skin “fixed”? Every doctor's visit is part health, part aesthetic. I have no cavities, but they could bleach my teeth. I don't have skin cancer, but what about fine lines? Is it odd that we have infused arbitrary moral judgments around these decisions, or is it the least surprising thing ever? This week, my Fitbit broke. I've been staring at my wrist wondering, are we over — me and the game of numbers? I feel confident in understanding my body when it’s fatigued, energized, hungry. But it's been a long time since I did it on my own. My bare arm makes me feel like a wild animal. But if that's the case, what was I before? Lately I work out at home in just shorts and a sports bra. My body is exposed, exposed to me. And the craziest thing happened in the middle of a workout and I could feel my skin moving with me and the music. Normally, it would all be "tight" under my spandex pants and shirt and whatnot. At certain points, there has been more lean to curb the wiggle. But it was all just ~out there~ and for a rare glimpse, that felt like my strength, conveying useful information. Like I could tap my palm to my hip and learn more. It's taken a decade, it might take more, but for a moment I existed in this loose-skinned, jiggly-parts body, and felt free.
I wrote those words in the clarity of an afterglow brought on by doing The Class one morning. I found The Class sometime in 2021 and have been an online subscriber since, practicing here and there or sometimes quite regularly. Discovering it as a practice allowed me to realize how pivotal and healing music was and has always been for me. It was the music, paired with the beat and sequence of movements, that created such a cathartic experience. Really, that has been the case for my yoga classes since Day One of teaching. Music, movement, meditation, and journaling make up the pillars of the practices that I offer to my students now and the result is a practice that I find exponentially more consciousness-shifting than I could ever experience doing yoga in silence or with music that felt incongruent with the movements.
After such practices, I can feel that my energy has shifted. Sometimes, I feel a catharsis that wipes the slate of my mind clean, while other times I feel a well-spring of emotions, ideas, and novel connections that compel me to write, sing, keep on dancing, cook something new, or take some kind of action. Fitness devices can be illuminating—alerting for emergencies like an unexpected fall or the onset of illness—and for many, they can be useful from a behavior change standpoint, compelling us to take that extra walk after dinner rather than to watch TV. But a fitness watch could never capture the glowing sensation I feel after dancing to a favorite song, or a runner’s high set to a Taylor Swift playlist, or the view from an overlook on a mountain hike. These devices can all approximate our health or progress toward a goal based on a set of biological indicators, but none can know us so deeply or uncover quite that sort of wisdom.
As each year passes, these devices are becoming more and more sophisticated, perhaps threatening to replace our own intuition about the movement that we need to do through more advanced readings of our bodies. But they will always be limited, they will never quite have our intelligence.
I was 13 the first time I discovered tracking numbers around fitness. I had decided that I needed to lose weight the summer of eighth grade and realized I could download calorie counting software on the computer in my bedroom. As I understand the period of my life now, losing weight became an obsession for me, and tracking my food intake eventually became a compulsion. I’m not sure if it’s valuable to sort this into such a pathological lens, but it does feel correct. The idea of being in my body was distressing, so calculating calories and my energetic deficit became a soothing act. Entering numbers at the end of the day and seeing their tally to a sum that the Internet told me would make the scale numbers go down became a ritual that made me feel safe.
It wasn’t the first ritual I developed as a child—there were others that came before it. As I use the word ritual, I’m reminded of an exchange I once had with Sheryl Paul, MA, a counselor trained in the Jungian approach, who shared her theory that children who develop compulsions (and bedtime rituals) are “the hidden priestesses and shamans of our time.” As she described, “The need for healthy rituals is prominent, but most kids don’t have the spiritual guidance to enact healthy rituals, so they instead enact unhealthy ones.” For me as a little girl, it was the precise order and placement of my bedtime tea, the putting on and taking off of my slippers, and the counting games I had to do to fall asleep. Eventually, this counting ritual became a bedtime calorie-counting ritual.
I like to think if there’s any good to come from my own journey, it’s that it’s forced me to learn healthier rituals, ones I can share to help others connect to a sense of safety from within — rather than from numbers in our head or on a screen.
That said, I’m still squarely in my own process. A couple of weeks after I wrote that post about breaking my FitBit, I fell on Jack Mountain where I was hiking, and dislocated my left shoulder. (I can’t even brag that I was bare wristed and digitally untethered at the time, because in fact, I was listening to an audiobook of The Untethered Soul with one earbud in. Did this contribute to my wobbly balance? Perhaps. We’ll never know.)
