UK Council To Send Obese People 'Motivational' Texts Telling Them To Use Stairs

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."

Comments

Oblig Mark Twain

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious."

Re:BMI

[fatphil]

No. BMI is designed for naive people two hundred years ago who just want a number, no matter how meaningless it is.

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.))