Queen Ilona Maher vs. The Whoop Guy

By now you've probably seen the clip of Steven Bartlett, host of Diary of a CEO, casually mentioning on a podcast that two glasses of wine — he didn't even get drunk — ruined three days of his life: worse sleep, worse podcasting, missed the gym, all of it dutifully tracked on his Whoop. And look, I understand the impulse to want to understand your body. I wear an Oura ring, and I love it — specifically for cycle tracking paired with Natural Cycles, because after years of infertility and PCOS, that kind of data feels like actually knowing my body rather than being at its mercy.

But there's a version of tracking that tips into something else entirely, and as a 90s kid who grew up on Weight Watchers and a side of "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," I recognize it immediately: the moment data stops feeling like information and starts feeling like a rubric you're failing. Monitoring movement, calories, and sleep scores sends me somewhere I've worked really hard not to go back to, like my nervous system somehow knows that optimization is just restriction in cleaner branding.

Which is why Ilona Maher's recent reel felt like a breath of fresh air. You gained a few pounds, she says, because you went out with the girls and laughed all night, sat around the family table and had your mom's cooking, ate the cake — and left feeling fuller (and more joyful) than you arrived.

As a second-generation Italian-American, I was raised to understand that food is how we say "I love you," and people can contain multitudes: in other words, you can love your Oura ring and love a glass of wine.