Look at the picture above, what do you see? That’s the front cover of City A.M. on 28-Feb-12 showing what £67.7bn can buy in the UK public sector.
Look closer, what else do you see? Obviously, the lower the average per annum income for a group of people, the more people you can pay. Key professions have been picked for the image. At the bottom, we have nurses and teachers: all women, you can tell from the long hair. At the top, we have bobbies, GPs and senior police: the higher paid professions and of course they have all been portrayed as men, the ties give that away. Hmmm? A clear depiction of the income gap between men and women, a clear depiction of career stereotypes. Is it any wonder that women are said to have lower aspirations? The media consistently bombards us with images that define the status quo. People subconsciously and unknowingly respond to stereotypes: aiming and applying for jobs that society says are ‘normal’ for their type. I very much doubt that too much thought went into creating this image and that’s what makes it so powerful. Stereotypes are so deeply ingrained. Indeed, if the cartoonist had decided to split each line according to the true gender mix in that profession, people may well have screamed “It’s political correctness gone mad!’ Anyway, having made this casual observation, I decided to take it a step further. Using 4 City A.M. papers that were yet to be discarded, I counted the number of male vs. female faces. I excluded the sports section, it was all 100% men and I excluded pictures of crowds because it can be difficult to differentiate man from woman. I did include the fictional ‘tipster’ because he is most certainly depicted as a man. However, I also include the female cartoon in the Lloyds Banking advert to keep it fair. Each image had to be indisputably male or female. The results: 14-Feb: 37 men, 11 women i.e. 23% women 24-Feb: 47 men, 17 women i.e. 27% women 14-Feb: 41 men, 13 women i.e. 24% women 28-Feb: 41 men, 7 women i.e. 15% women What’s your point, Heather, I hear you ask? I don’t have one, numbers just intrigue me.
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This week I watched an irked civilian railing off his displeasure at Boris Johnson writing for the Telegraph and getting paid for it. I think everyone, politicians included are entitled to some time off and they should spend that free time however they choose to. If Boris chooses to write in his free time, so be it. If someone is willing to pay him for it, even better. Why do I say this: He’s not doing it during ‘business’ hours If Boris is sat at his desk in City Hall writing articles I would take issue with that, even if it’s during his ‘lunch’ break. As a public servant it is his duty to serve the public from that office and doing anything else simply would not be right. However, I am reasonably confident that he does not do this. It doesn’t take much time As someone who has always enjoyed writing I know that when one is passionate about an issue you can write about it fluidly and rapidly, it does not take a lot of time. It’s more transparent than other enterprises People frequently take issue with politicians indulging in private enterprise. I too agree that there is only so much time in the day and if you’re in public office you need to rightly spend most of your time on that. Of the private enterprises that a politician might choose to undertake surely writing is one of the most transparent? We the public have access to the writing and can approximate how much time we believe it took Boris to get his feelings down. We get to know Boris’s stance on various issues better Through his writing we get a better feel for how Boris Johnson thinks and hence how suitable a mayoral candidate he is. Everything that Boris does that we can observe is an opportunity for us to vet him, articles included. More tax pounds Let’s trace the income that Boris makes from his column. For argument’s sake let’s call it £10,000 per contribution or about £500,000 per annum.
