The Weighting Game
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
The New Year is a marvellous time to sit back, put your feet up and
admire the view. Not of the rapidly browning front yard that is two
weeks overdue for mowing but of one's, well, heaving stomach.
Post-Christmas, I hear many troubled stories from folks worried that
they may have overindulged in the area of fruit mince pies, plum
puds and the family feast.
Tosh, I say. Overindulged, my foot. In reality, what has been taking place is a chrysalis-like transformation in your stomachs, from which a nest of strange mutant butterflies will soon emerge. The bulge in the stomach region is just a sign they are taking in enough nutrients and soon will be ready to Become.
And if you believe that, then you really are in a bad way. If it makes you feel better, you and thousands like you are actually stimulating the economy and couch-spring repairers remain eternally grateful and have asked me to pass on their thanks for the festive season.
Look, don't take your expanded girth to heart. It may look bad now but
allow me to introduce you to a little thing called the height-weight
ratio chart. To some people, these are about as uplifting as visions
of PM John Howard discoing naked to Saturday Night Fever, but that's
only because they're not using them right. Allow me to help.
The correct use of the height-weight chart, which, incidentally, is worked out
using the same complex formula that fuelled the shuttle to Mars, is:
take your weight and round it down to the nearest 5kg. Now mentally
delete 10kg due to the vagaries of your home scales, which probably
are a bit out. Next, find what the chart calls its “perfect” or
“average” weight band. Next, add to your height however much extra
height is required to get you into that ideal weight band.
Sure, some disbelievers in your family might doubt that you are, in reality, a
svelte 7ft 3in in socks, but just ignore them. What you know is that
you are merely awaiting your impending growth spurt. You are, in
fact, fudging nothing more than the timing of it all, not your weight.
Of course, some people fit right on into that ideal weight band first
time and they are technically known as either a) fit/healthy, b) supermodels or c) lucky swines who had better stop telling everyone how they can eat anything they want and never ever gain a scrap of weight. (You know who you are, and we're taking notes.)
© The Advertiser & Sheryl-Lee Kerr, 12 JAN 1999