Bernard O'Shea — The Dad Bod Diaries: Help! This culture of TMI is ruining my BMI

I know enough about weight loss to sit the Leaving Cert in it. And yet I still find myself eating chocolate biscuits at 11 o’clock at night

We know too much now. We don’t simply eat a biscuit anymore. We analyse the biscuit. We wonder what emotional need the biscuit represents.

There was a time when a person trying to lose weight got advice from maybe three places: your GP, your mother, and a lad in work who’d “cut out bread”. Now, before you have even had breakfast, your phone has already delivered 17 conflicting opinions from nutritionists, influencers, fitness coaches, and people who once lost four stone living in a van in New Zealand.

Every answer creates a new question. Should I fast? Should I not fast? Is oat milk inflammatory? Is milk poisonous? Is coffee good for longevity, or is it quietly killing me? Should I be eating eggs, or are they emotionally problematic again?

At some point, you stop trying to get healthy and start conducting a full-time investigation into the possibility of becoming healthy. And the mad thing is, I can’t even fully blame the phone because, truthfully, that has changed my life for the better.

Before it, I was genuinely chaotic. Not in the charming, creative sense people romanticise. I mean, properly disorganised. I had no diary. No proper system. No sense of direction, either figuratively or literally. I could get lost driving to places I’d been to several times. Emails vanished unanswered, not because I was rude but because I’d mentally drifted away halfway through replying to them.

I was what Irish people politely describe as “a bit away with the fairies”. Constant thoughts. Half-finished plans. Ideas arrive at speed and disappear just as quickly. Then, suddenly, this glowing rectangle arrived and quietly became my external brain.

My calendar now remembers where I’m supposed to be because I certainly won’t. Google Maps ended countless family arguments in which I insisted I knew “a quicker route”. Notes apps became storage units for comedy ideas that would have evaporated otherwise. Voice notes let me record thoughts in a car park outside SuperValu. 

Reminders now tell me things an organised adult human being should probably naturally remember. 

In many ways, the smartphone gave structure to people like me who never naturally had structure.

Professionally, it resurrected my comedy career. That’s just reality. For years, comedians relied on gatekeepers. Producers. Commissioners. Schedulers. 

Now I can sit in the car after school drop-off, record a 40-second video, and within hours, thousands, sometimes millions, of people can watch it. The same device that bombards me with anxiety about gut health also gave me creative independence.

That’s why modern life feels so confusing. The phone is both the problem and the solution. It organises my life while simultaneously overcrowding my brain. It gave me an opportunity, but also endless noise. It’s the reason I can work efficiently while also spending 45 minutes watching a man in Colorado explain the hidden dangers of bananas.

Permanent explanation mode

And if I’m honest, there’s another uncomfortable truth underneath all this: sometimes I use information as a way of avoiding responsibility, because endless research can feel strangely productive. If I’m still researching, I haven’t failed yet. 

If I’m still gathering information, then the solution remains just over the horizon. One more podcast. One more expert. One more breakthrough video called ‘Five Foods Secretly Destroying Your Energy’.

But action is different. Action gives answers. It’s easier to enter a three-hour spiral about hormones, metabolism and dopamine than it is to simply not eat 10 Toffypops for breakfast. That’s the part I’m slowly being forced to admit.

Sometimes, I turn my habits into a Netflix documentary series. Why does Bernard Overeat? Episode One: Childhood Comfort Eating. Episode Two: Emotional Regulation. Episode Three: Is It Stress, Sugar Addiction Or Unresolved Catholic Guilt? 

Meanwhile, the actual solution is sitting quietly in the corner whispering: “You could also just have porridge”.

I think many of us are now trapped in permanent explanation mode. Every behaviour needs analysis. Every craving requires a theory. Every habit must have a psychological root system going back to childhood. 

And some of that is useful. Self-awareness matters. But there is a point where self-awareness becomes self-exhaustion. We know too much now. We don’t simply eat a biscuit anymore. We analyse the biscuit. We wonder what emotional need the biscuit represents. We discuss if it is ultra-processed. We consider if we’re rewarding ourselves because we didn’t receive enough praise in secondary school.

Meanwhile, our grandparents just quietly had the biscuit and went back out to cut hedges.

The internet has given us an extraordinary ability to explain ourselves. But explanation and progress are not always the same thing, because deep down most of us already roughly know what works. Not perfectly. Not scientifically optimised. But generally. 

Sleep more. Walk more. Eat slightly less. Prepare food better. Stop treating every stressful Tuesday as an emotional emergency requiring melted cheese.

I’ve become addicted to complexity as it keeps hope alive. It suggests there’s a hidden answer somewhere. A secret short-cut hidden behind one more video.

Simple solutions feel frightening as they remove excuses. Perhaps that’s the real tension now. Not “phones are bad” or “social media ruined society”. That’s too simplistic and honestly not true. These tools hugely improved my life.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped using information as guidance and started using it as protection. Protection from failing. Protection from simplicity. Protection from admitting that sometimes the answer isn’t hidden in another podcast or algorithm.

Sometimes the answer is just making your breakfast and going for a walk. Damn it anyway.