If the same £500,000 had ended up as operating profit, it would only incur the corporate tax rate of 30%, so just £150,000 would be returned to the taxpayer. I don’t know about you but I prefer the former to the latter. The faster we can wipe out the deficit, the better. In conclusion, provided Boris pays his taxes and doesn’t spend office hours writing his articles, all things considered it’s beneficial to taxpayers and the voting public. Am I missing something here? By Dr Harry The body mass index (BMI) can be calculated by using a formula which relates your weight to your height. The result, a number, can be interpreted to give you an idea of whether you are overweight or obese. One flaw of the BMI is that all the work which has been done to define what is normal was originally done on middle class white Americans in the early 20th century. Some research has questioned the validity of this approach, because it may not be safe to assume that the BMI ranges for normal, overweight and obese can be applied to all races in the same way. Firstly, when measuring weight this includes both fat and non-fat (like muscle, bone, water and minerals). If some ethnic groups have higher bone density or greater muscle mass than other ethnic groups, this would affect their BMI but it would not mean they had more fat; so classifying them as obese or overweight may be inaccurate. One study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition relates measurements of body composition in black and white subjects and discovers that the non-fat content is greater in the black people studied compared to white subjects. This can be accounted for by an increased bone mineral density and/or protein content (muscle being the major protein). The implication of this is that more black people may be classified as obese according to BMI than actually have excess body fat when body fat is measured directly. It is striking that according to US census bureau department statistics, a greater percentage of the black population are obese than the white population than perhaps would otherwise be the case. Similarly you may find that at a particular BMI value, one ethnic group has more body fat compared to non-fat than another ethnic group. Yet the BMI interpretation currently does not factor race into the equation – there are no ethnicity-specific obesity classifications. For example, a white person with a BMI of 25 has the same body fat content as a person from Singapore whose BMI value is 22. And for a white person with a BMI value of 30, the cut-off for obesity, a person from Singapore has the same body-fat content with a BMI value of just 27. But some research shows the opposite effect in other Asian groups – e.g. those studied in rural Thailand . In this case the total body fat content which a white person has at BMI 25 would be the same body fat content a person from rural Thailand would have at a BMI of 27. In this case for a given BMI value, the white person has more body fat content. This most likely has a lot to do with the physical exercise which comes from working as a rural farmer in Thailand and has also been seen in young women in rural India. In some countries where the population is not recognised as obese according to the World Health Organization classification, there is an increasing number of obesity related diseases such as diabetes and heart attacks. Although the WHO has considered this fact, their current advice is to keep the current BMI charts but to be aware of BMI values which should act as prompts for intervention. These include 23 (which is in the normal range but is approaching the start of being classified as overweight) and 27.5 (which is in the overweight range but is approaching the start of being classified as obese). Researchers in some countries have therefore called for the WHO BMI cutoffs to be revised down to suit the needs of their own population and better act as a marker for risk to health.
By Dr Harry When I think of Belgium – that small country nestled between France and Germany – I naturally think of chocolates from master chocolatiers. Go back over 175 years and we find a man named Adolphe Quetelet who was rather keen on making measurements. In fact, he was so interested in finding out the relationship of one variable compared to another that he founded the Royal Statistical Society. Around the same time Monsieur Quetelet published a book where – amongst other things - he described a man’s weight in relation to his height in his quest to find values for the “average man”. This book, published in 1835 was called A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties and was focused more on sociology than public health. It certainly was never intended to be used as a measure of obesity! Fast forward to America in 1912, where insurance companies were looking at the relationships of height and weight and their effect on life expectancy. The idea being that if your weight is too high in relation to your height, this might indicate excess fatness and hence be a health insurance risk. These were called standard height-weight measurements and simply measured the height and weight of people of various ages (when they made insurance applications). Other statistical tables relating insurance risk to body weight were created by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MLIC) of New York in 1942. These tables showed what was a desirable weight for a given height. There were different tables for men and women. The MLIC updated and revised these tables in 1959 and 1983. To make up for the fact that weight may vary depending on your body frame, some estimate of this was included in the tables so you could classify yourself as having a small, medium or large frame. This would obviously help “big