Tech-enabled body dysmorphia and health obsession

The information overload, instead of empowering us, shackles us to the perversion of the original goal.

The Gentle Roadmap is a collection of my reflections on living out faith and gentleness as a lifelong disciple. Don’t be alarmed if I write about other things as well, like food, tech, and finance, as they’re all part of the journey. If you like my writing and want to be notified of new posts, please subscribe.

Part of my road to recovery from my mental prison is to assess each area of my life where I might have perverted its original purpose. Health is my field of interest, and many choices in my life have been taken centred on it.

Exercise, for a large part of it, has always been a sore spot.

Early relationship with exercise

I was a big child growing up, my body was considerably larger and taller than school pupils my age—my parents still keep my elementary school class photo somewhere, so I’m happy to show you if anyone who knows me in real life frowns their head.

(Was I, though? Or simply that each girl in my class grew at a different pace? I still remember many of their names and some of them still live in my hometown. Mum said she had come across a few of them occasionally.)

(Was I tall and uncomfortably large, or was the girl standing next to me in the group photo just tinier?)

(I believe she’s a mother now with young children. So the question about her body when she was a little girl would be completely irrelevant and rude.)

That was how my mind has been conditioned: to compare, to see if I stick out from my peers, to take action so that I don’t necessarily stand out.

Teenage relationship with exercise

PE was not my favourite subject in elementary and junior high school. Not because of convenience reasons, like my schools didn’t have proper shower rooms back then (not sure about now), and this is speaking from one of the most expensive schools in town—thoughtful development is not my country of origin’s strong suit—so that we had to wipe with whatever synthetic chemical-laden products and powder and changed back to our uniforms to get to the next subject in the day.

No. I disliked PE because I was bigger than my fellow girls. I ran slower than they did. I couldn’t forward roll. I couldn’t hop over the hurdle. I couldn’t score my 3-point basketball shots. I had strong, athletic boys as classmates, and equally agile, athletic girls in the class as well. They were the heavy hitters in the class meets. They had a say in whom to be picked to join their teams in the group sports days, like volleyball and basketball. And rounders. Don’t get me started with that, because I almost always missed the balls rather than hit them.

I danced, because I liked dancing (I still do, only it’s for “cardio”, I’ll explain later). I took dancing extracurriculars, taught by a Balinese dance teacher. I learned Balinese and other types of dancing, even her interpretation of Spanish and Chinese dances. I performed at school events. My late grandfather kept my photo in full Balinese dancer attire, taken when I was a pre-teen, on his wall. He was proud of his dancer granddaughter, he approved of my affinity towards arts, as he was a painter himself.

All in all, even though I wasn’t good at PE, I didn’t hate movements. In fact, I quite liked my Sunday afternoon dancing classes and various performances. They’re part of my joyful Sunday memories.

Becoming an athlete in my adolescent years

My relationship with sports started to change in high school as I joined shorinji kempo, that’s a martial art sport from Japan. The local university dojo was located near our home, so I began taking classes. The martial art was chosen partly because I loved Samurai X growing up, and one of the characters, Aoshi Shinomori, was my teenage crush. In the story, he used to lead a shadow warrior group from the kempo art. The more practical reason was I was the only child, a girl at that. My father suggested that I could take a self-defence class as he couldn’t drive me anywhere forever (this opened another topic in my brain as I was typing this: self-defence—why is the angle always women who have to take all the safety precautions, rather than educating men to participate in making the neighbourhood safer?)

Anyway, so I joined this dojo, partook in several junior competitions. I still wasn’t ace at it, there were stronger and faster girls. But it was the first time my body wasn’t the source of my insecurity because my senpai (senior) and sensei (teacher) taught us about weaponising our body weights and limbs to defend and attack. In fact, in one of the provincial competitions, I had to gain weight because I was a fighter for the 60-62 kg group. I weighed 60 kg at that time, and my to-be opponent was 62, my coach warned me that this girl’s punch could feel brutal if I was at the receiving end of it.

Apart from teaching me self-defence and allowing me to participate in sports events, kempo also gave me confidence. As I kept training, my agility improved. The body techniques taught for the martial arts could also be applied elsewhere because it was the basics, such as body weight bearing, running and sprinting feet placement, etc. During the joined training at the running track, I still ran slower than the slimmer girls, but nobody cared about it, because the seniors and coaches knew everyone competed for different classes. In my weight class, I was doing well.

There was a slight disappointment when I couldn’t join the “embu” or coordinated movement (like “kata” in karate) branch. The girls and boys in the groups were of the same height and agility. I was taller than the girls, but it didn’t bite me with feeling left out as the school PE classes did.

The confidence from kempo suffused into my school life as well. I couldn’t recall whether I had lost weight, but I ran faster at PE. I wasn’t your best girl for accuracy sports, like anything involving balls, but I enjoyed running and boring gymnastics. I still couldn’t forward roll, so I couldn’t join the embu competitions where the martial art movements marry the beauty of the rolls and gracefulness in hitting the mattress. I was one heavy hitter for the fighting number.

