It was not all that long ago that my ever-lovin’ wife showed me the Apple Health app on my phone: little red heart on a white background. I’d never opened it or even noticed it was there, tucked into the folder marked “Utilities”, right between PayByPhone parking and Booking.com. Unknown to me, and with no GDPR-style opt-out, this little gizmo had been recording every step I’d taken every single day.
Was I horrified at this invasion of privacy? No: I was delighted. Having long shunned the ostentatious, Fitbit-wearing gym-zombies for the wallies they so obviously are, I became completely fixated. My phone, joggling up and down in my pocket as I trotted, was tracking my non-exercise exercise routine in real time!
How many steps did I take yesterday? 6,143! Or the day before? 8,021! How about 25 May last year? Whee! 11,125! Must have taken the long way to the burger stand that day. At once, I had discovered a way of turning my day-to-day amblings – from home to school, from school to work, to and from the sandwich shop and the supermarket, up and down the stairs – into cold, hard data. Data that could be traded in for life expectancy, I fondly imagined, at some mystic branch of Travelex. 10,000 steps was the figure you hoped for: a figure that, like the equally plucked-from-the-air-seeming 21 units a week of alcohol, seemed to mark an absolute divide between Good and Not Good, and whose validity I have never doubted since hearing someone say it in a pub.
Every day, I had hit or exceeded the magic 10,000 steps was a day about which I could feel quietly smug. When I was feeling less smug, I could always pep myself up by scrolling back to the 36,409 steps I took on 14 April, when I went walking with some old friends in the Peak District before eating a curry, drinking five pints of beer and falling asleep in a chair dribbling.
There are millions out there like me: nerdily counting our steps and paying them into an imaginary bank, hoping that the 12,000-step Monday will cancel out the 8,000-step Tuesday. Two million fitness trackers are sold every year in Britain for anything between £50 and £110, even without counting those too skinflinty or too fashion-conscious to sign up to an actual Fitbit. And it turns out – woe! – that all of this is, more or less, horse’s eggs. A new study by academics from the University of British Columbia has discovered that these gizmos routinely overestimate the steps you’ve actually taken by as much as 25%.
To be fair, I’ve always suspected this of the wrist-mounted variety: it’s all too easy to imagine how their little accelerometers could mistake 20 minutes doing the washing-up for a healthy stroll round the park, or a quick hand shandy for a vigorous jog up a steep hill. I like to think that – together with GPS for distance covered and the fixed position in the trouser pocket (does it calculate stride length?) – the phone app will be more accurate; and that any overestimate will be cancelled out by all those steps I take when the phone is on my desk charging. But who am I trying to kid?
Most of the pleasure in all these things is the thrillingly sciencey illusion of exact, step-by-step accuracy. I mean: you don’t need a gadget on your wrist, or an app in your pocket, to tell you that you’ve walked a very long way, quite a long way, or roughly the distance between the sofa and the fridge. Common sense tells you that. We want that super-exact number. Where’s the fun in knowing you walked about 8,000 steps yesterday, give or take 1,600, and most likely take?
All this puts us right back in the position we were in, which is to say: knowing that you need to take some damn exercise if your body isn’t going to crumble to bits, that you know fine well whether you’ve taken a decent amount of exercise (and eaten well, which your Fitbit doesn’t know either) and that no amount of geeky data accumulation is a substitute for going for an actual old-fashioned walk.
• Sam Leith is an author, journalist and literary editor of the Spectator
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