boned” individuals. Again, none of these, at the time were designed with obesity as a public health issue in mind but scientists made later use of the charts for studies and research programs. Other metrics have been examined and have been put to the test over time. These include a “ponderal index” which is cube-root of weight divided by height. These measures have been examined with various populations. The body mass index (weight divided by height-squared) was a term coined by researchers in 1971 and has been used ever since, but this was originally suggested by Quetelet, so you may see it referred to as the Quetelet index. In 1997 the World Health Organization published guidelines on the interpretation of BMI values in relation to overweight and obesity. These were very similar to the 1959 MLIC tables. Although your personal finances and your business success are my primary interest, I believe you only operate at peak efficiency when you're fit and healthy. If you feel good, it filters through to your work. To help you with that, click for your free ebook: The Quick Guide to Sexy by the Founder I was quite podgy when my then boyfriend proposed. I wanted to look good in my wedding dress so I went on a calorie counting mission to get myself in shape. When the whole thing started I said, “I’m doing this just for the wedding and as soon as it’s over I’ll go back to chomping on whatever I want, whenever I want.” Three months in, after I saw the results of my exercise and my health conscious eating, I thought, I want to keep this body. I was still overweight according to BMI but I thought it was wrong because the mirror and my friends told a whole different story. I had calorie tracked before but the issue was that my weight generally crept back up because I stopped keeping track of my weight after I reached my goal. This was the problem. To solve it, I went onto my iPhone and looked for a tool that I would enjoy using to record my weight: I didn’t like any of them for the following reasons:
Although your personal finances and your business success are my primary interest, I believe you only operate at peak efficiency when you're fit and healthy. If you feel good, it filters through to your work. To help you with that, click for your free ebook: The Quick Guide to Sexy To Do What You Want Rather Than What Makes You Money Is A Luxury Preserved For The Privileged Few12/2/2012 If you know someone that says this it is more than likely that they grew up in a well-to-do home and never knew ‘want’. They see their ‘socialist’ views on life as something that sets them above other people, but seldom do these sanctimonious individuals pause to acknowledge how much of a privileged position they are in. Most people do not have the privilege to follow their hearts. To do so would be selfish and indeed self-indulgent. Money is not evil, it is an enabler, having a little money can be the difference between dying and having a few more breaths on this earth. I grew up in a poor country and was naturally frequently exposed to poverty and want. Yes, I fully acknowledge that I was raised in a relatively wealthy family but when you come from somewhere as poor as Malawi, that doesn’t mean you’re completely sheltered from the vagaries of misfortune. Fortunately for me, the things I enjoyed in life steered me towards a career that earns decent money. If for some reason I decided to follow a self-indulgent path that did not earn money, I would at the same time be taking myself off the path that would enable me to one day contribute in real, monetary terms to my family and to my country. Yes, you can contribute in non-monetary terms but I dare you to say that to the mother that hasn't been able to feed her children for two days. When you're poor, money to purchase food and shelter is all that matters. It consumes your every thought and effort. The needs of my own life are simple and I continually try to temper them. My biggest fantasy for when I have a real amount of money is to build a series of little libraries in Malawi because it is only through study of the written word that people can gain freedom from poverty. Most people in Malawi and indeed in many poor countries follow the path that makes money because they don’t have the choice. They need and want to help their family. The money they earn frequently goes to help with the school fees of siblings and to purchase medical supplies for any family members that are sick. Most poor countries cannot afford a state funded medical system. Free education if it is available is frequently atrocious, you wouldn’t wish it on an enemy let alone a loved family member. I know many including Steve Jobs proclaimed that you should follow your heart not money. I agree that this is an ideal position but most lives are less than ideal. Your family are the only people that love you unconditionally. The more selfless amongst us put our families first and ourselves last and in many cases if given the choices: 1) low-income fulfilling career but unable to contribute towards the extended family or 2) high-income less fulfilling career but able to contribute towards the extended family Most people would choose option two because they have to. So, for those that are fortunate enough to come from a background where they don’t have to make this choice, please stop being so self-righteous and count your lucky stars.
By Dr Harry
Body mass index (BMI) is the current measure which is used by the World Health Organization to determine whether you are obese. BMI is used the world over and applied to everyone in the same way. One reason for this is that it is easy to understand and easy to calculate using the formula: Weight in kg ÷ [Height (in metres) squared]. This simplicity however has also led to the BMI being criticised for being imperfect.
