Can an Apple Watch Help You Lose Weight?

The Apple Watch is one of the most popular smartwatches on the planet and it is hard to go even one day now in the United States without seeing one. No matter what model you are looking at, the Apple Watch will have some form of Workout app or fitness tracker. For many, this is the most important aspect of their Apple Watch (I know it is for me). So the question is, can an apple watch help you lose weight? Or, is it just hype?

When used correctly, an Apple Watch can certainly help you lose weight by allowing you to set goals and track them. It also does this by allowing you to monitor intensity during a workout and focus on achieving daily goals versus being caught up in overall results. However, no device can make you lose weight if you aren’t willing to put in the work.

So let’s take a look at some specific ways you can use your Apple Watch to lose weight or achieve your fitness goals!

Set and Modify Goals

As most know, goal setting is really the key to achieving great results. With an Apple Watch you can set specific goals to you that you can track over time. Some of the common goals are how many calories you want to burn, how often you stand up, and how many minutes of exercise in a day. You can also set step goals through accessory apps or simply watch your steps on your watch as it tracks them automatically. 

Goals are crucial for weight loss because if you don’t know where you are headed you won’t get there. So use the watch to first establish a baseline, then, think of a realistic way to increase your exercise time, calories burned, and steps. As long as your diet remains the same, increasing your activity levels will naturally increase the amount of calories burned and muscle grown in a day.

You can also look back at previous days and weeks at a time. A cool way to keep you on track is it shows rings for each goal and shows you getting closer to each one throughout the day. So you are pushing to close your rings each day. This creates a sense of achievement on a daily basis and helps you to keep pushing forward.

Track your Steps

Just having a way to track your steps is very important. This alone is a great indicator of your activity levels overall. See where you are at and maybe increase that 2,000 steps. If you can get to 10,000 steps a day or more, you are certainly on track. A sedentary individual may only get 2,000 steps in a day so if you can hit 10,000 that’s 5 times the calories burned through walking!

Walking a lot one day will not do much, just like anything that is only done for a day. But daily adherence to your steps goals can make a significant difference over time from those extra few hundred calories burned.

Track your Workouts

When you tap on the workout symbol which looks like a man running, you can choose from a variety of pre-added workouts or even create your own. This then starts the workout with a timer, heart rate monitor, and calories burned that you can see throughout the workout. The main reasons that I like this function are actually mental though.

Signaling the beginning and end of your workout creates more focus throughout the workout itself. You know that this is your workout time and you don’t want to slack because you know you are tracking it.

It also makes it fun to see where your heart rate is at and how many calories you’ve burned while you are still in the workout. And there is also an intensity that comes with that.

This also tracks the amount of time you are exercising so that you can fulfill your goal of daily exercise minutes. So if your goal is 30 min., you have to make sure you clock in at least 30 min. of an exercise through the workout app.

Monitor your Heart

By monitoring your heart rate, you can track the intensity of your workouts and know what type of fuel you are burning. Everyone has a different max heart rate depending on age and fitness though we typically just group by age. 

If you are doing a lower intensity workout, you are at about 50-60% of your max heart rate and burn about 85% of your calories from fat and the rest from carbohydrates or glycogen. 

If you are at 60-70% of your max heart rate it is a moderate workout and you are burning about 65% and the rest carbs.

If you are at 70-80% of your max heart rate, this is the aerobic zone and you are burning about 45% of your calories from fat but will be burning more calories in less time.

This change happens because fat burns slower than carbs and is better fuel for low intensity, high endurance activities.

With your Apple Watch you can track what zone you are in to match what your goals are. But in general you’ll want to be somewhere between 50% and 85% of your max heart rate during your workout. If it’s below that you likely need to up the intensity. Here is a chart to help you pinpoint where you should be at.

Compete with Friends

The Apple Watch also gives you the ability to share your activity with another Apple Watch user and compete and cheer one another on. You do this by tapping the activity circle, sliding it to the left, and tapping “invite a friend”. Then you can see when a friend finishes a workout and you can send little messages to encourage them. It also gives you the ability to enter into competitions such as the most calories burned in the week or whether you hit all of your goals each day.

For many, it is beneficial to work out with a friend. The Apple Watch lets you do this even if you are separated so that you can still feel that comradery and competition wherever you work out.

So give this feature a try if you haven’t already!

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As we can see, the Apple Watch can certainly be useful in one’s quest to lose weight. However, an Apple Watch or any fitness tracker is exactly that, a TRACKER. So if there is no exercise or effort on your part to track, it really means nothing. So take advantage of the helpful features and tools but remember that it is the work and mindset that will help you lose weight, not what is on your wrist.

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