UK Council To Send Obese People 'Motivational' Texts Telling Them To Use Stairs 225
Qedward writes "Stoke-on-Trent City Council is sending texts to obese people in the area to help motivate them to lose weight. Examples of the texts sent include 'aim to eat a variety of fruit and vegetables each day,' 'aim to eat regular meals and keep a check on snacks and drinks' and 'maybe walk to the shops or use the stairs more often.' Over 100,000 people in the region are overweight or obese, the council said, and the texts are for those who are aged at least 18, have a body mass index of 25 or over and who have proactively signed up to receive the motivational messages."
BMI is Flawed and Incorrect (Score:0, Interesting)
Well BMI is Wrong anyway, yay for using a flawed formula to make people feel bad.
Quote : http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/255712.php
BMI has been used for 100 years in population studies. by doctors, personal trainers, and other health care professionals, when deciding whether their patients are overweight. However, BMI has one important flaw - it does not measure your overall fat or lean tissue (muscle) content.
Body Mass Index, derived from a simple math formula, was devised in the 1830s by Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-1874), a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist. BMI is said to estimate how fat you are by dividing your weight in kilograms by your height in meters squared. However, as mentioned earlier, the measurement is flawed, especially if the person carries a lot of muscle.
The current BMI formula leads to confusion and misinformation, Trefethen believes. The height2 term divides the weight by too much when people are short, and by too little when they are tall. The result is short people being told they are thinner than they really are, while tall people are made to think that they are fatter than they are.
Re:i hate fat fucks as much as the next guy... (Score:1, Interesting)
and exactly what about "fat fucks" makes you hate them.
Well for starters any time the company buys us lunch, it's two pizzas or two whole chickens per Fatass, and one slice or one bony wing for each of the rest of us.
Is it the way that they can't do their jobs, oh, that's right, it has no effect on that.
Depends on the job. In my case, in an office, they get to have a $800 office chair while the rest of us have to deal with the $70 crappy models... because the normal max weight on a regular office chair is 250 pounds and you have to buy a really NICE one to support a 450 pound individual.
I guess its the fact that they take up your parking spot, but of course, that to the car.
Not my spot, because I can't park in the handicapped/disabled parking section. But it DOES take one of those spots away from the guy who has to use a walker due to advancing MS, the lady in the next cube over with a severe chronic Asthma condition, and the guy down the hall who busted both his legs when a drunk hit his car, and has a temporary permit while's he's in physical therapy.
Perhaps its the fact that they use 2 airplace seats, but then again, they pay for that.
That's only on large commercial jets. On smaller craft, one fat fuck weighs as much as three normal people, so they buy two tickets and then the airline has to leave one seat empty due to total cargo weight on the craft, so everyone pays more per ticket.
So what exactly is it that makes you and the next guy hate "fat fucks" you stupid ass, undereducated, bigotted piece of shit?
The smell is a big part of it. The constant complaining about being fat or not feeling good, even as they consume a meal that should feed a family of five. The laziness. The extra long break times taken. What they do to the toilet in the bathroom.
The thing which bothers me most about fat people is when they try to act like they're some kind of victim. You're not a victim, you're just too lazy/unmotivated to DO anything about it. I have little sympathy for people with problems which are entirely of their own making, and yes that includes Fatass Mutherfuckers alongside drug users, alcoholics, and other assorted low-life scum.
Re:i hate fat fucks as much as the next guy... (Score:0, Interesting)
Different AC here...
I've never seen a fat person pay for 2 airline seats. Maybe if they were super obese, but in general if they are just moderately obese then they squeze themselves into a single seat and bulge over the armrests into my seat. It's very uncomfortable for everyone.
Also at the moderately obese end they often smell bad due difficulty washing themselves and even reaching their butt to wipe it.
Finally it just makes me annoyed that I put in the effort and will power to control my diet (even though I really love food), and they dont. Guess who costs the public medical system more??
Re:i hate fat fucks as much as the next guy... (Score:1, Interesting)
Wish I had some mod points today.
Being fat is not a condition.It is a lifestyle choice that has impacts on others.Just the same as someone who smokes, doesn't shower, or doesn't clean their teeth.
I have sat next to quite a few fat people in my time on long haul flights.
Oblig Mark Twain (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:BMI (Score:4, Interesting)
Weight does not and should not scale with the square of height unless you imagine that taller people are taller and wider, but not thicker. It's not a cubic relation either in reality, but there would have been more logic supporting that than square, even if it's a no better fit to common-sense results wise.
Everything to do with exponent-2 BMI should just be totally ignored. It's total bullshit. It says no more, and plenty less, than a whole range of other measures that aren't bullshit. It should have been thrown into the toxic waste bin of stupid medical superstitions that's of no use to anyone decades ago.
We do some work in the field, in governmental contexts. We've come up with phrase "policy-based evidence-making" for such bogostats.
What's your BMI using a 2.5 exponent, as proposed here?
http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/bmi.html
(And no, sorry, I'm not volunteering mine on either scale, given where on the bell-curve I sit. (yes, the flat bit.))