Can you lose weight via WhatsApp?

I have just run a 10km obstacle race and I am standing in a drizzly field in south London, looking at photographs of myself leaping over giant inflatable walls… and lamenting my bingo wings, triple chin and little pot belly.

‘I don’t understand,’ I moan to my friend’s husband Neil, who took the photographs of us during the run. ‘I’ve been eating healthily for months.’ 

Suspicious of the long-term effects of the Atkins, 5:2, SlimFast and faddy diets, I’ve been trying to lose weight by reducing my calories (to 900 a day) and upping my exercise (to three workouts a week). However, I plateaued at a size 12-14, my body clinging on stubbornly to its wobbly bits. Neil, a CrossFit guru who works in finance but whose knowledge of nutrition is PhD-worthy, shrugs.

‘I can easily get you in shape in no time,’ he offers. I’m thrilled and wait for him to suggest some clever new training programme. But instead he says… ‘You should join my WhatsApp group.’

‘WhatsApp? To lose weight?’

‘Trust me.’

That night, Neil’s wife, my friend Amy, adds me to a WhatsApp group entitled ‘Nutritionist Neil’. The group icon is a can of Diet Coke with a red cross through it (our friend Nicky, also in the group, is trying to kick her cola habit).

At 6am, my phone flashes and Nutritionist Neil lays out his plan. ‘Everything, and I mean everything, that passes your lips from now on must be photographed and posted to the group. That means every Haribo, every mint. And don’t cheat. You will only be cheating yourselves.’

The lunches

Turning to technology as a weight-loss crutch isn’t exactly new. The use of fitness apps has increased by 330 per cent over the past three years, according to a recent study by Flurry Analytics, and remote training – working out with a trainer over Skype or on FaceTime – is now as run-of-the-mill as popping to Virgin Active, for celebs and civilians.

And, despite being a technophobe, even I have now ‘attended’ a yoga class at an ashram in India via YouTube, and downloaded My Fitness Pal, an app with 165 million users that can monitor every calorie, every step and the precise nutrients in my dinner. But just posting your meals and snacks on a WhatsApp group? How can that help?

The theory, explains Neil, is that pausing to photograph everything we eat should make us more thoughtful about our food choices – plus sharing the pictures with friends should theoretically deter me from pigging out on chocolate and cheese.

After all, posting a snap of my Shake Shack double cheeseburger and strawberry milkshake, while Amy is nibbling on grilled chicken and kale, has a definite public-shaming element to it. And the fact that they’re my friends, rather than an anonymous personal trainer, adds an extra level of, well, ruthlessness to the challenge.

Next, Neil wants our precise goals, so he can send us suggested nutrition plans and cheer us on until we reach our targets. Amy wants to tone up and Nicky wants to lose four stone, both before our girls’ holiday to Barbados in December. I’m thrown. I hadn’t realised it would be this formal.

‘Errr, I want to fit into my Helmut Lang leather trousers again,’ I write. But Neil wants more specifics. I check my BMI and give it some thought. ‘I want to drop two more stone. By Barbados.’ To lighten it up a bit, I add, ‘No carbs before Barbs,’ though I have a feeling I won’t be laughing for long. But I grab my camera phone and give it a go.

Day one. Breakfast. I arrange two oatcakes prettily on a tea plate then, as an afterthought, slather on almond butter to please pro-protein Neil. (He encourages me to increase my calories to 1,900 a day, ensuring carbohydrates comprise only 15 per cent of that; the rest being protein and ‘good’ fats like olive oil, nuts and avocado.)

Next, I brew a camomile tea, earning a gold-star emoji, which I find childishly pleasing – while poor Nicky gets a telling-off for a diet yogurt that will prompt a sugar spike. Lunch is vegetable soup and chicken breast – another thumbs up – but at 3pm my daily headache kicks in and, as usual, I suppress it with two dark-chocolate rice cakes and strong tea. Then, 90 minutes later, cranberry and orange biscuits are passed around the office. In the past, I’d have forgotten about the earlier rice cakes, but  the photograph is an annoying reminder, making me pause. I eat the biscuit anyway.

The snacks

That night, I’m out for dinner. I sip on sparkling water (I’m rewarded with a picture of a halo from Amy), and scour the menu for low-carb, high-protein options, choosing steak with steamed vegetables. The waiter won’t substitute my chips for a side salad or sweet-potato fries. I push them to the side of my plate, but end up picking at them, and post a photograph to confess.

‘Well done for posting the pictures, guys,’ says Nutritionist Neil. ‘Remember there is no giving in – if you slip up and eat something bad, don’t think it’s all over. Just move on.’ At that moment my pudding arrives – a flourless Nutella cake. I duly post a picture. ‘Oh my word,’ says Neil. There is a very long pause. Then he adds, ‘Let’s remember though that progress comes from consistency, so it’s not an excuse to cheat.’

Amy and Nicky fall about laughing (ie, they post crying-with-laughter emojis). ‘It’s flourless,’ I write with a winky face. But it niggles at me, in a way it wouldn’t were the group not all there to see it. I realise I am embarrassed.

Having afternoon snacks and a pudding with dinner on day one is bad enough – but photographing it and sharing it makes it all more real... and excruciatingly shameful. Tomorrow, I promise myself, I’ll try harder – to keep face, if nothing else. 

On day two I get flummoxed trying to track my macronutrients using a barcode- scanner app – I hadn’t realised this would be so time-consuming and techy – and on day three I discover I have put on a pound.

Grumpy, I make myself protein porridge and get a telling-off from Neil (still too carb-heavy!), then I’m reprimanded again in the afternoon for nibbling on a tiny square of raspberry chocolate (even though I photographed it alongside a tube of lip balm to show the miniscule scale).

