Whether you’re an elite exerciser, or simply a health-focused individual looking to improve your nutrition, a watch with fitness tracking features may be the tool you’re missing. While you may love your watch for its ability to tell time, the real magic can happen when its features are supportive of your health and fitness goals at the same time! Getting a watch with fitness features can be one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your nutrition.
First things first, what exactly can your watch or fitness tracker do to improve your nutrition?
Many fitness tracking watches detect the body’s movement and convert that data to your smartphone to give you data such as calories burned, steps taken, flights of stairs climbed, and heart rate achieved during a workout and throughout the day.
Some fitness watches, such as the Apple Watch, will even remind you to stand up or even take a few minutes to simply “breathe.” One aspect of improving your nutrition and overall health is learning to slow down more! And let’s be honest, we as a society are not the best at taking a moment to breathe! It’s hard to force yourself to be silent, which is where you watch can save the day.
Ever tracked your sleep duration and quality? There are watches with that feature as well!
Can smartwatches really improve your nutrition?
Now, you may be asking, “Does tracking my heart rate, sleep quality, stress levels, or steps going to influence what I eat?” and the answer is a resounding yes! You can make decisions about your nutrition as a result of more than just your hunger. How active we are, how we sleep, our stress levels, hydration levels, and more can actually influence how much and what you choose to put in your mouth. If these things didn’t effect nutrition, we would be eating chicken and broccoli for days!
No matter what your health and fitness goals are, there are many options for fitness trackers. Let’s discuss the best watches to improve nutrition and fast-track your way to crushing your health and fitness goals!
1. The Letsfit Smartwatch
This fitness tracker is great for an affordable price. You get a lot for the price including tracking your running, cycling, walking, yoga workouts, and more. It can even go underwater during your swim workouts and navigate your runs with a GPS navigation system. Steps and stress levels can also be tracked on the Letsfit Smartwatch!
Tracking Steps For A Better Diet
Using a step tracker to lose weight and eat better is possible when a plan is put in place! Sometimes people think they’re got to kill themselves in the gym for 2 hours every day or eat ice cubes for lunch. But really, weight loss can be achieved by simply getting your body moving for more minutes of the day, even if that’s at a slow and steady pace.
Now, merely walking 10,000 steps a day and eating hotdogs and cookies for lunch ain’t going to do the job, but it’s easy to naturally make healthier decisions when you’re daily step goal of 10k steps is achieved. Part of this is the physiological response to exercise and the natural craving for healthy food. People also feel an extra ounce of motivation to choose healthier foods knowing they’ve worked their body hard and want to reap the best possible results from their efforts!
2. The Fitbit Inspire 2
Another affordable watch that covers a lot of ground is the good ole trusty Fitbit! The Fitbit Inspire 2 can also track more than 15 different exercise modes, track steps taken, distance traveled, continuous heart rate, and active zone minutes. The great thing about the Fitbit Inspire 2 is its ability to track your sleep quality. It actually breaks down how much time you spend sleeping in the different phases, light, deep, and REM sleep.
Sleep Tracking and Nutrition Quality
The power of sleep can not be undermined in regards to its role in nutritional habits. Sleep is responsible for a number of physiological processes involved in appetite control!
Sleep deprivation actually affects the body’s release of ghrelin and leptin, two hormones that control when we get hungry and when we are full. Think about it, when you get only a couple of hours of sleep, are you cravings brussels sprouts?! No way! You’re all about the donut and bagels… Right?!
If you’re up late into the night watching movies or finishing a work deadline, are you grabbing grilled chicken and sliced carrots to munch on? I am thinking no. I would venture to say you’re slamming a bag of potato chips!
Tracking can sleep may help keep you accountable and track trends that you see in your nutritional habits when you get good sleep vs subpar sleep. The Fitbit Inspire is one of several watches that can improve your sleep and thus improve your nutrition!
3. Apple Watch Series 6
Of course, we can’t talk about the best watches to improve your nutrition without talking about the beloved Apple Watch! The Apple Watch Series 6 has many of the features already discussed thus far in this article, but a feature that the apple watch has that many do not is the breathing function. Every hour or so, your watch will notify you to start breathing for about a minute or 2 or 3.
Many do not inherently take time to do this, but it can be a game-changer when it comes to impacting food choices.
If your sitting in a brewing ball of stress all day and not taking time to get the body out of a state of fight-or-flight mode, eating choice will not be as optimal. Why? Again, it comes down to stress eating! Regularly practicing deep breathing exercises may help increase weight loss and reduced body fat, as doing so may impede stress levels, which may reduce hunger and the desire for high-calorie foods.
4. Garmin FĒNIX 5X
A unique feature of the Garmin Fenix 5x is it’s ability to measure heart rate variability or HRV. HRV is different than heart rate in that it is a measure of the variation in the time interval between heartbeats. This metric can assess stress levels since it’s a great indicator of the balance between the different branches of the autonomic nervous system and how well your body is equipped to respond to stress.
High HRV generally means that you’re highly equipt to respond to stress and lower HRV indicates that the body is under a higher amount of external stress.
HRV And Nutrition?
First of all, HRV is measuring stress levels, so generally more stress is going to result in poorer diet choices. Being able to monitor your HRV levels and stress score can give personal data about you and help keep you accountable with diet choices.
You may think that you’re just “craving” a burger and fries after a long day, but by measuring your stress levels, you may get clued in about when you choose less healthy foods and when you’re choices are more optimal.
Learning when you can push on the gas with your workouts and when to dial back can be in part determined by HRV, and you may also be able to see how you respond to certain foods with HRV.
This means that HRV can actually help a person detect when a certain diet plan or food is causing a negative physiological response prior to more serious symptoms arising. This can allow a person to make adjustments to best fit their nutritional and health needs!
Smartwatches to improve your nutrition – Our summary
We hope you enjoyed our breakdown of the top 4 best watches to improve your nutrition! Hopefully, you’ve learned a bit about why stress heart rate, steps/workouts, breathing, and HRV can influence your dietary choices in ways that you didn’t know before. For more information about elimination diet meal plans, ways to fight fatigue, reduce bloating, balance hormones, and more, we recommend visiting fwdfuel.com for some fantastic nutrition resources!
Last Updated on July 9, 2021