Are You in a Toxic Relationship with Your Fitness or Weight-Loss Tracker?

Desiree Meadows, 32, loved seeing how many calories she burned each day on her heart-rate monitor and fitness app. But checking her stats eventually led to her becoming a full-blown "fitness addict" (and not in a cute #FitnessAddict way). Obsessing over the numbers led to squeezing extra workouts into her day when she didn’t meet her calories-burned goal, she says.

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Even workouts she used to do to de-stress and soak up the mind-body benefits turned into an opportunity to log torched calories, she says.

On top of that, she gave up on her favorite group classes when she realized that she could burn more by exercising on her own. Red flag.

When anxiety, guilt, and shame flare up every time you check your stats, or exercise becomes a punishment for failing to meet your goals, it's probably time to take a step back from the data-craze, says research neuroscientist Nicole Avena, Ph.D., author of Why Diets Fail.

Another sure sign that your fitness and nutrition logging is getting out of control is when it interferes with your body's natural hunger signals. That's what happened to Alex Baccam, 21, when she started to track every single ingredient in her meals.

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At first, logging everything she ate was a helpful way to see the nutritional value of her go-tos. But when the fat percentage of her meals increased after she logged a snack that wasn't crazy-healthy, Baccam felt discouraged and annoyed with herself for eating the calories she burned during a workout (though, fyi, fatty snacks can actually help you lose weight). That frustration led Baccam to ignore her natural cravings for snacks and nosh on her favorite "junk food" when she wanted it.