Dear LPG,

Everyone has something that sets their imagination in motion and I suppose that I am no exception, although the thing that really gets me thinking often leaves my friend seeing me as a bit of a fuddy-duddy.  When I was young, like many people it was the pop music charts but I think that older age has encouraged me to move on from there.  I continue to be triggered by demographics and once I have found a set of statistics that interests me, my mind goes into overdrive and I just can’t help putting my own spin on the results.

This is exactly what happened to me when I looked back at some of the older articles on the LPG pages recently.   I found myself reading what DP had to say about BMI (►►►) and I could not help myself.  My next port of call was a Googling session to find out just how mine stood up against the national average.

It is not that good, but I found an interesting set of statistics which showed how fat we are as a nation, although the statistics are seven years old now and, as well as the first six of those, we have had the experience of the most recent one we have lived through while being stuck at home with not a lot else to do but eat ourselves into an even worse state.

With a bit of luck, we are on the way out of lockdown now and perhaps this is the time to take a good look at what the mirror often forgets to tell our eyes when we take our daily look and visually measure just where we are up to. 

I know that there are other ways of measuring how fit or fat we are these days but BMI is as good a starting point as ever, and I think the eye-popping effect of my latest personal result when I first saw it, gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘pop chart’!   

According to the statistics that I found, we are in the top 40 of the world’s fattest nations out of the 190 nations measured in the survey that I found; a position that is not enviable, and that was before lockdown.

Perhaps now is the time to measure our personal BMI again and have another go at doing something about it if yours is anything like mine.

TM, Catford.

TM signposts us to an online BMI calculator…

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… and offers us the hard facts contained in the statistics she found…

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