I receive an email from Tesco Diets

Many moons ago, in my search for the Holy Grail of Slimming (i.e. a diet that allows you to lose weight, keep it off and not feel hungry or deprived), I signed up to Tesco Diets. I can’t really remember how it worked now, but I think it was basically calorie counting plus exercise counting.

(By exercise counting, by the way, I mean that thing where someone writes an article which says “1 hour on the cross trainer: two Mars Bars burned”, which would be great if it worked like that – but it doesn’t, because how many calories you burn depends on your height, your weight, your general level of fitness and how hard your heart is working. So a very out of condition person walking up a flight of stairs is likely to be burning considerably more calories per minute than a reasonably fit person on the cross-trainer. But I digress.)

Anyway, the Tesco thing offered to do shopping lists for you based on your diet, which – like all such offers – turns out to be a gimmick that doesn’t really work that well, or at least it didn’t for me. So I ditched it, and ultimately diets generally. And I haven’t received anything from them for months in the way of newsletters. So as you can imagine I was quite surprised to receive this email out of the blue this morning:

Dear Katy,

So you have been less than vigilant about maintaining a healthy diet and exercise regime over the summer months! But now its September and the summer party really is over and you are left feeling self conscious about the holiday gain. You want to lose weight and get back into shape, but you just can’t seem to do it! Well we can help. Follow our top tips and soon you’ll be on your way to a healthier, slimmer you. Have a great week!

Dr. Barbara Wilson
Head of Nutrition

Humph.

HUMPH.

Is it just me or is this email out of order? I know it’s easy to be alarmist about anorexia and bulimia, but I can’t help thinking that this is exactly the sort of email that would play on a certain sort of person’s deepest insecurities. But that’s not even the main point. I think there are two points to be made about this.

The first is that there are plenty of reasons why someone wouldn’t have kept going with Tesco Diets – like the fact that they’d discovered that Weight Watchers or Slimming World or perhaps even eating healthily and exercising without electronic assistance might be working better for them.

The second is that I wouldn’t listen to that sort of nannying hectoring from my mother and I’m certainly not taking it from Tesco. If you want to get me back into Tesco Diets (which, in fairness, isn’t going to happen however you try), try something like “Hi Katy, we notice you haven’t logged on for a while, and we thought we’d remind you of the following features which have helped many of our customers raise their fitness levels and boost their self-confidence. We hope to see you soon. Etc etc.”

Excuse me, I need to go and write an angry letter now.