that much, eh?

Well, both my new bathroom scales and pedometer turned up earlier in the week.

First off, the scales then - is my weight as bad as I'd feared? No - I weigh well within the limit of these scales. Does that really count as good news? Not really, no.

I'm not going to say what I actually weigh, mainly out of embarrassment, but also because I'm not taking what I measured as being a proper measure yet. The key to weighing yourself regularly is to set a day and time and to always measure it under the same circumstances (i.e. same clothes).

It doesn't really matter when those are, but the key is the consistent repetition, and I think the best time for me to do it will be at the weekend. So what I measured earlier in the week could be high or low - I mean, not to the extent of a stone or anything, but it's important not to go weighing myself randomly or I'll get all sorts of spurious readings that could end up disheartening me.

The really bad news side of things is that I really do need the extra weight measurement that these "fat bastard" scales go up to. In fact, actually, by the looks of things I need exactly half of the extra measurement they provide. If I tell you that standard scales weigh up to 20 stone then that probably gives you some idea of the problem I've got.

Not that the 20 stone represents a good weight you understand. There's something called "Body Mass Index" (BMI) and the idea of this BMI thing is it gives you an easy figure to work out how heavy you are. It's calculated using your height and weight and the idea is that it's banded, so if you're number is between x and y then you're a healthy weight, if it's lower than x you're underweight and if it's above y then you're overweight.

The most useful aspect of BMI is that that figure is consistent - if you're 3 foot tall and have a BMI of 20 then that means the same thing as if you're 8 foot tall and have a BMI of 20. Anyway, the real point is that in order to simply be classified as obese I need to get below 20 stone. At my current weight I'm what's known as morbidly obese, which is a doctory weigh of saying I'm going to kill myself by being this fat.

My first goal is therefore to get under 20 stone, and I'm hoping to do that by Christmas. It's a lot to loose and if I'm to achieve it I really need to stick with both the new exercise regime and the diet, but it's a steady loss. The key is this "lifestyle change" thing - not sitting on my fat arse all day, but regularly going for walks and generally increasing my activity levels.

Which is why I got the pedometer.

Apparently, there's quite a lot of evidence that they work as good motivators - when you can actually see how many steps you're actually taking, and knowing how many you need to do, it's not surprising it encourages you.

I've mainly been experimenting with it so far this week. Part of it seems to be accurately setting your step length, and I've been having a few problems with that. See, the difficulty is that when I try to actually measure it, I don't walk normally.

It recommends that you do a set number of steps (10) and measure that, to give the average. But the problem is when I do those ten steps I end up not walking like I normally do. I keep "striding" - taking deliberately long steps.

However, I think I've managed to get it so that it's about right now and it seems pretty accurate when I'm doing proper walking. That's relatively easy to check, because I can just mentally count the number of steps I take along a particular stretch and then see how many its recorded, and it seems reasonably accurate.

However, it seems to go a bit bonkers when I'm just bimbling. I was laying on my bed, watching telly and went to the loo and back for a piss and it recorded something like 40-odd steps. The actual distance is something in the order of 5 metres, so 10 metres there and back and my stride length is about 60cm, so it should only be about 16 or 17 steps.

I think the problem is because of the changing height and the weird movements when I'm wandering around in that way. I guess what that means is that I can use the pedometer to measure proper walking, but in terms of bimbling it's probably a case of take as a fixed amount every day.