bmi

But then came the big questions:

1. How much did I actually weigh?
2. How much did I need to loose?
3. 3. How was I going to do it?

Question 1 was a problem because I've not weighed myself in years. Indeed, I didn't even own a set of scales. I did, however, suspect that I weighed enough to be heavier than most scales weigh up to.

A normal set of bathroom scales maxes out at 20 stone. This, I knew, was a lot less than what I weighed - I'd weighed 18 stone when I was at school and still wearing XL level clothes. If I was now 4XL I had to weigh in the region of 350 to 400 pounds (ballpark 25 - 30 stone).

I therefore had to buy a set of scales that would weigh above 20 stone. It took me a little while to find one, but when I eventually did, on the 16th of August, I immediately weighed myself and found that I weighed 24 stone 2 pounds.

Fuck, that's big.

I'd often joked that I was "2 people" but it turns out this was scarily close to the truth, as the answer to the second question would reveal.

Question 2 is all about something called Body Mass Index ,or BMI.

A long time ago, some clever spod worked out a formula that allows you to combine your weight and height and come up with a new number - your BMI. This new number can seem arbitrary, but for me, this table really helps explain it:


So what this shows is your height (in feet and inches) along the left and the BMI along the top. The numbers in the individual boxes are your weight (in pounds).

What the table shows is that BMI is banded and has a simple interpretation - if you have a BMI of between about 25 and 30 then you're Overweight, but if it's over 40 then you're Extremely Obese as it puts it. Another name for this is Morbid Obesity, which is a way of saying you're so fat that, statistically speaking, your weight is almost certain to have extremely negative consequences on your health.

Guess what my BMI is? Well, firstly I'm 5 foot 11 inches tall and as noted above I weighed 24 stone 2 pounds when I first weighed myself. Well, there are 14 stone in every pound, so I weighed 338 pounds. That gives me a BMI of 47.1.

No surprise that I was over the morbid obesity line, but how far over might come as something of a shocker.

Or, to put it another way, to break through into the normal weight band I needed to loose a total of 159 pounds, or about 11 and a half stone. Which is why the joke I mentioned about being two people was horribly true. If I loose half my entire bodyweight from 24stone 2 pound to 12 stone 1 pound I'll be nicely into the normal weight range.

Indeed, what makes that slightly scarier is if you remember that it took me a while to get my scales and so I'd already been dieting for a while before I started weighing myself, so I don't really know what my maximum weight was.

But anyway, the point is there are two of me - inside this fat person there really is a thin one trying to get out!

But then there's question 3 - how was he going to do it?

I needed a plan.