LIFE
Simon Gosling — gave me a tour of
a high-tech home he’s built for Unru-
ly, the digital advertising company he
works at. It was a fascinating glimpse
into the future, complete with voice-
activated lighting, an augmented real-
ity headset so you can see what a new
sofa will look like in your sitting room
before buying it and a fridge that
adds milk to your shopping list when
it detects that you’re running out.
But the gizmo that really caught my
attention was a wifi body scale that
not only calculates your weight, but
sends the data to a health app on your
phone so you can monitor how much
you’re losing (or gaining).
I immediately ordered one on
Amazon, along with an activity-
tracking watch that tells me how
many steps I’ve done each day, how
many calories I’ve lost, etc, and can
link up with the scale and the app
via Bluetooth. The final piece of the
puzzle is a dieting app that calculates
how many calories I’m allowed to eat
every 24 hours if I want to get down
to my target weight by the end of
this month.
You may think I’m a fool for
believing all this tech is a substitute
for a bit of old-fashioned willpower,
but I cannot tell you what a differ-
ence it has made. The sense of reward
I get when I step on the scale in the
morning and it tells me that I’ve lost
weight — it literally flashes up the
exact amount I’ve lost to the near-
est ounce — is enormous. Because
it then sends this information to my
phone, I can fire up the app when I
get to work, click on the weight-loss
graph and marvel at the downward-
sloping gradient. It puts a real spring
in my step, which is just as wellI
have a confession to make: I’m
a yo-yo dieter. For the past ten
years, I’ve lost a bit of weight in
January and then spent the rest of
the year putting it back on. Prob-
lem is, I’ve been adding more than
I’ve been taking away, with the result
that at the end of last year I was
12st 13lb. That might not sound like
much to the average Spectator read-
er, but I’m a bit of a short-arse —
5ft 8½ in if you must know (and, yes,
I’m aware that adding that ½ is a bit
tragic). That meant my body mass
index was 27, which, according to
the World Health Organisation, is
officially overweight.
In one of Clive James’s books of
memoirs — volume two, I think —
he wrote that you don’t gradually
become fat. Rather, you just wake
up one day and discover you’re a fat
person. That’s how I felt on 1 Janu-
ary. It didn’t help that I had stupidly
bought my only good suit in the sales
more than a year ago when I was a
svelte 12st. Fastening the top button
of my trousers involved sucking in
my stomach and then hoping nothing
went pop when I breathed out. I felt
like a sack of potatoes with a rubber
band round the middle.
The solution, I decided, was to
lose more weight this year. Try to get
down to 11½ st. But how? Inspiration
struck when an old friend of mine —
because I’ve connected Caroline to
the health app and we’re competing
with each other to see who can do the
most steps each day.
If I put on weight, by contrast, I
feel an almost existential sense of
despair. The little screen on the scale
shows a plus sign rather than a minus
sign — Armageddon! — and imme-
diately adds an upward-sloping kink
to the graph. O tempora o mores! The
health app then lies in wait on my
phone, ready to fill me with shame if
I’m masochistic enough to launch it.
To keep myself on the straight
and narrow, I’ve been reduced to cal-
orie counting, painstakingly enter-
ing each morsel that passes my lips
into the dieting app. This information
is then conveyed to the all-powerful
health app, which tells me how much
of my daily allowance I have left.
On a typical day I will have spent
my budget by lunchtime, but I can
earn some calories back if I do enough
steps. Not so much singing for my sup-
per as walking for it, which isn’t easy
when you’re a cyclist. I have taken to
getting off the Overground one stop
early and wheeling my bicycle back
home just so I can earn enough calo-
ries to afford some grilled mackerel
and salad leaves.
I go to bed hungry every night,
which I know is interfering with my
sleep because the health app moni-
tors my sleep patterns via my activity
watch (don’t ask me how).
It probably sounds as if I’ve gone
completely insane, but I’m already
back down to 12st. The suit is now
a perfect fit. Only 7lb left to go.Toby Young is associate editor of
The Spectator.No Sacred Cows
These days, fat is
a high-tech issue
Toby Young
MICHAEL HEATH
I can fi re up
the app, click
on the weight-
loss graph and
marvel at the
downward-
sloping
gradient