Flaw #1: BMI is not an estimate of body fat
The assumption is that once you work out your BMI you know how much fat you are carrying. And fat is unhealthy. So a BMI of 30 means obesity, and thus you need to lose weight, right? Perhaps, but not necessarily. BMI does not make any direct measure of fat. It merely relates your current weight to your height. There are other ways of finding out your body fat content but these methods are complicated – and thus costly. It is therefore not practical to insist on going into that much detail (or spending that much money) if you want to roll out this measure in mainstream practice. Body mass index has caught on in health circles because of its simplicity. It is simple to calculate, quick and therefore cheap. Flaw #2: BMI treats all folk the same It might seem strange that we can use the simple BMI formula no matter who we are. That’s because it is strange, and fundamentally wrong. It is not credible that a man or woman, young or old, black, white or Hispanic can use a universal formula without any kind of adjustment. However, that’s exactly what we do with BMI.
Gender
The most obvious difference between men and women is that women naturally carry more fat, especially around the waist and thighs. This is not necessarily an unhealthy fat distribution. Men are generally taller as well as having a greater muscle mass. On the other hand, if both a man and a woman with a similar lifestyle and diet have a BMI of 35 it is likely that the man’s fat is distributed more on the upper half of his body (where the vital organs are) and could thus be a slightly more precarious health situation. We could use a different calculation for men and women, to give a more accurate gender specific result. This would add to the complexity but would not be unworkable especially with modern technology making BMI calculation as easy as entering your data into a BMI calculator with the results available automatically. Age Another obvious difference is age. Older people tend to workout less than youngsters, and their muscle mass decreases as a result. As physical activity decreases, muscle mass decreases but the BMI calculation is the same whether you are aged 75 or 25. This has an effect on BMI because as body weight drops, so will BMI. So even though the older person is becoming less active the BMI metric may see their classification move from overweight or obese into the “normal” range just because muscle mass has fallen. Children Children are a special case. You cannot use the same tables to interpret a child’s BMI. You have to take into account the child’s age and sex to see where he or she rests in relation to the normal range. If you look at the BMI reference charts for children you will see that it is not as simple as saying 18.5 – 24.99 is normal. This is because of the enormous growth potential that children have, and the medical community understands this BMI flaw and have attempted to adjust for it. Click the link to read an entire blog on BMI in Children.
Race
The BMI charts were developed for the whole population by using a sample of a few middle class white Americans in the early twentieth century. The normal ranges are therefore population specific and may be fine for the majority, but ethnic minorities may find the normal ranges unrealistic because they were not designed with them in mind. Modern cities – where most people now live – have changed a lot in the past century. The measurements made back then which have been the foundation for all subsequent BMI reference ranges have not sufficiently changed with the times. Some country specific adaptations have already taken place, with Hong Kong and some counties in Southeast Asia having taken this into account for their particular populations. Importantly, research (e.g. in the Journal of Endocrinology) suggests that black people have a tendency towards higher bone density and higher muscle mass than white people and this could affect their BMI upwards. Click the link to read an entire blog on BMI and Race. Body shape BMI does not know where your fat is hiding, but treats all fat the same. However, some body locations are better places than others for your fat to be distributed and although BMI is not a good way to distinguish these, other measures such as the waist to hip ratios can be used to give you a better understanding of where your fat is (although looking in the mirror will usually help too). The idea is that fat distributed around the waist (called “visceral fat”) is worse for your overall health than non-visceral fat (around your buttocks and thighs). Different body shapes are a consequence of the distribution of fat on the body and it is clear that this is a significant factor when assessing health which BMI cannot accurately reflect.