One of the subjects in the local final exams in high school (that meant not the national final exam) was PE. Running speed and endurance were marked. Because of the consistent practice in kempo, running was a breeze. I came out the fourth scorer in the female cohort. Not bad, really.

In uni, I continued training at the dojo. I stopped practising when I studied in Holland as I didn’t bother to find a shorinji kempo dojo there.

Oh to be young and free again…

Adulthood relationship with exercise

In my adulthood where I’ve been a contributing member to society, I participated in various exercise routines. As forward rolls and coordinated group movements were no longer parts of daily life, I was free to choose more practical activities. Walking and running were my default go-to. Even when I was working as a field engineer at the offshore rigs, I always took time when I was off duty to walk or jog on the helipad facing the sea. It wasn’t for losing weight. Movement was natural for me. Only, my sleep schedule was nonexistent, which probably contributed to my mental (un)wellness.

Fast forward to my current job (and previous years in similar roles and master’s degree), movement is attributed towards health. There’s no movement for happiness anymore in my understanding. I get it that sitting for too long is not helpful for health.

The advent of smartwatches made it more difficult as well. We’re hooked to our little displays showing how many steps we have taken today, and how many miles we have walked.

Not for any natural reason, but because we want to “please” the gamification system.

Hang on, what do you mean by pleasing the system?

Now this is the product manager in me speaking.

The role of apps in shaping behaviours

Applications—or apps—are created as a product of the enterprise economy. Businesses. They are designed with economic values assigned to measure and achieve. Since they are not physical products, the values they’re developed to track are intangible.

In the real world, the corresponding benefits of the apps to the activities they add value to might be tangible, like the increase of your physical activities, resulting in your smaller waist measurement, or like a complex IoT (internet-of-things) technology utilised by farmers, so that their crops multiply next year.

But in itself, an app has an intangible target to achieve, such as human attention, emotions, and time spent using it. An e-commerce enabler may track their success metric in the number of successful transactions. The essence of their development objective is to ensure the delightful user journey, so that both the sellers and buyers on the platform enjoy using the app and return to use it for their next purchases—called user retention. With higher retention, theoretically, they keep using the app for future economic activities, increasing the Lifetime Value or LTV, the amount of transactions carried out on that platform.

Therefore, extensive studies have been conducted to experiment and nudge the user behaviours for the benefit of the app companies. Pick-and-mixing different traditional fields, from design to behavioural finance, the apps are to be made (wait for the jargon) as “frictionless” as possible, with it being a “one-stop shop” or a “super app” to be kept in mind.

Again, I get that. We’re human beings. We evolve in refining our civilisation by optimising. And since we’re in the digital age, the economic activities are then focused on the digital experience.

Two things came to mind when discussing the common jargon in app-making to keep users happy:

• a frictionless user journey

• gamification

A frictionless user journey goes a long way. Just like what I gave an example in this piece about how easy it is to whip out your phone, snap an image, and share a story, it doesn’t stop when the story is online. It eventually turns this repeated series of actions into a habit. Next time somebody sees a beautiful rainbow in the Edinburgh sky over the castle, they will go through the repeated motion until the image can now be seen by their followers on Insta.

Sharing a story is too easy to begin with. Its user journey might have been experimented with a few times over by many different designers and brought to the executives to review before being rolled out to users worldwide. If it’s not easy, nobody would want to do it, especially in the age of competitiveness. Windows 98 is cumbersome by today’s standard, but it was ace long time ago because the digitalisation era had not yet reached the late-stage design thinking (I use this term as the catch-all—the design does not necessarily only encompass the interface, but also the tech infrastructure behind it that enables better graphic, animation, etc).

Gamification is a different, malicious creature in the long run. It makes your user journey feel fun at first. We are attracted to the stories of victory. Feeling like you win or achieve something keeps you hooked to the apps. My old app has this simple gamification check-in, where you need to check in every day to collect the coins. It’s fun and relatively harmless, but the knock-on effect is what’s distressing.

The kicker is you need to spend the points you collect from your daily check-ins only in the app (or the offline payment environment that involves the e-wallet in the app).

If you frown your forehead thinking what’s wrong or shrug your shoulders because nearly every app you know employs a certain technique of gamification these days, congratulations because you’ve normalised this mental manipulation.

Step trackers and obsession

I bought my current smartwatch nearly three years ago because I had random heart palpitations and tachycardia, which upon further reflection, was an early symptom of malnourishment.

In hindsight, why did I even think about buying this device?

I was delusional in thinking that the device was merely to provide data so I could take action. Far from it. I became obsessed with my heart rate.

My unhealthy coping mechanism that demands control—fair enough, because my heart rate is within my control to a certain degree—latched onto the smartwatch as the new obsession, the be-all and end-all. The obsession towards data.

Suddenly, everything was about optimisation.

For those of you with anxiety and recurrent panic attacks, you know how an increased heart rate from a budding panic episode can explode into a full-blown attack through the negative spiral or feedback loop mechanism.

