These days, fat is a high-tech issue

I 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. Problem 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 reader, but I’m a bit of a short-arse — 5ft 8½in 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 January. 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 11½st. But how? Inspiration struck when an old friend of mine — Simon Gosling — gave me a tour of a high-tech home he’s built for Unruly, the digital advertising company he works at. It was a fascinating glimpse into the future, complete with voice-activated lighting, an augmented reality 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.