Flaw #3: BMI ranges are arbitrary
The World Health Organization uses the normal range for BMI as 18.5 – 24.99 which is what Fat Creep™ has used. However you will come across other resources which use slightly different ranges for the classifications of normal, overweight and underweight. The fact that there is no universal consensus does show how arbitrary the BMI ranges are. If your BMI lies in the overlap zones, you may wonder what label you should give to your value, and indeed you may question the validity of the result. BMI ranges are not universally agreed upon because it is not clear what values for "normal" are risk-free. The normal range may differ between populations, which may have to do with other factors such as ethnicity, body shape, fat distribution etc. which we have discussed already. This is an area of current research and we should not be surprised if the goalposts shift again in the future.
Flaw #4: BMI can misclassify
If you hit the gym once, twice or even more times per week chances are you are physically healthy. All training and especially weight lifting leads to you gaining muscle – or ‘bulking up’. Even if you don’t lift weights with the intention of bodybuilding, even modest increases in muscle mass, if they affect the major muscle groups in your legs, arms, back, shoulders, chest and abs will lead to noticeable weight gain. Since your height does not change, you will increase your BMI as you train and therefore you may change your classification from normal to overweight or obese! Flaw #5: BMI is a blunt instrument BMI is used to label people as overweight and obese but the measure is too crude to be used to reach judgments on overall physical health. Only by considering the whole individual – including family history, current medical conditions and vital signs such as blood pressure can a proper conclusion on health be drawn. Conclusion on BMI: use it but know it’s limitations BMI is established as an essential tool in public health medicine and its ease of use means it is here to stay. A high BMI may define you as overweight or obese but this does not necessarily equal unhealthy. Do not be afraid to question a BMI value that you do not agree with and ask your health provider for a more complete explanation. If you don’t get the answers you are looking for, post them to our comments page and we will read every one. Although your personal finances and your business success are my primary interest, I believe you only operate at peak efficiency when you're fit and healthy. If you feel good, it filters through to your work. To help you with that, click for your free ebook: The Quick Guide to Sexy Dear friend, You will know if you follow my blog that once I discover an idea that I believe is moving me closer towards my goal of financial freedom, I publish it, not everyone’s modus operandi – I know; however, when I finally hire that celebratory yacht on the coast of St Tropez, I don’t want to be the only one enjoying that sweet joy I want all my friends to be there celebrating their own financial freedom. Anyway, I digress but you must excuse me, I only went to bed at 1.00 a.m. working on Fat Creep™’s next YouTube video and I’m already up at 6.00 a.m. Last year I made a massive discovery. Something that adds so much value to my life that whenever I meet someone that has not heard of it I plug it like I am on their payroll although I am not. It’s called Weebly.com. Weebly is a drag-and-drop facility that enables a user to build a fully functional website within hours. When I started understanding the internet, way back in 2007, I used to host my websites viaPowweb, however, because I was having to use my own amateur HTML skills it took me ages to update my website and naturally that site would remain not updated for months at time. Fast forward to 2010, I saw Powweb offering a widget called “Weebly” and I started using that to update Katsonga.com instead and I was hooked. You see, the problem with HTML is that different browsers – internet explorer, Google chrome, safari, firefox and the rest of them – read HTML code differently. This means that the same code will look different depending on the browser being used and sometimes my pages used to look awful in one browser versus another. This wasn’t a huge problem even in 2007 because internet explorer was still the major engine used for web browsing but a website that is not optimized for all browsers is most certainly not acceptable today as internet explorer only has a small portion of the market.Weebly solved this problem for me because their widgets are already optimized for all major search engines. To add icing to an already splendiferous cake the facility is already mobile enabled. If you go back even six to eight months, most websites appeared all tiny and weird on a mobile device because they had not been optimized to work well on small phone screens. Weebly had already preempted that issue and solved it before it was one. Now, whilst I think Facebook is fun and everything, you will agree that it can be a massive time vortex – it sucks many to its core and before you know it