Our demented smartwatch obsession

Also, the joy of a daffodil, comfort food, and on NO ACCOUNT go and see that Nicole Kidman film.

Do you know what a Whoop band is? I didn’t until a few weeks ago when a friend showed me hers. It’s kind of like a smartwatch, although it doesn’t actually have a screen or tell the time, so it’s not that much like a watch. You wear it on your wrist, though, and it monitors your exercise, sleep, heart rate, hydration level etc and feeds all the info to an app on your phone. She showed me her data and I was fasssscinated - really detailed analysis on how she’d slept the night before (badly, it turned out), and what time she should go to sleep that night to make up her ‘sleep debt’. It does the same with exercise and fitness levels, and tells you how long you need to recover after a bout of exercise. It tracks menstrual cycles. It measures your blood oxygenation levels. It’s supposedly much more advanced than Apple watches or Garmins or even an Oura ring. Navy SEALS supposedly wear them, and for £229 you can too.

Having seen hers, I was instantly obsessed, came home and spent all evening googling the Whoop band. This was in early January. It was a very early January obsession. Maybe I should get a Whoop band AND set of smart scales while I was at it? (If you’re blissfully unaware of what smart scales are, they’re basically bathroom scales that can talk to an app on your phone so you can easily monitor your weight. I still laugh about the friend who got on her smart scales after a holiday in Greece, then received a notification her phone saying ‘Is this you?’ She’d eaten so much halloumi and put on so many pounds in a week that the scales didn’t believe it could be her. She was being trolled by her bathroom scales, in other words.)

I used to run quite a lot and I had a Garmin at some stage. I love a bit of data, knowing how far I’d run and what time I’d got. It was immensely satisfying, seeing the times improve (quite slowly). But it can also become obsessive, a bit like those people who constantly tell you how many steps they’ve walked that day (congratulations, Dick Whittington!) That’s why I wasn’t remotely surprised by a news story over the weekend saying that smart watches are making everyone more anxious. According to Mintel, half of all Brits who wear them say their they’ve made them more worried about their health, and women over 55 are apparently the most likely to be stressed by theirs.

Of course they’re making everyone more stressed! You wake up in the morning, and your watch tells you you’ve slept badly. You berate yourself if you don’t hit your step target. It pings with notifications telling you to move more and drink more water. It’s like having a tiny shouty personal trainer jumping up and down on your wrist at all times. I know, I know, obesity rates and dodgy health across the country. But do we really need so much data?

I had dinner with pals last night and carried out a quick straw poll on them. How many had heard of a Whoop band? Only one of them had because a friends of hers had just got one. ‘He’s obsessed,’ she said, ‘he says it tells him that his recovery is much better after sex.’

‘What does that even mean?’ I asked.

‘Dunno,’ she replied, ‘but he says it’s changed his life.’

Look at the inauguration yesterday. There was Elon, there was Zuck, there was Tim Cook. All the tech bros up front, in pole position. These days, tech is king and there seems to be the belief that we should all be ‘optimising’ our lives, not wasting a moment or a shred of data. We should treat ourselves like machines instead of humans by constantly monitoring our movement, our temperature, our hydration, our sleep. If we have the data, we can make ourselves better! More efficient! Leaner! Sleeker! Faster!

But healthier? On a purely metric level, maybe, but I’m not sure all this monitoring is very good for our brains. When I mentioned I was writing about this to Mum yesterday, she said she’d read a piece recently about a woman who’d gone for a run and forgotten her smart watch, so did the entire run again after she got home, for a second time in order that her watch record it. This kind of thing, to me, doesn’t sound entirely dissimilar to the way some of those with eating disorders behave. I see it in my own fairly gentle pilates classes - people obsessively tapping at their smartwatches at the start and end of every session. I’m not sure your performance was worth recording, June, you’ve just burned 90 calories!

At the same time, I seem to be having more and more conversations about Ozempic. Not for me, I mean, but just hearing about it in general. ‘Babe we’re all going to be on it by June,’ a friend said last week, as we sat in the pub sharing a packet of crisps. ‘Microdosing it. That’s what everyone’s doing.’ (If you want to read about microdosing Ozempic, HERE is a recent piece written by the brilliant Harriet Walker on the topic.)

I know these drugs are helping people, I know they may help the NHS but, collectively, it all seems to lead to a place where we’re more conflicted and confused about our bodies and weight and health and what we ‘should’ look like than less. And the smartwatch craze feeds into this - the obsessive need to know how we slept, how hard we worked in that gym class, how many calories we’ve burned each day, how far we’ve travelled and so on. ALSO, and extremely unhealthily, smart watches make us even more reliant on our phones, tapping at them all the time to crunch our own individual numbers.

That’s why I decided against a Whoop band, because I’m just as prone to obsessing over this stuff as everyone else, and I didn’t think I needed to spend all of January monitoring myself, waking up and immediately checking my phone to see how much REM sleep I’d got. That’s why the news story about smart watches making us more anxious didn’t seem surprising, either. Take it off! Put on two coats (I keep wearing two coats atm) and go for a nice walk! How about that for a goal?

Picture of the week

Is this not quite cheerful? It’s an 11 euro milk jug I bought in Spain the other weekend, and then stuffed with daffodils from Pete the florist in Crystal Palace.

