Fitness challenge

My good friend Jo Blick has taken up a fitness challenge and she is going great guns. I'm sure she is talking all about it on her radio show on More FM, but you can also follow her progress on-line. Honestly, I usually find weight-loss stories about as interesting as a wet weekend in Levin (i.e not very) but she is a great, and very amusing, writer so this is worth a look. The fitness challenge is a competition (as you might expect from the word 'challenge') and she is nothing if not competitive, so she's bound to do well. Go Jo!

I do wonder, however (and perhaps Jo can enlighten us), how they measure the challenge at the end. Please tell me it's not based on weight loss, becasue I know for a fact that weight loss and fitness are far from the same thing - witness skinny, stick-thin blow-away-in-a-puff-of-wind people, or gym poseurs with rippling muscles, who couldn't run a mile. According to the BMI measure, all rugby players are overweight and half of the All Blacks are obese.

I recently read an article in one of those No Idea type magazines (I was waiting to pick up my curry and it was the only thing on the table - I don't normally inflict such tripe on myself) about some ridiculous bint who once went to the gym and put on 5lbs and so stopped going. Heaven forbid she actually got some body shape and tone - far preferrable that she eat celery stalks and lettuce leaves and lack any energy to do anything interesting, but at least she would look THIN, which seems to be the pinnacle of achievement and the desirable setting for all women, if such magazines are to be believed, which they are apparently, judging by their sales figures. Rant over.

I also recommend Jo's short but succinct book reviews on the same site.