Why tracking our fitness isn't healthy
Sundials to Smart watches: Competitive roots of timekeeping
Here’s what we’ll learn in this article:
1. How did the Romans tell time?
2. How did watches evolve to what they are now?
3. Why digital fitness devices make us less healthy
4. What a chiropractor has discovered about smart watches
5. How to measure radiation from an Apple watch
“I don't count my sit-ups; I only start counting when it starts hurting because they’re the only ones that count.”
― Muhammad Ali
“Where did the year go?” is a question we often hear as we get closer to its end.
The sands of time slip through our fingers lest we cherish fleeting shores of consciousness, which serve to crystallize our present moments into eternity.
How did life pass us by?
How has society evolved its relationship with time, and as a result devolved its love of light?
Lighting the way with time
The use of a time piece to track competitive sports dates all the way back to Ancient Rome, as obelisks were used as sundials to tell time between chariot races. The Flaminio Obelisk, erected in Heliopolis, was commissioned by Pharaoh Ramses II in Egypt around 1260 BC. In 10 BC, Roman Emperor Augustus had the obelisk transported from Heliopolis to Rome, and placed it at the Circus Maximus to serve as a reminder of his conquest of Egypt.
Another obelisk called the Solarium Augusti (Sundial of Augustus) was also transported along with the Flaminio, and still stands in front of the Parliament building in Rome today. The Solarium was erected in such a way that the gnōmōn, or the shadow of the sundial, fell across the center of a marble altar on September 23, the birthday of Augustus himself.
The ancients knew how to keep time with light. Today many of us keep time with an artificial spectre that gets its signal from satellites who serve as demigods between us and the Most High. This light casts an invisible shadow upon our soul, as we battle in a circus that maximizes our stress, and sells our sweat to centralized medicine.
Have we become armchair gladiators and tyrants of a New Rome that seeks only to colonize our mind, while we shout down our fellow man from the soul-crushed comfort of a screen called home?
Where has our inward light, and our inner gnōmōn gone?
Chariots of tomorrow
The first Olympic games to use stopwatches were in 1896. However, these watches were only accurate to 1/5 of a second.1 Just twenty years later, stopwatches would advance their accuracy to 1/100 second. In 1916, Swiss inventor Edouard Heuer (the genesis of TAG Heuer) was able to design the world’s fastest stopwatch, called the Mikrograph, which made its debut at the 1920 Olympic Games. In 1933, the Heuer brand launched the Autavia, the first dashboard stopwatch for race cars.2
In the 1960s, timekeeping would undergo another quantum leap with the introduction of the quartz clock. The 1960s Olympics marked a massive shift in history, when clocks transitioned from mechanical to electric.3 Due to its crystal piezoelectric nature, quartz is able to transmit data instantaneously. Athletes no longer had to strain to hear the ticking of a stopwatch, but could run and swim past a virtual finish line.
From Sports Race to Rat Race
Several timepieces are closely associated with automobile racing, perhaps none more than the Heuer Monaco, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019. Steve McQueen made the watch famous when he wore it in the 1971 film Le Mans. Introduced in 1969, the Monaco is a line of automatic chronograph (a watch that also has a stop watch function) wristwatches created to commemorate the Monaco Grand Prix. Notable for its distinctive square case, the Monaco was among the first of its kind in this design.
The athlete of today now has even more devices, that not only track time, but overall performance, based on heart rate and blood glucose, tracking the twitch of a hamstring at the speed of light using radiofrequency.
Horses are also being tracked with more sophisticated equipment, at the expense of their health:
“Devices such as StrideSAFE monitor a racehorse’s movements 2,400 times per second throughout a race, sending 2,400 pulses of radio frequency (RF) radiation every second through the body of the horse. It also contains a GPS component that communicates with global positioning satellites. It also communicates with the RFID chip implanted in the left side of every horse’s neck, ensuring that the chip also emits radiation throughout the race.”
, Racehorses at Churchill Downs
How does wireless radiation effect our blood sugar?
The internet is flooded with health gurus telling non-diabetics to use constant glucose monitoring devices that relay data to an iPhone. Yet many of these biohackers only cut through our vitality like a machete, since they fail to understand that EMF and blue light can actually create diabetes.4
During the Cold War, the Joint Publications Research Service translated foreign documents of Soviet research, which showed how participants exposed to electromagnetic fields similar to those of the cordless phones and cell phones we have today were prediabetic and had sugar in their urine after the experiments.6
In 2011, Finnish researchers conducted brain scans and submitted their findings to the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, showing that glucose metabolism is disrupted in the region of the brain next to a cell phone.7
Sleep gurus espouse the benefits of using computerized “rings” on our hand that emit electrical fields, when our brains should be the only technology that’s pulsing any type of EMF during our five stages of sleep.
What happens when we place our bodies in a field that is billions of times stronger than the theta brainwaves (4-8 Hz) we experience during sleep? Sleep is difficult for many because this is emotionally a time we need to reliquish control. Devices that keep us from being unplugged only fuel our need to know, but never allow us to let go.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will be blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
-Tao Te Ching
I remember driving Bohdanna to a sleep study years ago, where they monitored her throughout the night. She was already having bouts of insomnia for months, and this study was going to show how she could improve her sleep. The irony was that she was being monitored with electrodes connected to her brain the entire night. Needless to say, she wasn’t able to get a good night’s sleep.
