Take your height, weight, divide something with something and you get BMI?
Ok, the true formula: weight in kg / height in meters².
Check wikipedia (link at the bottom) to see US units.

So, of course there is a table which will define the possibilities:

Severely underweight, BMI is less than 16.0
Underweight, BMI is from 16.0 to 18.5
Normal, BMI is 18.5 to 25
Overweight, BMI is 25 to 30
Obese Class I, BMI is 30 to 35
Obese Class II BMI is 35 to 40
Obese Class III BMI is over 40

Image via Wikipedia

After reading a few good online articles about BMI, it hit me also, as did many other authors of various articles. BMI takes into consideration only your weight and height!
What about bone structure, muscle mass, waist and hip size/ratio, is the person an athlete, etc.?
Nothing.

If you google up BMI, and click on the wikipedia link, there’s a great read from which century(!) BMI is:

The body mass index (BMI), or Quetelet index, is a heuristic proxy for human body fat based on an individual’s weight and height. BMI does not actually measure the percentage of body fat. It was invented between 1830 and 1850 by the Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet during the course of developing “social physics”.[1] Body mass index is defined as the individual’s body weight divided by the square of his or her height. The formulae universally used in medicine produce a unit of measure of kg/m2.

Between 1830 and 1850? And we still use that? How many sites still use BMI? Fitbit does for example. And many, many others. Somebody pass me a wooden fork please and the keys to my car which runs on coal and steam.

How many doctors still use BMI to advise their patients, specially kids, about their weight?

Now, don’t even get me started on Body Fat Percentage. How great it is to measure it with the scale you have in your bathroom. Another great fail.

I highly recommend reading this article (links to a PDF!) titled Do you believe in Fairies and Unicorns, or the BMI, which describes BMI in great detail and explains why it should not be used.

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This blog post became a presentation in 2009, which i also did in 2010 and 2011 and hope to do more in the future.

Due to the nature of my work, well at least up till October 2010, when I was still working for the biggest Slovenian online retail store – mimovrste, I’ve daily read between 300 and 400 emails. I’ve sent out no less then at least a 100 each day. 100 sent being pure minimal.

So looking at my job one day, I realized everyday communication became e-communication.
We have all these different types of e-communication abilities today: msn, gtalk, yahoo messenger, skype, aim, facebook, twitter, remember icq? And of course there’s email.

I’m 32, I still recall days when I was at first just a kid and we didn’t have mobile phones. Everyone had a stationary phone. Back then it was a big fuzz if you had a phone at home which didn’t have a spinning wheel to dial out, but buttons. Imagine that.
Few years later, teenager, I recall it was normal to have everybody’s home phone number, yes even the numbers of the girls.
These days it’s hard to get somebody’s phone number, lets not event mention the girls numbers.

So my day started looking more and more like: coffee, email, coffee, lunch, coffee, more coffee and e-mail.
Or, from time to time and different variation: coffee, email, meeting + coffee, email, meeting + lunch + coffee, more coffee and some more coffee and email.

At the end of the day, I’ve sent 257 emails – that is still my “record”. And that day I was 4 hours in the car in 1 meeting.  No idea tho, how many emails I’ve read that day.

Time management
So it all comes down to time management. Is e-communication expected always and everywhere? With the popularity of smart phones and tablets you can be accessible anywhere at almost any given time.
Has it happened to you lately, that perhaps you went off grid for lets say 2-3 or 4 hours, because the reception was bad there and your phone didn’t get a signal. After those 2-3-4 hours you have enormous amounts of text messages and Facebook messages if you’re alright, did anything happen or even better are you still alive, you never reply this slow.

Expected?
So is e-communication expected? How often do you do the following or this happens to you? Somebody sends you an email and after 30 seconds calls you on the phone if you got the email?!?
And the sad thing is, we all do this. Including me. But we always know, the other person is not sitting at his desk waiting for my email or all the emails to drop in their inbox. Remember the days when you still had to sent a real paper letter thru the “snail” mail? It was justified calling the other person back then in the following days if he or she received your letter.