You were relatively okay but having a moment, and then you noticed your heart beat faster. Uneasiness rose in your heart because what if this was a heart attack moment? See, you could probably have eaten too much of saturated fat last week. Oh no, now it’s check smartwatch 110 bpm. It’s tachycardia. I need to rush to the hospital!

Interoception, or the sensitivity towards our internal bodily process, is heightened in those with an anxiety disorder or a long history of trauma. On the one hand, it’s useful as there are people whose internal awareness is so detached (disordered eating is a conundrum I’ll explain someday), but too much awareness causes neverending body-checking and paralysing fear.

Before long, I was absorbed in checking my historical data on heart rate. The slower heart rate we had meant we were healthier, or so I had falsely thought (again, my knowledge was so disjointed it worsened my ED).

At one point last year, I decided it was enough. Instead of the heart rate, I switched the display to show the physical activity indicator, while keeping the old display of the number of steps.

Of course, my problem didn’t disappear, but found another thing to latch on and obsess about: the number of steps.

Suddenly, the numbers were competition. When heart rate was essentially me worrying over my deluded notion of the expected heart rate, the number of steps went straight into the global ranks.

The frictionless user journey where you can glance at your smartwatch to see how far (or how many steps) you’ve taken today is also coupled with the gamification when you want to earn assets or simply beat other walkers.

It sent me back to my pre-shorinji kempo PE years. Only, the leaderboard was now the entire world (Sweatcoin case) and myself (progress tracker case), not merely the 30 students in my class.

A sedentary life poses an increased health risk. But when you move out of wanting to see the number rise instead of the intuitive feeling to move, you will accidentally shape a habit of moving to satisfy your own rigid rules towards an arbitrary number.

The story of 10,000 steps tells us that perhaps the holy number you’re holding onto came from a totally arbitrary (or at least not exact).

In science, there’s always the margin of error or tolerance. But our emotional (chimp) brain is stimulated by stories and gimmicks, by the narratives that are easier to understand. Hence, arbitrary numbers become magic, as if the 10,000 number is sacred and must be met for optimum health.

The watch face used to show the heart rate

A sports centre near my place back in Jakarta where I used to run weekly, 2.5 - 5k while undernourished

The power of data in storytelling

For many people, the presence of accessible data that were incomprehensible years ago might mean nothing other than an excellent diagnosis tool to talk to their doctors. But for those with a certain mind predisposition, the numbers become a coping mechanism, something to obsess about without sensible acceptance.

For example, if you keep holding onto the belief that 10,000 steps are a must (or a minimum), you’ll feel less than for the day if you only record 6,000 steps. Or, if the 110 bpm reading makes your internal alarm go off, you can get panicked even more without trying to do the basics, such as whether you’re under panic attack, undernourished, lack of sleep, and so on.

Everything seems and feels scary and triggering once your mind keeps scanning for problems. The abundance of data, unfortunately, feeds your brain’s constant vigilance. Instead of a part of the equation, data is considered holy and final. Suddenly, exercise isn’t about health anymore, it’s to calm your restless mind by reaching the 10k steps.

Instead of a mere piece of information which needs to be combined with other pieces to make up the big picture, your crooked narrative on one single exhibit of data muddles your understanding. You start believing the story that your body is at fault, and you don’t know what to do. Even when you speak to a medical professional, the strong grip of your twisted narrative can be hard to break by their scientific explanation.

As a result, you’re even more stressed. Combined with a rigid, black-and-white mindset that’s commonly present in the population with disordered eating behaviour and obsession towards exercise, the fatal solution comes up as restricting the nutrition intake while doubling up the physical activities.

“You’re doing it wrong!” says those faceless people in a certain eating style when many want to quit after observing symptoms of malnutrition.

It’s common to jog on a walking pad before bed just to reach one’s daily target!

It’s easy to paint this with a broad stroke that the trees are mistaken as the forest. But that’s not the case. Neither is the meme of “modern life requires modern solution”, that modern life involves working at a desk that entails the solution of wearing a smartwatch to be more informed in our movement.

Both are a form of simplification because the reality is more sinister.

Data accessibility enables body dysmorphia more easily

The information overload, instead of empowering us, shackles us to the perversion of the original goal. Instead of eating or moving intuitively, our eyes are glued to the screens. The figures dictate if we need to move more or eat less.

By supporting the resurgent concept that my body is to be subdued, to be made tinier and thinner—because thinner is touted as healthier, a smartwatch is no longer just a tool. It is a symbol of control, a mini item that packs a punch to enslave minds.

My dance becomes a cardio dance party. My nature walk becomes a vehicle to reach a certain target steps.

Welcome to the golden age of data.

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Before you close the tab . . .

My utopian fever dream is that the UBI (universal basic income) has kicked in and the freed-up time from being more efficient is used to rest and create arts—anything that marks us human. After all, true freedom is the ability to say No to the things we don’t want to do. So, if you want to ✨support my publication✨, you can buy me some hot drink 🥤here or grab your copy of the year-end journal 📔 (there’s nothing as too early for a journal).

Until next time,