Institute For The Future

A Different Kind of Health Preview

At the Institute, we've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how visualization tools can help encourage people to improve their health by helping people see the visceral effects of eating, exercise and other behaviors. Now from Japan comes word of a different kind of health preview to motivate people to exercise: Encourage people to exercise by embedding images of desserts and other tempting foods into the console of a treadmill. Roger Cohen recently wrote about his experience using one of these treadmills for the New York Times:

I was on a Japanese treadmill gazing at the usual numbers, speed and calorie count and so on, when I started to get mesmerized by the little images of food and drink on the screen. At 35 calories, there was a frothy cappuccino, and then at 75 two pieces of tuna sushi, to be followed at 126 by an ice cream cone, at 150 by a beer and at 204 by an elegant glass decanter of sake. The 300-calorie mark ushered in chocolate cake, which segued at 325 to cheesecake. At 450 calories I caught a sweat-drenched glimpse of an egg-topped sandwich suggestive of a Croque Madame. Whatever followed was lost in translation. I’d never seen anything like this in any gym and found myself lost in an obsessive, screen-gazing state.

Cohen goes on to describe the feeling of running on a treadmill and watching junk food float on and off the screen as one of "fantasy" and "escapism." But I also think it's a much more honest take on exercising. For many of us, exercise is both a way to get healthier but also to justify a bit of immediate hedonism. I often treat myself to ice cream after a long run, for example, not because it necessarily makes the most sense, but because I feel like I've "earned" it. Tempting people with these indulgences in real-time, but only if they've earned it by burning off calories, offers a creative way for people to visualize pleasure and manage their health--and their indulgences--in effective ways.