If this was a solo diet I’d quit, but it’s only been 72 hours – to save face in front of my friends, I carry on. That weekend, I am at a book festival with a packed schedule. Hurrying out for lunch between meetings, I panic. I’d usually grab a sandwich but it’s too carby, and salad won’t fill me up for long enough, so in desperation I message the group.

After scanning my location on Google Maps, Neil sends me to a Mexican restaurant where I eat steak, black beans topped with feta, an enormous salad and a side of guacamole. My stomach doesn’t grumble until I get home at 11pm, and even then a plate of spinach and ham is enough to settle it (#winning!).

For the next few days, I am a model student: when the snacks table at work is piled high with crisps, dips, savoury nibbles and chocolate cake, I send a photograph of the spread to the WhatsApp group and ask Neil what I can eat. He permits some guacamole and a few mini sausages (‘not ideal but…’), and I chomp away happily, while my colleagues laugh at me having to ask.

At a family Sunday lunch I skip roast potatoes and pile on the vegetables and lamb; I eat pork stir-fries and my body weight in turkey meatballs, trying to please Neil. But by day nine I am sick of meat. The sight of ham turns my stomach.

That night, I dream that turkey mince is growing out of my knees. In the morning, I open the fridge. Only sliced turkey left. I put it on a quinoa cake and eat it miserably. I lose steam after that. My off-camera snacks mount up (if you’re reading this, Group, sorry!).

There were those three chocolate biscuits with a cup of milky tea and the chocolate-and-peanut Eat Natural bar between meetings. I expect the others to taper off too, but Nicky stocks up on turkey burgers and bakes ham and mushroom muffins (Neil’s recipe), while Amy blends strange concoctions of strawberries and broccoli in her Nutribullet, which she insists are delicious.

The dinners

Invigorated by them, I throw myself into it properly and fill my fridge (which had previously contained only jam, elderflower cordial and mustard) with ‘gold star’ foods: avocado, purple sprouting broccoli, fresh steaks, vegetable cakes, salty butter, guacamole, mangetout, oaky cheeses, carrot sticks, Greek yogurt; something I haven’t done for years since I lived with an ex-boyfriend. (Cooking for one never appealed.)

Suddenly I am excited to eat at home as, with my WhatsApp group on standby, I actually have someone to show off my efforts to. By day 12, friends start to comment when I whip out my phone every time I eat. Two (millennial) friends think it’s fun; they post their dinners on Instagram most nights anyway.

An older friend finds it amusing, saying she might try it too. My mum tells me I’m absurd, but sweetly fills the fridge with avocado and eggs when I visit. And a forthright colleague says, ‘Get lost, I’m so sick of people obsessing about nutrition.’ And I do begin to feel obsessive.

Late one morning, I dash out of my flat with a fistful of turkey breast and bump into a new neighbour in the lift, and after explaining my peculiar breakfast, I waffle on for 10 minutes about the merits of photographing your  food and ‘mindful’ eating.

On WhatsApp I find myself writing things like, ‘Had 1 litre of water, 1 seaweed oatcake and did an ashtanga yoga class, now off home to protein it up’ – without irony. My old tea-and-biscuits-for-breakfast self would roll her eyes and say ‘shut up, fool’.

Then, just as I’m hitting my stride, another hiccup. Working late one night, I crack open a tub of chocolate mini rolls on a colleague’s desk (it’s 8pm on a Friday, after all) and eat one… two… heck, I haven’t photographed those so I might as well carry on… I finish the whole tub.

Afterwards, I feel sick, and deeply disappointed in myself. If this were a ‘normal’ diet, I’d give up. But bizarrely, I feel like I’ve let down the group and I owe it to them to pick up and carry on. Until now we’d been in it together; when Nicky got through a Diet Coke craving and when Amy resisted the pile of pain au chocolats being handed around her office, we heaped on praise.

Then there is Neil; he has invested so much time and care into our nutrition programme (a 20-page dossier no less), the least I could do is try properly. So after chocolate-roll-gate I vow to do better still – for my Helmut Lang trousers, for my Barbs body – but also for Amy, Nicky and Nutritionist Neil.

Three weeks later, I weigh myself: I have lost two pounds. Hallelujah! I celebrate with… ham and mashed avocado. ‘Splash on some olive oil too,’ says Neil jubilantly.

Six weeks on, I am four pounds down – a small start, perhaps – but I feel more awake, energetic, in touch with how certain foods make me feel, plus I no longer have afternoon sugar-dip headaches.

Better still, whereas previously my meals looked unfailingly beige, I now take pride in colour and presentation. And when I do dive into a chocolate cake – much as I admire Neil’s steely willpower in only ever eating for fuel, I will always let myself eat for enjoyment now and then – I appreciate the texture and sweetness more than I ever did before.

What’s more, my WhatsApp group is now a constant feed of inspiring supper ideas – Amy’s charcuterie boards, Neil’s chunky home-made guacamole, the innovative things Nicky can do with a (half-permitted) sweet potato – so this doesn’t feel like a diet that will peter out. Rather, it is a way of examining my go-to eating habits, and pressing reset.

Ultimately, I’ll always have a slab of soft cheese in my fridge, I can’t imagine a future without buttery Jersey Royal new potatoes, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop at one chocolate Florentine – so maybe those leather trousers won’t get an airing just yet.

But for as long as Neil, Amy and Nicky will have me, I’ll carry on photographing what I eat because the rewards are tremendous. After all, there really is something to be said for thinking before you eat – and before you cheat. (Now, where did I stash those Jaffa Cakes…?)