That same month, I transitioned off hormonal birth control after spending over half of my life on the pill. I spent about 6 months sans medication or device, aiming to discover a set of supportive and healing lifestyle habits on my own terms and without a means of measurement from any external source. Indeed, I learned a lot about my body during that time, developing a new and textured sense of trust and understanding within it. I learned the flow of a day that was most nourishing to me, the nonnegotiable habits that allowed me to feel and sleep better and improve my mood. These were daily moments like morning sunlight and walking (and watching the sunset when possible), touching nature bare-skinned each day, dancing or listening to music daily, nourishing with protein and fat in the morning, and creating end-of-work habits like lighting a candle to remind my brain and body that I could transition to a more calm time. Every single one of these is still true, and I like that even if I’m 80-90% on target, I still have a pretty great day, mood-wise.
Eventually, I got a new fitness watch. The urge to track my hikes (and venture only with GPS) propelled me to invest in a Garmin and once again I had the numbers on my wrist. This time, though, it was a little different. Calories burned are still tracked, but I am most focused on metrics that feel less punishing, which include my sleep quality and a number called the “Body Battery.” Garmin’s Body Battery is essentially a measure calculated based on the charge and drain on your body and they use a combination of VO2 max, heart rate variability, heart rate, and movement/activities.
While before I was an explorer of habits, now I am a de facto scientist with this thing on my body. I can see how my heart rate and heart rate variability are impacted by my sleep, diet, exercise, and stress. Most notably, I can see how drinking alcohol annihilates my body battery, how dinner within two hours of bedtime puts me into a stress state that means I don’t charge as quickly even while asleep, how a walk before dinner helps bring my stress down, and that rest days are mandatory if I want to improve my speed on a run. My Garmin has never shamed me into working out more but frequently reminds me that I need to take it easy, and applauds me for pacing myself. Unlike the gentle encouragement to “get moving” so I hit my somewhat arbitrary step goal, there are notifications about when I should aim for exercise to help make my body battery more resilient over time. For the first time, the device is helping me to manage my energy in a way that feels supportive, rather than comparative.
But…and this is a bit but…it is still a numbers machine, and the pull of the numbers is still oh-so-strong at times. It often makes me do things that are largely outside of what my intuition would have me do, purely to help keep the calculations tidy and organized. Have I gone for a run simply to maintain my ‘Productive’ training status? Yes. Have I gotten OUT OF BED at 10 pm to walk around my house for 5 minutes just to keep my 10K step/day streak active? YOU BET. Have I felt terrible about myself after seeing my stress off-the-charts after a delicious dinner? Unfortunately, yes. Has it kept me from just enjoying my food? Sometimes, yes.
I keep dreaming about prisons lately. A couple weeks ago, I had a dream that I was sent to a prison where I had all of my belongings, including my watch and my phone, taken away from me. I learned from a past dreamwork course that the best way to understand the meaning of a dream is to reflect not on the story but rather on its feeling. What I noticed most was the freedom I felt in my dream-body of my actions, time, and decision-making in the prison without any of my devices.
Ya know, sometimes my dreams are as subtle as a brick to the face. Anyhow, I responded by deleting Instagram from my phone for a week, but the Garmin watch remained.
Then last week, I was in North Carolina with Ben visiting his parents. One day, my watch pointed out that I was on a new 10,000+ step/day streak at 17 days. Once I learned that, something ancient in my brain lit up; I had to keep the streak going. For the next few nights despite going on trail runs and walking the dogs every day, I happened to hit about 9,000 steps by 9 pm. It was bedtime, but instead, I would obey the pull of my brain and go out onto the covered porch in the rain, taking 75-foot laps in my bare feet until my wrist vibrated and that little ancient part could settle down for the evening.
The next morning while we were drinking coffee, Ben’s dad remarked that he’d noticed me out there, “pacing back and forth, like an animal in a cage.”
I couldn’t help but reflect on that time I ditched the watch for a while: It's taken a decade, it might take more, I said back then. I think that’s still true. Perhaps it’s a never-ending life practice to try to find that feeling of freedom and safety in my body— whether or not I know the numbers, but uncovering so much more than they could ever say.
Post-Script
Last night Ben was telling me about how Courtney Dauwalter, a superhuman ultra-marathon runner, set a new women’s record on the Western States, the worlds’ oldest 100-mile race. She beat the women’s course record by over an hour, running it in 15:29:33. Aside from this being actually mind-bending that a human can do this, I most admire her approach to running free of a coach or a device to decide her training plan. This piece from Trail Runner Magazine left me smiling.
Dauwalter said:
“Sometimes our gadgets can get in the way of our enjoyment of the run…There are so many ways to train, enjoy, and go after running goals. Having a training plan, using devices and analyzing data, or not doing any of those things, are all great options. I think it depends on the person and how they find joy. But I also think there is no downside to occasionally leaving the watch at home and heading out the door for a run where you just listen to your body and not worry about metrics.”