Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Health-check


I've been continuing my health-kick from last year into this and have continued to make progress on reducing fat, increasing muscle-mass and generally improving my diet and ramping up the regular exercise I take. The results are encouraging, overall I've improved my BMI (body-mass-index) from around 28 in Jan 2017 down to roughly 19 since the end of last year. So far this year I've been less focused on weight and more focused on changing shape and constitution by exercising more and driving down my % body-fat (from over 30% to around 18% now) and increasing muscle-mass by doing regular weight training. Apparently muscle mass and therefore strength is something that diminishes as you age and is something that's advantageous to keep at healthy levels, I'm certainly aware of it more now than I was!

As much as these things are personal and difficult to approximate, I did take the test on the BBC web site today just to see what it reports (see results page above). It shows how my vital statistics compare to averages for men of my age, size and region of the country, pleasingly I'm well and truly in the "healthy" section. Amazingly only 21% of men my age are in that category, 79% being either overweight, obese or very obese, if accurate, that's quite an alarming statistic, it can only lead to more health problems for those people as they age and more strain on our already creaking NHS.

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