When losing is winning

After experiencing countless direct remarks and subtle innuendos of my expanding frame from my mob I decided instead of dismissing their remarks as little more than friendly family banter I thought I’d do something about my unacceptable predicament.

It’s not like I’m ignorant of the end result of adopting a prolonged unhealthy lifestyle without a balanced fitness routine. The old me succinctly mirrored that outcome.

All year I’ve seen saturation coverage of Indigenous Australians dying 20 years before mainstream Australians and recording horrendous results for diabetes, cardiovascular, kidney, chronic ear and eye diseases and a myriad other deadly illness that seem to afflict us more than our non-Indigenous counterparts.

One only needs to turn on the television today to hear of the current obesity problem being described by medical experts as an Australian pandemic. I understand obesity has doubled in Australian adults and tripled in Australian children in the past decade.

I’m patently aware that obesity increases a person's risk for Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, abnormal blood fat (for example, cholesterol) levels, some cancers, high blood uric acid levels, breathlessness, sleep apnoea, impaired fertility, osteoarthritis of the knees and lower back pain. It also reduces quality of life with respect to social interaction, anxiety, depression and mental wellbeing.

So armed with these pertinent and sobering statistics and never one for adopting the most orthodox approach to logical pathways i.e. starting a diet and exercise regime after the festive season - I decided to commence one prior to the most celebrated calorie loaded party oriented time of the year.

My old bathrooms scales showed an uninspiring result of the weight it had to assess and produced a reading of 105 kilos when I finally decided to clear away the cobwebs and hop on board. Now I’m talking about very old scale that precedes my daughter Jayde who has recently turned 12.

My wife Rhonda agreed to join me in my campaign to shed those dangerously high kilos from my 182cm frame. But in order for her to come on board she insisted that we do away with the old scale and buy a new one that displays weight electronically to the 100th of a gram.

So off to the local supermarket we went and jointly identified a Weight Watchers weight tracking and body analysis scale by Conair. This amazingly light weight scale has become a blessing as it not only records to the exact gram your weight but it can be programmed individually for several people.

Every time Rhonda or I step on the scale as person 1 or 2 it gives us a reading of our current weight, our weight when we last jumped on the scale, our starting weight when we commence this programme, our weight from our goal weight (how much more we desired to lose), our body fat, body mass index, body water and bone mass.

After losing an astounding eight kilos in three weeks on my old scale from the December 4 commencement date of my weight loss program I was most disappointed to hop on my new scale on the 25th to find my weight wasn’t 97 kilos but rather an unflattering 103.7 kilos.

My new Christmas present provided me with a bad start to an otherwise fantastic day; a reading of my weight on my new scale showed painfully that my old scale was almost five kilos out. In effect my starting weight on December 4 of my program wasn’t 105 kilos as thought but, rather, a sad 109.7 kilos.