Habit, Temporality and the Body as Movement: '5:2 Your Life'

This article explores the 5:2 dietary plan in terms of the relationship between habit, temporality and matter through a focus on the somatechnics of the body in movement. It makes links between some of the recent work on the body and habit which suggests, broadly speaking, that habit is an important way of understanding the body, the social and the temporal, and recent work on the body and animation and automation. This latter set of literature explores how animation, traditionally the preserve of the human, is now also a capacity of non-human entities or technologies and, as such, raises questions as to whether the dichotomies of human/non-human, bodies/technologies and nature/culture can hold. The article examines how a prevalent framing of the blurring of the distinction between animation and automation is to see various technologies as ‘creeping’ into the realm of the body, threatening to turn humans into automations. However, through a focus on critical arguments about the impossibility of maintaining dichotomies, it argues that the 5:2 plan can be understood to emerge from an awareness of, and as a response to, a temporally and socially specific configuration of nature and culture, bodies and technologies, and animation and automation