by Desperate Housewife (From Bucks Free Press)

My Christmas present told me I was obese!

12:06pm Friday 1st January 2010

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Well, as we welcome a new year and a new decade I have been asked by a surprising number of people what my resolutions are going to be! Perhaps that’s because I am so overweight that my friends are politely prompting me to go on a diet!

This Christmas our family gift was a board that goes with a popular gaming console, which measures your fitness levels. In order for it to be able to relay this information accurately one must input such data as your height and age and then it calculates your BMI - as it has weighing scales built in to the board.

Thankfully, we had waited until the afternoon of Christmas day before plugging it all in, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have eaten anything for my Christmas lunch for the supposedly fun gaming console told me that I was OBESE! Yes, my Christmas present told me I was obese!

Since then I have exercising on it daily for at least half an hour, yesterday for an hour and a half! The competitive streak in me that had been buried since my school days has apparently resurfaced! If my husband gets a better score on a fitness test than me I will try again and again until I am better than him.

These last few days since Christmas I have had delicious chocolates and Christmas cake in the house to consume- obviously I have considered eating this to be vital to give me the energy I have needed to complete even the lowest level of fitness challenges! However, realistically I know that I will not lose weight if I am eating unhealthily no matter how many hours I spend balancing on the white board. The New Year is as good a time as any to resolve not to eat as much “naughty,” food, so the first day of January is the first day of my new diet. I know that it will be very hard, as I have about four stones of extra baggage to disperse of! It’s only 12:05 and already the only thing I can think about is food. I gave up smoking at the start of the last decade but somehow this dieting feels harder. Thinking about it- I started eating when I gave up smoking- but I won’t swap the cakes for cigarettes, no, I am very glad that my smoking days are over. This time I will exchange my vice(s) for exercise. Hopefully the desire for long term results; a change in my physical shape and a need to improve my health, will get me through the hideous start to this diet and new exercise regime. At the beginning you seem to put a lot of effort in but see very little physical difference.

If anyone else asks me if I have made a New Year’s Resolution I will admit my plan to exercise more, but I won’t tell them that I am planning to lose a third of my body weight as it would put too much pressure on myself. I know that friends would think they were being supportive by constantly asking how the diet was going, but I wouldn’t like it.

Well, very good luck to anyone else who has made a New Year’s Resolution! Keep to it- you can do it!