A rather bizarre story hit the press today, concerning overweight Premier League players based on health service guidelines.
Now, far from being taken seriously in this obese world we now live in, it probably serves more to show how guidelines can actually in fact be a total and complete waste of space when applied in general.
The target of their creation probably finds it helpful, so I’m not overly dismissing it, but in many other instances it’s probably akin to the Government spending money advising me to not put my tongue in a live plug socket – I wasn’t going to anyway.
The headline grabbers in this particular piece lead with three Manchester stars needing to put down the pies and work a bit harder in training as according to their ‘Body Mass Index’ rating, Yaya Toure, Memphis Depay and Wilfried Bony need to be a little trimmer.
They aren’t alone of course, the Manchester Evening News have published a list of 26 ‘fatties’ and those who need to ‘put on weight’ in the top flight based on this assessment.
BMI for those who aren’t aware gives a guide of what you should weigh compared to your height – in such whether you are healthy – and guidelines state that if ‘your BMI is 25 or more, you should think about losing weight.’
Equally those with a score under 18.5 should ‘talk to their GP about gaining weight.’
Pretty simple really, however it makes no accounting for weight being based on muscle or flab, or the taller or shorter amongst us, so for many it can be largely useless and misleading, and that’s the category finely tuned athletes like myself fall into.
For Sunderland, fortunately I find myself in good company with Danny Graham who finds himself joint seventh on the list.
Height (m): 1.83
Weight (kg): 87
BMI score: 26.0
Very unhealthy apparently, but not as bad as Norwich’s ‘lardarse’ Swedish defender Martin Olsson who boasts a score of 28.0, but nowhere near as healthy (or not) at the other end of the scale like Tottenham’s ‘chunky stick-insect’ Michel Vorm who has a score of 25.1.
Jeremain Lens also finds himself in joint twelfth with a height of 1.78, weight of 80 and BMI of 25.2.
|
Height
|
Weight
|
BMI
|
||
|
1
|
Martin Olsson
|
1.7
|
81
|
28.0
|
|
2
|
Darren Randolph
|
1.88
|
98
|
27.7
|
|
–
|
Fraizer Campbell
|
1.72
|
82
|
27.7
|
|
3
|
Wes Morgan
|
1.85
|
93
|
27.2
|
|
4
|
Darren Gibson
|
1.83
|
90
|
26.9
|
|
5
|
Branislav Ivanovic
|
1.85
|
91
|
26.6
|
|
6
|
Ryan Bertrand
|
1.79
|
85
|
26.5
|
|
7
|
John Ruddy
|
1.93
|
97
|
26.0
|
|
–
|
Romelu Lukaku
|
1.9
|
94
|
26.0
|
|
–
|
Danny Graham
|
1.83
|
87
|
26.0
|
|
8
|
John Terry
|
1.87
|
90
|
25.7
|
|
9
|
Kurt Zouma
|
1.9
|
92
|
25.5
|
|
10
|
Steven Whittaker
|
1.85
|
87
|
25.4
|
|
–
|
Wilfried Bony
|
1.82
|
84
|
25.4
|
|
11
|
Micah Richards
|
1.8
|
82
|
25.3
|
|
–
|
Michail Antonio
|
1.8
|
82
|
25.3
|
|
12
|
Jeremain Lens
|
1.78
|
80
|
25.2
|
|
–
|
Brad Guzan
|
1.93
|
94
|
25.2
|
|
–
|
Xherdan Shaqiri
|
1.69
|
72
|
25.2
|
|
–
|
Yaya Toure
|
1.89
|
90
|
25.2
|
|
–
|
Memphis Depay
|
1.76
|
78
|
25.2
|
|
–
|
Tim Howard
|
1.87
|
88
|
25.2
|
|
–
|
Wes Hoolahan
|
1.68
|
71
|
25.2
|
|
13
|
Dimitri Payet
|
1.75
|
77
|
25.1
|
|
–
|
Shinji Okazaki
|
1.74
|
76
|
25.1
|
|
–
|
Michel Vorm
|
1.83
|
84
|
25.1
|
So what does this mean in reality, what should we do with the pies I hear you all cry?
Well, eat them. It’s a quiet news day and I got bored.
Now that is a fact.
As is the fact you probably wished you hadn’t bothered reading this.
