Limbo - future of weight loss or expensive dud?

I’ve just been told about a fascinating new app and I can’t make my mind up about it - it’s either going to be a fabulous success and make its creators very rich or it’s going to sink without trace.

The app is called Limbo and it aims to gamify weight loss by getting users to constantly monitor their glucose levels. It uses some of the same closed loop technology for people with diabetes which I wrote about last year and which was approved by NICE last week.

On a Zoom call, Limbo CEO Rurik Bradbury, a serial entrepreneur based in New York, explained that the business was born out of the research of one of his co-founders, physiologist Tony Martin who is based in Cork in Ireland: “Tony for about 30 years has been on this lonely odyssey where he's been researching blood sugar and its impact on the body.” In 2017 came a big moment with the arrival of CGM - continuous glucose monitors:”If you manage your blood sugar in a certain way, and you manage it with food inputs, you have the blueprint to transform the body, including weight loss.”

So the idea for Limbo came to them - give users the same glucose monitors that parents were hacking together for their children with Type 1 diabetes:

“What we added on top of that is a transmitter that live streams to an app,”explained Rurik. “We built an app, we built cloud services. And the fundamental concept is, if we could take this out of Cork and make it into a tech platform, we could scale it to millions, hundreds of millions of people.”

What they have built and tested in Ireland is a service they insist is not about following a diet but being nudged by what your glucose monitor - a patch you replace every two weeks - tells the app about what you’re eating. (You’re also supposed to enter details of your meals but the monitor gives a more honest readout.)

“What the app does is essentially coaching. It nudges you, it spots if you eat something - if you eat a mince pie, it can immediately tell that and jump in and say ‘hang on a minute’!”. While there are yet to be any major studies on the effectiveness of the app in terms of weight loss, Limbo says it has a lot of data from the several hundred people in Ireland who have been trying it out and the results so far have been very impressive.

Also on the call was Limbo’s PR man Paul Cockerton who gave an enthusiastic endorsement of the app’s effectiveness. ‘PR man Backs Employer’s Claims”, I hear you say, is about as surprising a headline as “Dog Bites Man.” But Paul, who I had come across over the years working for various clients including the once groundbreaking mobile operating system Symbian, had an interesting story to tell.

The call from Limbo had come when he was at a low ebb: ‘I’d just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, had put on huge amounts of weight, so as well as saying I’d help them, I signed up for the service to try it out.” The results, as I could see from his appearance on his webcam, were spectacular - a lot of weight lost and some other benefits too: “In terms of energy, clarity of mind, it’s like a cobweb has been lifted.”

There’s obviously a huge market for any company that can demonstrate that it can reliably help you shed weight, so it’s not surprising that it has won some heavyweight financial backers. Why then do I have any doubts about a rather clever product which seems to work?

First, the absolutely eyewatering cost of a Limbo subscription - getting on for £1000 to get started, then £250 per month, probably for at least three months. Rurik Bradbury says the price will come down as the technology advances but in the short term it is hard to see many - besides those for whom the only alternative is having their stomach stapled - wanting to splash out that much.

And the second reason is human nature. We’ve all been on those miracle diets or exercise regimes which see you lose a lot of weight in a hurry, only to find that six months later you are back where you started. Why should Limbo be any different ?

Its founders, however, are confident that their system will nudge us towards a permanent change in our eating habits. Limbo is starting to sign up UK customers right now so by this time next year we should have a clearer idea of whether this really is the future of weight loss - or just another diet dud.