And people actually sign on for it.
Intimate data: can a person who tracks their steps, sleep and food ever truly be free?: 'Big tech now encourages us to monitor everything from our heart rate to our glucose levels via smartphones and watches. How much privacy have we lost to the promise of self improvement - and is it time to stop?'
How about we ( Read more... )

There's a strong interview with Christopher Eccleston in today's Guardian G2 on his issues with bodily dysphoria, mental health problems, etc “I’m male and northern and from a working-class background, so you were not supposed to speak about your feelings,” he says. “I still carry all the baggage about masculinity and toughness, and I was ashamed ( Read more... )

'I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want-an adorable pancreas?': Jean Kerr, The Snake Has All The Lines (1960).
Okay, I daresay no-one has ever been told their pancreas is adorable, but people whose life's work involves pancreases may, perhaps, be occasionally moved to comment if they ( Read more... )

Reading this account of the life and times of an obsessive biohacker, we do rather wonder, what is the point, if you're doing/not doing so many things in order to extend your life, when do you have time to, ahem, live? He has completely cut out sugar, pornography, masturbation, all menial jobs, alcohol, processed food, news and social media from ( Read more... )

Has been rather the theme of this week, one way and another.
It pretty much began, sometime Sunday night/Monday morning, as I went downstairs in the dark and my foot skidded off a stair, jarring my knee. Which was very ouchy all the following day, and still a bit twingey, though it survived yoga.
I was due for a routine mammogram on Tuesday: ( Read more... )

Over the weekend, I got noshed on by insects.
And have come up in horrible itchy lumps.
And what is really annoying/bewildering about this is, that I was wearing trousers and a long-sleeved top, and while there were a couple of bites that, yes, just inside the neckline, I guess that's more or less explicable -
I just do not see how they get to ( Read more... )

The Long Read in today's Guardian is on 'clean eating' and how problematic, not to say, entirely woo-woo, it is.
However, I think the author misses a trick because, even though she cites to a mid-Victorian food reformer: In the 1850s, a British chemist called Arthur Hill Hassall became convinced that the whole food supply of London was riddled with ( Read more... )

But, really? this? Am reminded of Winston Smith's compulsory and surveilled physical jerks.
The National Health Service is to put its own 1.35 million staff at the head of a new fight against obesity by encouraging them to join weight-watching groups and take out gym memberships, its new head will announce this week.
How about you reduce the ( Read more... )

I have seen a couple of links to reports about a couple who are Christian swingers - and of what appears to be a somewhat evangelical end of the spectrum vis a vis belief systems.
One report suggested that what they were doing was setting up a swingers' contact system for people in that exact same situation. The other suggested that they were using ( Read more... )

Further to yesterday's post about bodies and ageing and so on, it occurred to me that people such as athletes and ballet dancers, i.e. people who are all about pushing their bodies to do things other bodies can't do, probably don't feel that those bodies 'will automatically fall into line with [their] will', because they are all about putting an ( Read more... )