Wearing a fitness tracker, are you? Eager to get your 10,000 steps today, are you? You idiot. Those things are useless. Last year, the University of Pittsburgh published a study claiming that people who wear fitness trackers tend to lose less weight than people who don’t. Then yesterday, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University went further, saying that a daily 10,000-step target could be harmful for some users. Honestly, all said, you would probably lose more weight if you took off your fitness tracker right now and spent an hour violently tutting at it.

The latest findings were presented by Dr Greg Hager at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He said that the target of 10,000 steps was all but arbitrary, having roots in a single study of Japanese men 57 years ago, and that it fails to take into account any environmental or societal variables that may occur from person to person. Three million wearable fitness trackers were bought in the UK in 2015 alone and yet, according to Hager, many owners might be striding towards a target that simply isn’t suitable for them. You have all been wasting your money. You idiots.

Honestly, I couldn’t have been happier to hear this news, because I have spent the past two years sitting on my arse mainlining cakes all day. Seriously, I am not in good shape. As a work-from-home freelance writer, I probably only manage a couple of thousand steps each day, and most of those are to and from the kitchen, because that’s where all the bacon sandwiches are.

I am not exaggerating. See that picture of me in the byline? I currently look like I killed and ate that person, then hid from the police by sleeping in a bin for a month. The last time I performed any sort of physical exertion was in a soft-play centre with my son, and I ended up tearing a footlong hole in the crotch of my trousers as a result, because, realistically, I hadn’t been slim enough to wear them for months. So I’m thrilled that someone has finally punctured these fitness myths. After all, you might have been trying to lose weight and failing, but I haven’t even been trying. Surely that makes me the winner here.

Except it doesn’t, obviously, because the thrust of Hager’s presentation seems nitpicky. Yes, a flat 10,000-step goal doesn’t take things such as age or length of stride into consideration. And, yes, simply walking for a few miles each day won’t be as good for you as a focused, closely monitored exercise and nutrition plan that has been created for your specific lifestyle. But it still means you’re walking a few miles a day, and that has to count for something. You’re still being compelled to move around where otherwise you were not. And, so long as you’re not banking on it to turn you into an Olympic-level athlete, any movement is better than none at all. Meanwhile, at last count, inert sanctimony doesn’t burn very many calories at all, which means that I’m screwed.

However, if this is the end of the fitness tracker – if such wearable devices really are going to be consigned to the same bin as all the abandoned Nutribullets and 5:2 books – then it’s going to leave the industry with a gap in the market. And, if you would be so generous as to listen to my pitch, I think I have just the replacement: shame.

No, really. Any time in the past that I’ve managed to effectively lose weight, it’s because I’ve been thoroughly, corrosively ashamed of how I look. For a while, this has best taken the form of a personal trainer; a man I paid to make me feel sluggish and inadequate at every turn, until I got my act together and stopped piling doughnuts into my face every evening.

And I think this has been the key factor missing from fitness trackers so far. Any fool can give you a sterile set of data at the end of the day, but no product has been able to combine this with an hour-long tirade about how much you have been letting yourself go lately, ideally in your mother’s voice. Get one of those on the market before anyone else and you would be a trillionaire by Easter.

Fortunately, until then, I’ve accidentally struck upon a handy workaround. From time to time, I’m asked to take part in various Channel 5 talking-heads shows called such things as World’s Funniest Marmosets or 50 Shocking Celebrity Blow-Offs. And, since shame is such a powerful catalyst for weight loss, I am here to tell you that nothing is quite as shameful as seeing your own ballooning face wobble in harrowing high-definition closeup, like some sort of dreadful Steve Bannon statue made by a moron from legally condemned margarine. If I lose weight this year – and I think I probably will have to – it will be purely because Channel 5 made me feel like a worthless gutbucket. So that’s my advice to you, readers: throw the fitness tracker in the bin and get booked on a mediocre filler clip show instead. Honestly, it works wonders.