Old and fat

It’s one thing being a size 12 in the UK but quite another over here where women’s clothing seems to come in miniscule versions of the UK 6, 8 and 10 (and beyond that, good luck!) However valiant attempts to convince myself that Singaporean women are all tiny (well, they are shorter!) failed to take account of the insidious onslaught of vanity sizing in the UK. This is of course the well known phenomenon where you are a size 16 in Jaegar yet miraculously and with no diet, a size 12 in Next.

Of course the absolute key to vanity sizing is that somehow the female psyche deems anything up to a size 12 to be acceptable and my guess is that the measurements just keep getting bigger to keep pace with the nation’s ever expanding girth. Of course if I was brutally honest I would fess up to realising that the size 12 trousers I have been buying from Next are not ‘just up from a size 10’ or anything like - you could fit a Filipino netball team in them. Well today the brutal truth is out: I am fat.

Well, 34.8% of me is fat to be precise - which any way you look at it is a truly hideous concept. So says the body and fitness assessment report from our new gym, and it makes pretty damning reading. In fact the only real plus is that my blood pressure is normal, although I’m not sure how it’s faring after this diagnosis! Apparently I have the cardiovascular fitness of an asthmatic sloth, the strength of Superman’s anorexic sister on kryptonite and the flexibility of a wheelchair-bound octogenarian. In light of this I suppose I should take comfort from the fact that my ‘Body Age’ is only 45. Forty five!!! It’s bad enough that my real age starts with a three but to find out that my internal organs will soon be drawing out their pension is positively mortifying.

Of course Dom laughed heartily at the report, especially at the Body Age calculation, so I’m currently seeking consolation in the fact that as I write this he is at the gym having his assessment. Soon we will find out if that beer belly of his really is solid muscle and whether 20 minutes on an exercise bike a couple of times a week has built up sufficient cardiovascular fitness to give Haile Gebrsellasie a run for his money. Somehow I think not…