I actually went to see Pete on Friday morning to buy lilies, because I had various people coming over the weekend and wanted to cheer up my house. Pete had a couple of big buckets of lilies but no price on them, and when I asked him how much the stems were he narrowed his eyes at me and replied ‘too much.’ Flowers are more expensive in January, Pete went on with a heavy sigh, talking himself out of a sale, because it requires so much heat to grow them.

So, instead of buying the expensive lilies I bought four bunches of daffodils for a fiver, stuck two bunches into this cow jug and two into a jam jar and now, every time I walk into my kitchen and see them, I feel a small burst of happiness. If you need a pick-me-up this week, give it a whirl: daffodils for a few quid; vase or jam jar. INSTANT PERK.

Recommendations of the week

All recipes this week because I’ve been on a mad cooking spree. I think it’s because it’s cold and drab and we all need cosy things to get us through the next few weeks. Forget any remote kind of January regime (see above re being worried about calories), have another piece of toast! Have a biscuit and a cup of tea! Have a crumpet! The weather is tiresome, we need to find small joys where we can.

To that end, here are three of the things I cooked over the weekend which were comforting.

• THIS ox cheek stew recipe, which I discovered the other day thanks to India Knight’s unbeatably lovely Substack. I don’t think ox cheeks are that easy to find. I had to ring the nice Dulwich butcher and order them in (nice because there’s an old boy in there who always calls me ‘young lady’, and they always give me a marrow bone for Dennis), but it was worth seeking them out. Blimey, ox cheeks are ENORMOUS. Each one was like a fat ribeye in my hand. But after five hours in the oven, they gently broke up into smaller, unbelievably delicious chunks. Ladle it over a bowl of mashed potato, sit on the sofa watching telly and you may feel (slightly) less cross about January.

• THIS Burnt Basque cheesecake. I went to my friend Tash’s house for Sunday lunch a few weeks before Christmas and she pulled this cheesecake from the fridge as casually as if it was a carton of yoghurt. I was in awe that she’d made such an impressive and obscenely good thing for pudding, but she insisted it was very easy. I’m often sceptical when people say that - ‘Oh god it honestly couldn’t be simpler,’ your hostess says brightly when you compliment her on dinner. ‘All you need is eye of newt, wing of bat and a very specific kind of saffron from a remote field in Iran, plus 86 other ingredients, then you whack it in the oven for a couple of hours and that’s it!’ Anyway, I made this cheesecake for lunch on Saturday and it is easy. You just have to make it the day before so it has enough time in the fridge. Also it contains nearly FOUR tubs of Philadelphia, but don’t let that put you off (again, let’s not get too hung up on calories. Go for a nice walk afterwards). It looks super impressive when you slap it on the table, still wrapped in its crinkly brown cooking paper, and it’s very very delicious.

• THIS sausage/fennel/cream pasta recipe from Rick Stein. There are loads of recipe variations for pasta sauce with sausage and fennel seeds out there, but I wonder if this one beats them all? Mine was possibly helped by the fact I made it with chicken stock I’d been simmering for HOURS, and posh sausages from the Dulwich butcher (Scotch Meats, if you know it). But I don’t think it would be that different if you used a good stock cube and herby sausages from the supermarket. I could honestly have eaten the sauce with a spoon. NB. This recipe says it’s enough for four people but my friend Hols and I managed to eat the entire lot between us, poured over pappardelle, on Friday night while we watched The Traitors. So take note if you’re as greedy as us. H-E-A-V-E-N.

(Probably a good thing I didn’t get those smart scales, isn’t it?)

Nonsense of the week

Babygirl. Deary, deary me. This is the Nicole Kidman film that everyone’s banging on about, I think largely because it has a lot of sex in it. But I presume that those marketing the film have only gone on about the sex because it hasn’t got much else going on, and nobody would have bothered to go and see it otherwise. It is awful.

Also, the sex is comedic. I laughed at various points when Nicole Kidman was writhing around on the floor, and I don’t think we were supposed to laugh? It’s essentially about an affair between and older woman and a young male intern at her company, and it wants to be taken very seriously as saying something important about sex and the sexes and power dynamics and age gaps. But I don’t think it manages to say anything remotely important and, also, there’s genuinely more chemistry between Donald Trump and Melania than there is between Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas.

So that’s two films that I’ve hated in recent weeks - We Live In Time and now Babygirl. I was going to go and see the Dylan one this week, but I might give it a miss now and concentrate on Claudia Winkleman and fake-Welsh Charlotte instead. Do we think fake-Welsh Charlotte is going to win? Various people are saying that but I’m not so sure. Certain pubs across the country have announced they’re screening The Traitors finale on Friday night, if you’re interested. What are we going to watch next week?

PS

Don’t mention the war operation

Dennis and I are off to the vet tomorrow morning for an important and delicate operation: the snip. If I think too much about it I feel v guilty, and I know people have all sorts of opinions on this subject, but I’ve decided it’s the right time for various reasons. I’ve also told almost every single person I’ve met in the park in the past few days. ‘I’m so sorry!’ I said to a bemused man yesterday morning, as I dragged Dennis off his elderly spaniel, ‘but we’re going to the vet on Wednesday to have them off.’

I haven’t talked about it much in front of Dennis because he looks extremely worried at the best of times and I don’t want to alarm him any further, but I’ll almost inevitably report back on it next week 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