Obese

The before shot

Today I went to the family planning clinic (there, that's the first thing I wasn't supposed to mention). Anyway, in between injections we took blood pressure readings, which lead to the discussion about the fact that I'm overweight. The nurse is one of those wonderful old-school nurses who have been doing their job forever and know everything. She wasn't about to tell me what to do, but looked very worried when the reading came up 140/80, and told me I should go to my GP, which I'm not about to do as they will prescribe pills and that'll be it - me, on pills forever.

Anyway, as my only risk factor is being overweight, I told my lovely nurse to bully me into losing weight. She duly weighed me, calculated my BMI and told me I now fitted into the OBESE category. That, I must admit is a bit of shock. I've always been a bit fat, but also very active. How many obese people cycle to work every day and play netball and tennis? Being generally big helps me out quite a bit, as the weight doesn't just go straight to my tummy, and I have a lot of muscle mass, so I don't immediately strike people (including myself) as fat.


But then again, I do eat a lot. Not just bad stuff you understand, a lot generally. And I think losing weight for me will be about generally eating smaller amounts of everything (and cutting back on the Friday evening pub chips and the let's face it almost every day mid afternoon chocolate bar).

Anyway, I currently weigh about 88kg and my goal is by my next appointment to weigh 80kg. That's in 12 weeks time, so just under 1 kilo to be lost per week. I have even created myself a little graph on old-fashioned graph paper with a target weight to reach. The nurse put an alert on the computer for the next person having an appointment with me to check whether I'd reached my target weight, so it will be pretty embarrassing if I don't.

But will I do it? I'm feeling pretty hungry after eating sensibly today!