Once upon a time, in the distant year of 2005, when it was inconceivable that statement belts would ever be unfashionable, Special K launched a wildly exciting promotion: buy an enormous box of cereal and a pedometer might just appear inside! My memory of the specifics is a little hazy (2005, to me, will always be the era of Going Out Tops and little else), but I’m pretty sure it was a one-in-every-three-box-wins-a-pedometer situation. Fuelled by the twin desires to get our hands on this technology and to do so in the cheapest possible way, my housemate and I went off to the supermarket. We weighed a bunch of Special K boxes and emerged victorious with our very own pedometers. I wore mine to university a few times, then quickly grew discouraged that my purely incidental exercise wasn’t quite hitting the mythical 10,000 steps a day goal. So I stopped wearing it, then I lost it altogether, and never gave it another thought until, well, now. If this rather tedious tale were to unfold in a contemporary setting, things would be quite different. For one, almost everyone has some form of step-measuring device in their watch, Fitbit or smartphone now, so there would be no need for cereal boxes. But also, since the heady days of boho chic and Kim Beazley’s last dance (not together), the world has changed. We in the West have evolved into body data narcissists. Thanks to our smartphones, smartwatches and Fitbits, we have become obsessed not just with compiling but aggressively sharing operational information about our bodies with the world at large. Step counting is the most profoundly stupid example of this. Did you know the idea of walking 10,000 steps a day isn’t rooted in modern science at all? It originated from a Japanese clock company that created a pedometer for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. They chose 10,000 steps because it was a nice, round, memorable number. The notion that this is an achievable, desirable and genuinely beneficial health goal is about as meaningful as feeling “so special” after a bowl of cereal. While, of course, physical movement has proven benefits, the core objective of modern fitness is just part of a convenient marketing ploy.