you’ve wasted a whole hour that you hadn’t planned on wasting, browsing through some random’s photos. Weebly on the other hand adds massive value to a life. It enables a user that otherwise may not have been able, to get their idea out there and possibly make some revenue out of it. Even incorporating features such as Google ads is so simple. Through no extra effort on my part I am receiving my first £10 from Google. You may be thinking that’s a small amount especially given that’s after a few months of use but I did nothing special to receive it and that, to me, makes it a substantial gain, it’s passive income and it will grow over time. I could go on about the benefits forever, integrating shopping carts, embedding YouTube videos and pictures is very easy. You can add a forum and even an appointment booking system within minutes. Indeed, if you know a little HTML you can easily adjust the code on the Weebly templates to make them more unique to you. Basic HTML is putsy, I learnt my first bits of code in late 2006 using htmlgoodies and I was able to build a very simple site in three days so it is definitely worth pumping a little time into. If you need any help, they have a super-responsive support team that responds to emails in less than 24 hours. Anyway, enough said – get your ideas out there, use Weebly. They have a free service but to build something more sophisticated you will need to upgrade for $78 for two years, that’s less than $40 / £27 per annum. This is way lower than the value that these guys are adding to my life right now, but I am not that naive, I know it’s the entry level fee and in two years’ time they will hike that rate up, it’s the model everyone uses but in Weebly’s case I am not going to mind because their very presence will be the reason I managed to get my ideas out there. Yours, Heather By Dr Harry Most of us have heard of the body mass index (BMI): your doctor uses it to classify how fat or thin you are; it’s the measure that magazines and newspapers use to inform us of the “obesity problem” in the developed world and insurance companies sometimes use it to determine your health insurance premium. But what exactly is it? BMI is simply a number which relates your weight to your height. Despite the metric’s flaws, its simplicity has led to its wide use and as such it is likely to affect your life whether you like it or not! Not least because a high BMI could lead to more expensive health insurance. How to calculate the BMI To find out what your own BMI is, all you need is your current weight and height and the mathematical formula below.
Examples: 1. Weight = 66kg, Height = 1.55 meters. BMI = 66 ÷ (1.55 x 1.55) = 27.5 2. Weight = 135 lbs, Height = 66 inches. BMI = (135 x 703) ÷ (66 x 66) = 21.8 3. Weight = 135 lbs, Height = 5 feet 6 inches. BMI = (135 x 4.88) ÷ (5.5 x 5.5) = 21.8 Note: 66 inches is the same thing as 5 feet 6 inches. The Fat Creep™ iOS and android app calculates BMI for you if you enter your height on settings page 2. Some people don't believe the BMI metric suits their body type so the functionality has been included in a non-intrusive way. What does the body mass index (BMI) number mean?You probably know already, because it is so popular in the media, that having a high BMI can be bad because it means you are overweight or obese. But if we start by looking at the other end of the scale, a low BMI value is just as unhealthy. You can see a table showing the range of BMI values in the Fat Creep™ app - press the BMI button on the home page. If you have a BMI less than 17.50 you are officially malnourished and could be anorexic. This is a medical condition and a serious emergency. You are so thin that you are endangering your health and need urgent medical attention. If your BMI is between 17.50 and 18.50 you are still underweight. Between 18.5 and 24.99 you are classified as having a “normal” BMI. The World Health Organization sets the minimum threshold for normality at 18.50 and that is why we have used it here but many other health organizations and professionals identify 20 - 24.99 as normal. And any BMI below 20 is considered underweight. A BMI between 25 and 30 is “overweight”. If your BMI is above 30 you are officially obese. This is another medical condition and you are putting yourself at risk. You should see a doctor about strategies to lose weight and reduce your BMI to the healthy range. After a BMI value of 30, the higher your BMI gets the more at risk you are putting yourself.
Some people ask me whether the BMI has its flaws and whether it is the correct measurement for them. I will be answering that question, and looking into where BMI all began in my next blog post. If you have any comments or want to share your experiences with me, please do get in touch.· Although your personal finances and your business success are my primary interest, I believe you only operate at peak efficiency when you're fit and healthy. If you feel good, it filters through to your work. To help you with that, click for your free ebook: The Quick Guide to Sexy |
By Heather
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