Dear Diary, Just a note to say I am leaving you for a Fitbit
For years, I kept a diary. I was ten when I started, with a Disney diary that gave me three lines to record my daily highlights, with my birthday entry given special prominence by using a different coloured pen.
The early entries were a little random: let’s just say that women who claim their wedding was the best day of their life have obviously never had two KitKats fall out of a vending machine by mistake.
Nevertheless, it became a habit that endured through my teens and twenties. When I dated the writer Iain Banks for a while, he took things up a notch by replacing my Collins desk diaries with beautiful moleskin notebooks which took me up to an hour a night to fill.
Yet Iain didn’t keep a diary: or at least, he didn’t keep a journal. Instead, he wrote Crow road, and peppered it with the films I’d taken him to see, walks we’d taken, and jokes we’d shared.
I gave up on diaries eventually when, inevitably, someone found one of my journals and read it. In the end I wasn’t especially burned by the breach of privacy, but it did make me wonder why I was spending so much time on something if it was intended for an audience of one, especially since most of my notes were lists of whinges.
Unlike Dr Johnson or Anne Frank, this was not a journal for the ages. At least the writer David Sedaris finds his useful for winning arguments. ‘That’s not what you said on February 3, 1996,’ he’d say to someone.
It was Sedaris who got me to buy a Fitbit, and Matt from work who got me to switch it on. Fitness trackers, as I’m sure you’ve heard, are the new pedometers, only these can sync to your computer and keep tabs on your output – meaning steps.
Sedaris wrote a very funny article, enthusing how his tracker had pushed him into upping his walks from four miles a day to 25. He started picking up litter, just to add interest, and now he has a bin lorry named in his honour.
Matt uses his to track distances, but also to calculate calories consumed. He has lost three stone. This got my attention.
The genius of fitness trackers is that they put you in competition with yourself and when you meet your target of, say, 10,000 steps a day you literally get a little buzz, applied to your wrist. Press a button and you get an instant snapshot of your heart rate, the amount of miles covered, hours slept, stairs climbed, and kilocalories used.
on more than one occasion at 11pm, I would jog silently by the kettle in the kitchen, to tip my numbers into the target zone.
It took me about a month to realise that tracker data might not be entirely accurate, after my Fitbit congratulated me on 10,000 steps while I was sitting on a train, reading a book.
Now a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine confirms that these trackers have a level of accuracy within 30 per cent of sending a letter up the chimney to Santa. Too late: it has me hooked, rather like my diary habit years ago.
Because a Fitbit is really just another kind of diary, with all the interesting gossipy stuff about milestones cut out, leaving you with miles and stones.