I’m a tech expert and lost nearly 4st with three gadgets – dieting was so much easier and I didn’t even have to run

TECH can’t solve all of our problems – but it helped me shed nearly four stone over the summer, so I can’t complain. I’m The Sun’s technology editor so I spend a lot of time testing gadgets, but I didn’t spend enough time moving it turned out - and I was ballooning without realising it. Then I stepped on the scale one day and, suddenly horrified, I vowed to trim the fat. In February 2024, my weight had crept up to 15st, nearly 210lbs. I was a men's large clothing size, and my BMI was officially overweight.

Seven months later, by the end of that September, I’d dropped 50lb to just over 11st - 160lb - and could fit comfortably into a men's medium. It wasn’t all tech, of course. I ate less food and moved more. But I’m convinced it would’ve been way harder without gadgets. The thing about losing weight is that it’s simple, but definitely not easy. We all know how it works: burn more calories than you consume.

But in a world where inhaling a slab of cake is much more tempting than getting up for a 6am run, the calories often win. As it happens, I love cake and I don’t love running, so I was already on the back foot. And my back foot was getting heavier by the day. I also wasn’t about to squirt Ozempic into my thigh or book a flight to Turkey for a nip-tuck. So here’s how I got the weight off… with a little help from technology.

First up is the Apple Watch. Important note here: it doesn’t need to be an Apple Watch. But it does have to be something that tracks heart rate and calories – not just steps. I used an Apple Watch Series 9 (and then the Series 10 when it came out in September), but any decent Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung, or Google watch with a heart-rate monitor will do. The Apple Watch Series 10 starts at £399, but there's a cheaper Apple Watch SE out for £219. And you can bag some Fitbit models for even less.

It’s that heart measurement that allows watches to make a fairly decent guess at how many calories you’re burning each day. I found this massively useful for two reasons. Firstly, knowing my calories burned let me work out how many I could comfortably eat. Yum. Secondly, it’s bloody motivational. The Apple Watch does a great job of this with its “Move” ring that monitors how many calories you’ve burned throughout the day.

If you stack this on top of your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is how many calories you burn simply by existing, then you have a total number for each day. Eat less than that big number and the weight goes down. How quickly I was losing the weight would depend on the gap between what I was eating and that big number. Looking back, I was probably losing in the region of 1lb to 1.5lbs a week, which is about right for healthy weight loss.

Trying to close your Apple Watch Move ring is great fun, and basically turns movement into a game. And you can set your target of how many calories you want to burn as high or low as you like. I started out with it set at around 500 calories, but I’ve since bumped it up to 750 now that I exercise more regularly. You’ll work out pretty quickly what a reasonable amount of movement is for yourself. If you've got an active job, you might already be well on your way.

The good news is that almost everything you do adds to the ring, even just walking to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Brilliant. I also had a little help from France. No, I didn’t start guzzling entire bottles of wine in the hope that grapes would sort me out. There’s a French company called Withings that makes health gadgets – including “smart” weighing scales. For your body, not baking.

It’s difficult to eyeball how much fat I was dropping (if any), so a scale was essential. Part of the faff of weighing yourself is having to take note of it. You can write it down or manually log it in an app, but I found even that was a pain. What’s great about the Withings Body Comp scale (£179.95) is that it beams your daily weight straight into your apps for you. So it’ll pop up in the Withings app, and then automatically sync to the iPhone’s Health app too.

If I’m putting in all of this effort, I want the freedom to be as lazy as possible with monitoring it. What’s great about these scales is that they also measure your body fat percentage. That’s a record of the percentage of your body that’s made up of fat (versus muscle or bone or water). The Sun spoke to Ollie Thompson (@olliethompsonhealth), one of the UK’s top personal trainers and founder of Welltolead, who revealed how weight isn’t the only stat worth watching….

If you’re like most people, you probably focus too much on the number on the scale when it comes to getting fit. But weight alone doesn’t tell the full story, and obsessing over it can hide the progress you’re actually making. Instead, grab a fitness tracker and start paying attention to a few other stats that reveal more about your fitness. Stat #1 – Body fat percentage. This shows how much of your body is made up of fat compared to lean mass.