An unenlightened performance
Fast forward to today, performance tracking devices are creeping into the lives of consumers, having rebranded themselves as biohacking toys of convenience.
Have you ever signed up to find someone online through a service like Spokeo, when you want to track someone down?
The way these sites work is by getting your information first, so you are the one who can eventually be found by any stranger who pays $20.
Today’s tracking devices are a two-way street. We may think that the technology is there to serve us, as we celebrate and share the thousands of steps we’ve taken from our office chair to the water cooler. In reality we’re also giving away our information to the cloud, which will only sell our sweat equity down the river.
We’ve also forgotten that our eyes aren’t a camera, but a clock, that tells our bodies what time we should eat, pray, and love. Many of our chronic diseases, from mood disorders, obesity, diabetes, to cancer, has a circadian origin.5
This is why all health begins and ends in the gateway of light – our eye. For instance, many of us wake up and flood our retina with artificial blue light, which signals to our hypothalamus that it’s solar noon, while in reality it’s time to see the Sunrise. This type of light distortion can throw off not only our metabolism, but also affects melatonin levels later at night. Since melatonin fights tumors, could this be why so many teens are experiencing higher rates of cancer?
Apple’s marketing team tells us that we’ll be able to track our health without missing a beat. While the watch may never miss a beat, our heart may skip a beat. Circadian rhythms govern cardiac rhythms, and a disruption of our native light environment makes us more susceptible to arrhythmia.6
What happens when we start our day by living six hours ahead? How do you feel when you’ve flown from New York to London? If we’re always trying to rocket past others and be jetsetters in life, we’ll wind up with the jet-lagging crowd.
Furthermore, does tracking our health equal improving health?
Watching our anxiety disappear
Even if we hold wireless devices like our phone away from our head, we still absorb radiation through our body’s electrical nervous system through what are known as brillouin precursors.
Contrary to centralized Western medicine’s denial of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine as a healing modality, the human body and nervous system is loaded with electrical pathways and conductive points known as meridians.
Could this be why muscle tension is relieved instantaneously with the removal of an Apple Watch?
Watch this! The following video is from The Scottsdale Chiropractor:
How to measure radiation of an Apple Watch
The following video by Satya Giordano of EMF Center measures the levels of radiofrequency emitted by an Apple Watch, as one moves further away from the source. In this instance, distance is our friend.
Who is watching out for our future?
What is the cost of submitting the time of our life to an all-knowing black box?
Is it worth the promotion?
If not to whom, to what are we connecting ourselves?
Are we shackling ourselves to a never-ending chariot race of addiction?
When will we learn to avoid the shiny objects that blind us from the Most High?
'None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.'
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Many of us will choose to remain a slave, because letting go of control is more terrifying than submitting to an expected life of servitude.
If we choose freedom, then we must hold onto our Sundial, our heart’s compass, which will only ever lead us to the Elysian fields.
When we live with direction, we make all the worries of life unnecessary.
May we sail forth into a future not of security
But one full of torrents unknown.
Out of the abyss, and through the fire.
“Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse est.”
“Seafaring is necessary, living is not.”
-Pompey
We are more powerful than we know.
Roman & Bohdanna
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https://www.watchtime.com/reviews/100-points-time-tag-heuers-carrera-mikrograph/
https://www.watchtime.com/featured/10-things-to-know-about-tag-heuer/
https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/corporate-news/posts/olympic-timekeeping
Fishbein AB, Knutson KL, Zee PC. Circadian disruption and human health. J Clin Invest. 2021 Oct 1;131(19):e148286. doi: 10.1172/JCI148286. PMID: 34596053; PMCID: PMC8483747.
Hayter EA, Wehrens SMT, Van Dongen HPA, Stangherlin A, Gaddameedhi S, Crooks E, Barron NJ, Venetucci LA, O'Neill JS, Brown TM, Skene DJ, Trafford AW, Bechtold DA. Distinct circadian mechanisms govern cardiac rhythms and susceptibility to arrhythmia. Nat Commun. 2021 Apr 30;12(1):2472. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-22788-8. Erratum in: Nat Commun. 2021 Dec 8;12(1):7284. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-27498-9. PMID: 33931651; PMCID: PMC8087694.
I was working in the Fitness Industry 2005-12 during the launch of Fitbit et al. Working with performance athletes led me to engage with these products and I quickly realized the minimal usefulness. Once you get a baseline re VO2 max, HRV then it is not helpful to use the provided metrics compared to learning by feeling/listening to your body. Of course, we now understand the danger they represent as well, e.g. transmitters/receivers (control of your physiology). 'Counting Steps' was the primary/only selling point I guess, ridiculous.
My watchband broke, April '21, and I never replaced it, thus I haven't worn a watch since then. Never bought into the Fitbit thing either, although one of my daughters was big on it, and on talking about just how much REM sleep she'd had, courtesy of that thing.