DAY 1 — “The Mirror Doesn’t Lie. The App Might.”
April 1st, 2026 — Starting weight: 102kg. Starting excuses: Zero.
There is a very particular kind of humiliation that comes from standing on a set of smart scales at 55 years old, gut out, and watching a Bluetooth device cheerfully announce to your phone that your visceral fat is “Extremely High.”
Happy April Fool’s Day to me.
My name is unimportant for now. What matters is this: I am a 55-year-old Frenchman, 189cm tall (that’s 6ft2 for my British friends, among whom I now live), and I weigh 102 kilograms as of this morning. I have a belly that precedes me into rooms. I have a gym membership I have been meaning to use more seriously. I have a bike. I have, apparently, a visceral fat score of 16 — which, if you know anything about visceral fat, is the number that sits in your arteries and quietly plots against you.
And I have, because I apparently enjoy spending money on things that confuse and occasionally insult me, invested in a Hume Pod and a Hume Band — two devices marketed as potentially life-saving wearable health technology.
So. Here we are.
The Numbers Don’t Lie — But Some Devices Speak With a Forked Tongue
This morning I took readings from two different systems. Let me show you the contrast, because it is instructive.
My Eufy Smart Scale said:
- Weight: 102.00 kg
- BMI: 28.5 — HIGH
- Body Fat %: 30.7% — EXTREMELY HIGH
- Visceral Fat: 16 — EXTREMELY HIGH
- Body Fat Mass: 31.30 kg — EXTREMELY HIGH
- Lean Body Mass: 70.70 kg — LOW
- Water: 49.4% — LOW
- Protein: 12.4% — LOW
- BMR: 1,759 kcal — LOW
That is a lot of red on the screen. That is the kind of readout that makes a man put down his croissant. (I put down the croissant.)
Meanwhile, my Hume Pod looked at the same body and said:
- Trunk fat: 23.7% — Standard
- Both legs: 18.8% — Standard
Standard! Standard, it says. My trunk — this magnificent rotunda of accumulated baguettes and Bordeaux — is standard.
Why? Because — and I want you to read this carefully — the results are “compared to Hume Health users like you.”
Like me. What does that mean, exactly? Like me in age? Like me in weight? Like me in the sense that we all own a Hume Pod and presumably bought it because we were already worried about our health? If your comparison group is a self-selected pool of people who purchased an expensive health device because they were concerned about their metrics, you have just created the world’s most comfortable bell curve. Everyone feels fine. No one is warned. Lovely.
I asked Hume about this. I will report back on what they say.
I Know What I Am Capable Of. That’s The Problem.
Here is what makes this particular journey different from a first-timer’s struggle: I know what this body can do when it tries.
Three months ago, I owned a Peloton bike (I had it for 18 months). I rode it every single day — over 150 consecutive days. I went from where I am now down to 90 kilograms. That is not a fantasy, that is a fact logged in a app and felt in my knees. The body responded. It can respond again. My target this time is 88 kg — just two kilograms beyond what I previously achieved, and this time I intend to build something more durable than a streak.
The Peloton is gone. But the gym membership is real, the outdoor bike is in the garage, and the stubbornness is very much intact.
The Inconvenient Truths I Am Also Tackling This Month
Weight loss is never just about exercise. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Here is my full honest inventory of things I need to fix simultaneously:
Sleep — or rather, the lack of it. I am a night owl by nature and by habit. Left to my own devices I will be awake at 2am reading something I don’t need to read. Starting tonight, I am forcing myself to be in bed before 11pm and up before 6am, with a gym session targeted for 6 o’clock in the morning. Yes, that is as alarming to me as it sounds to you.
There is also this: I have been diagnosed with sleep apnea. I own a CPAP machine — the kind that delivers continuous airway pressure and is supposed to give you the deep, restorative sleep that your body desperately needs for fat metabolism, muscle recovery, and basic human functioning. The problem is that I tear the mask off in my sleep. Every night, at some point, my unconscious self stages a small revolt and removes it. This month, I am going to try — seriously try — to keep it on. Because poor sleep and excess visceral fat are not coincidentally linked. They are causal. Fix the sleep, and the rest becomes significantly easier.
Hydration — or rather, the near-total absence of it. I do not drink enough water. This is not a quirk, it is a problem. Water retention at 49.4% on the Eufy scales confirms what my lips have been trying to tell me for years. As I write this, I have just drunk a full pint of water. That is the beginning. Every cell in my body is apparently surprised and mildly suspicious.
Alcohol. I am French. I enjoy wine. I will not pretend otherwise, nor will I announce some dramatic abstinence that I will abandon by Day 4. What I will commit to is drinking meaningfully less this month, and being honest here when I do drink. Empty calories and disrupted sleep in one glass — it is not a great deal, even if the glass is good.
Intermittent Fasting 16/8. I will be eating within an 8-hour window each day, fasting for 16. This suits a night owl turned reluctant early riser rather well — it means my eating window will likely run from around midday to 8pm, which aligns with the gym-in-the-morning plan. The science on 16/8 and visceral fat reduction in middle-aged men is genuinely encouraging. We will test it in real time.
Why I Am Doing This — And Why You Might Want to Follow Along
For the next 30 days, I am going to do something genuinely uncomfortable: I am going to be honest.
Not social-media-honest, where you post a slightly blurry before photo and then disappear for three weeks. Actually honest. Daily measurements. Daily reality checks. And a proper, good-faith examination of whether these devices — the Hume Pod, the Hume Band, the Eufy scales, and my trusty Fitbit Charge 5 — are actually giving me useful, actionable data, or whether they are selling me the comforting illusion of insight.
My tools:
- 🏋️ A gym membership (now being used, starting today)
- 🚲 A bike (for outdoor rides, weather permitting — this is England)
- 📊 Eufy smart scales
- ⌚ Fitbit Charge 5
- 🫙 Hume Pod (body composition scanner)
- 📡 Hume Band (activity and recovery tracker)
- 💧 Water (revolutionary, I know)
- 😴 A CPAP machine I will actually try to keep on my face
My advantages:
- I am French, which means I understand food at a cellular level, and I know what actually eating well looks like — not diet culture, real food culture.
- I have done this before. 150 days on a Peloton proved the body is willing when the mind commits.
- I am 55, not 85. The body still responds. It is slower, but it responds.
- I have, at this point in my life, absolutely nothing to prove to anyone — which paradoxically makes me more honest than I have ever been.
Today’s Action
- ✅ First weigh-in completed (both scales)
- ✅ Hume Pod scan completed
- ✅ Fitbit Charge 5 synced and baseline noted
- ✅ First pint of water consumed (historic)
- ✅ Bed time set: 11pm
- ✅ Alarm set: 5:45am
- 🎯 Gym session booked for tomorrow morning — 6am
Tomorrow: First early morning gym session, overnight sleep data from the Hume Band and Fitbit, and the CPAP experiment begins tonight.
The belly is real. The data is questionable. The journey starts now.
— Day 1 of 30
