The Quantified Body

Questioning the numbers-first narrative of health and body image.

[This post does contain some references to disordered eating and body image, though I have consciously not included any specific references to weight or calorie content]

Calories, fat, sugar, step count, BMI, heart rate, running speed, blood pressure, hours of sleep, quality of sleep. If you can name it, you can probably find a device or app that will track it for you. Technology is bringing the science of numbers into our lives more and more every day, and we are lapping it up. Fitbits, Apple watches, period tracking apps, step counters, running trackers; I can’t think of a single person (including myself) that I know who doesn’t have at least one of these. The study of this phenomenon centres around the idea of the 'quantified self', i.e. the process by which we track our actions (and even personal worth) through numerical, technology-assisted means. Our bodies are being mapped out by, and in some cases reduced to, numbers and figures.

Even as body positivity (and neutrality) movements have been gaining traction, a powerful type of tech which promotes compulsive self-monitoring has been growing in parallel. Our attraction to these devices and apps is understandable; by being able to render our world, and our selves, in numbers, we feel that we know more, and we therefore feel more in control. This technology capitalises on the very human tendency to need to know, to measure, and to categorise. It makes us feel safe. When everything around us is chaotic, we comfort ourselves with our own metrics, that if we take X amount of steps a day, or run for X number of minutes, or limit our food intake to X number of calories, that we are in control, that we are doing ‘good’ for ourselves and our health.

The only problem with this is that there becomes a very arbitrary line drawn between ‘good’ numbers and ‘bad’ numbers. In the past, if I weighed X kilograms on a given day, I felt good; but, on another day, I could be feeling genuinely good about my body – strong, fit and healthy – until I stepped on the scales and the weight displayed didn’t correlate. The rest of my day was ruined if my weight was on the ‘wrong’ side of the line. What’s more, the drawing of these lines is largely influenced by toxic dieting cultures and, increasingly, the productivity craze. And, most importantly, quantifiers such as weight and BMI have been scientifically proven to be poor indicators of overall health. Dieting culture existed before the digital world became so dominant, but now it is being supercharged, both by the barrage of idealised images of bodies on social media and the increasing prevalence of body tracking apps. I have definitely fallen victim to obsessive calorie, weight and exercise tracking in the past, aided by technology. And while I still have a certain strange fascination with my step count, I have consciously stepped (no pun intended) away from most other types of tracking now.

The companies that sell these self-tracking products push the narrative that simply by tracking our lives, we will improve them. But measurement is only the first step, and we need the tools to be able to process this data and use it effectively. Conversely, sometimes more information can actually be a detriment to our health, as demonstrated by the rise of sleep-related anxiety, and yes, insomnia, stemming from the contemporary trend of sleep tracking. This numerical hyperawareness is actually causing a crisis by which our health, and our ability to control it, is declining.

An overarching issue, therefore, with this culture of tracking, is that it pushes us further away from being genuinely and intuitively in tune with our bodies, while masquerading as something that brings us closer to that. I no longer need to listen to my body's signals to know my position in my menstrual cycle if a period tracking app can tell me exactly where I am. I don’t need to check in with how my internal organs are trying to speak to me if a dieting app is telling me exactly what to eat, and when. I might turn around and head home from my walk at 10,000 steps even if my feet are telling me they’d love to go further, or force myself to continue past 5,000 even if my body is screaming that it needs to stop. As a teenager, I rejected my body’s signals of hunger, instead deciding what food I should eat by the calorie count that I was currently at. But this isn’t how it should be. These apps can be extremely useful and convenient, yes, but nothing knows our bodies’ needs better than our own bodies, which have so many ways of communicating that with us. With this obsessive culture of tracking and quantifying, we are trying to communicate with our bodies in a language that only our brains can ever attempt to ‘know’.

By quantifying our experience, by measuring, tracking, and analysing it to the nth degree, are we also taking the enjoyment out of it? Numbers can help to motivate us, but they can also make everything feel more and more like work. If we run only to achieve our goal of X amount of kilometres in X amount of time a week, and not to feel the wind on our face, the rush of endorphins as our heart rate climbs, are we doing ourselves a disservice? Our enjoyment increasingly seems to come not from the activity itself but from the satisfaction of seeing it neatly tracked and analysed. If you don’t track it, did it really happen? It’s a scary thought, but I actually can’t imagine going for a run and not knowing how far I went and how fast. Maybe this will be my homework from this piece – to run just for the sake of it, of getting outside and raising my heart rate without knowing exactly how much by and without being able to measure the ‘worth’ of the run in facts and figures.

This need for a push against quantification is part of the reason why I love the message behind Jameela Jamil’s podcast, iWeigh. On the surface, this is a pretty standard celebrity interview podcast. But at the end of each episode, Jamil asks her guest to tell her what they ‘weigh’; they have to tell her their weight in actions, values, and relationships, not kilograms or pounds. In doing this, Jamil is undoing the pervasive narrative (especially among women) of someone’s self-worth being tied to a number on a scale. And it is honestly just so lovely to listen to, to hear someone say that they weigh being an amazing mother, their social activism, their ability to command the attention in a room, their empathy. This idea focuses on the qualitative, rather than that quantitative, aspects of a person’s existence. And it is different for every single person. This culture of numbers tries to make everything we do measurable against a constant value (10,000 steps, 2,000 calories, 5-fruit-and-veg-a-day), but human experience can't really be contained in this way. The things said in this section of each podcast episode are things that can't be measured in numbers. But they are the things that help us get up in the morning, that give us that warm feeling of accomplishment and connection with others.

Science and data are important, and I’m not suggesting that we do away with them completely of course. But, tracking data can only get us so far; it only represents one fraction of the human experience, and we can't automatically improve our health simply by tracking it. Perhaps we should, as we usually have before now, leave it to the professionals. Most importantly, we need to remind ourselves that we are worth so much more than the numbers that we so often use to measure our value.