Demanded?
Is e-communication demanded? I’ve often seen or heard of the following: When John Doe started his new job he signed a form confirming that he received a: notebook, blackberry, another phone, USB internet stick, VPN access data, etc.. Do employers expect or even worse, demand from employees that they are constantly accessible? Is it fair, do they compensate for this demand financially?

Cost management
What about cost management? All this equipment costs something at the beginning, so we have the initial investment, but we have to add the cost of amortization, planning of depreciation of all the fixed assets.
How about cost of equipment management, IT personnel is a certain cost, even if you outsource it, laptops have 2-3 years of life expectancy, then it gets to slow or to sloppy. Phones get lost, break and fail and they have to be replaced with new ones or fixed. All screams costs! And don’t forget, software that runs on your laptops, etc., has to be upgraded, it costs too.

Coming down to
At the end it all comes down to a basic few questions:
what do you cost your company?
or
how much do your employees cost you?

So what does your employer pay for? To write and read emails?!?

Survival guide
So I came up with this survival guide, which helped me get thru the days, sometimes preventing me from strangling somebody or bitching at somebody.
It has 4 simple rules, which if you follow will make your email communication much easier and your life less of a struggle.

Rule #1 – Don’t look for emotions in email(s)
People love to do that. If somebody writes in CAPS, which usually means (in the old IRC slang) that the person is screaming, it’s not always like that. People all ages write emails and some simple don’t know this. Live with it. Take it into a consideration.
A lot of people like to show their power thru email, that they are superior or inferior. Most of the time, such people do this only because they avoid eye to eye or phone confrontations in some cases you’ll find out, rare tho, they don’t even write their own emails. And you’ll probably also hear their excuse: I can express so much better via email then in person.
Also how about punctuations and emotional response to it? Have you ever thought about, what if you miss a comma or a semicolon or a punctuation that you can easily offend somebody?
What if the person writing to you forgot to put a smiley face at the end of a sentence and you read this offensively.
So, if you see emotions in email(s) – stop already, there aren’t any. It’s plain, it doesn’t have emotions, it’s text, it’s data, it’s information. Look for emotions in a phone conversation or a live face to face conversation.

Rule #2 – Email is a tool to achieve goals / results
This actually isn’t mine to be honest. Gregor Cuzak told me this after we had a verbal fight and screamed a bit at each other, because I jumped him for the way he wrote emails to me. In the middle of all this screaming he told me this sentence: ” for me, email is a tool to achieve goals or results and that’s how I take it”. It got clear to me in a second.
So become more effective by being more goal or result orientated and read and also write(!) your emails in that matter.

Rule #3 – Email is not always the most effective way of communication
But you just said you can be more effective? True, I’ve said that, but email is not always the best way to communicate. Sometimes it’s quite the opposite, it slows down the processes, it makes you miss deadlines, it’s a big time waster.
With email invention we also got the RE’s, the CC’s and the BCC‘s as I call them. The great way to waste your time without even knowing it.
Send an email out to 5 or 6 people at 3:50pm and seeing what happens regarding a quite important topic which can create a wast number of replies between lets say 2 or 3 people and then the other 2 or 3 start replying later that evening or even the next day and when the first 3 agreed already on something, person number 5 says they’ve made a mistake or i disagree and… well they just all waste time on something they could have simple cleared in 15 minutes via a phone conference call or a skype call or in person.

Rule #4 – The 4 hour rule of not replying to an email…
… which pissed you off.
Don’t reply to emails which piss you off immediately. I personally use a 4 hour rule, some people use 1 day, some use 2 days, some use a rule of 10 minutes, different. Start with 4 hours and see where it goes.
Why you ask? Simple. Your response, 4 hours later, won’t be emotional, you’ll cool down by then already and your answer will be more constructive, polite and most important, efficient!

Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes I would love to puncture somebody’s tires, strangle is canary, cripple his hamster, cross his guinea pig with an emu.
But after 4 hours, I just answer the email, his tires aren’t punctured, canary is still alive, hamster is still happily spinning it’s wheel, emu is still unsatisfied, guinea pig is still in one piece.

How?
People always ask me how to incorporate this 4 rules into their lives? Start with 1 or just 2, start with all 4 if you think you’re up to it. It’s hard to always be 100% at them. Even I fail. Sometimes I’m just too pissed, but most of the time it works for me and a few other people I know.
But most important, you have to self discipline yourself, give it time and even more time.

In my opinion that law violated human rights, freedom, expressing of who we are and it is definitely suppression of  our roots and beliefs.

I’m proud Slovenian woman, proud of our history and all that our ancestors had to put up with so we can have our own independent country nowadays. I’m also very grateful that we speak our own language – Slovenian language – and that I can live by the norms I was taught to be the right ones.

But despite all that I’m still open-minded and I understand and support other, different cultures, religion, beliefs … Everyone of us has a right to be what he/she wants, to believe and live the way that he/she thinks it’s just the best for him/her and for community as well.

After I have read the article I wondered why French (with Sarkozy) have reached such decision. For example: you can see women in burqas in Slovenia as well. But I don’t have any problems with that because they just live how they were raised and it’s not hurtful to anyone nearby. Until we respect each other, our appearance shouldn’t be a problem at all.

Bellow that article there were written four different opinions of random people passing by. Three of them were very similar to mine, but there was one opinion that really made me think also from the another point of view. Quote: »I would forbid burqas in Slovenia as well. If you choose to live in other culture, you have to accept it. If you can’t, then go back where you come from, go back home. And you can’t say in your defense that is not democratic – because there is no democracy. Democracy restricts only those who can’t accept valid norms. In our culture valid norm are: visible/not covered face and not (completely) covered body. When I visited Muslim countries I covered myself of course. The same has been done by our students that were taken to visit and learn about foreign culture. But in our culture the face has to be visible also because of identification.«

After reading the opinion written above I started to brain-storm from another point of view. And yeah, it’ true: wherever we go, we accept and respect other culture’s norms and that is the only right thing to do! If you are guest and you’re tempted to experience or even live in a foreign country, you have to be adjusted to their environment. People are different and we need to respect that. And here I asked myself a question: Why does this move feel that unilateral sometimes? Why people cover themselves when they travel in Muslim countries and on the other hand, why it becomes controversial the other way around when a Muslim is visiting/living in western countries?

That discussion is talking just about wearing burqas by chance. But we can generalize: our public life has to be adjusted to the country/culture we are visiting or we decide to live. We have to accept their habits, language … Did you ever think about yourself when your are foreigner? Have you ever resisted foreign rules? If you have decided to do that, did you defend yourself with a fact that you have different beliefs? Did you managed to enter sacred place dressed the way you are at home and wearing sneakers? So, should rules be obeyed by every culture or will we continue to drive this upside-down world?

What about the consequences? In France you can be fined (150 to 30.000 eur) or go to prison for a year. What about the consequences in Muslim culture? It should be created the similar way. But do they have them at all? Are they measured in money, in prison time? Or are there different mechanisms that we are afraid of and because of them with don’t even think to do our own way?

What really surprised me was the fact, that the article was from year 2002 and it focused greatly on some hard facts and asked some good questions.

Because “someone”, back in the 1970s, made, which is a more and more obvious, a bad decision and advised that the best way for your nutrition is high protein and carbohydrate intake and no fat, since well, fat causes hearth problems. But, carbohydrates, you can go crazy with them.
The whole food industry adapted, fast. They threw out sugar from everyday meals, presented with more and more diet and light products, when the truth was far off. And it wasn’t only the food industry that adapted.
Is it possible, that we, 30-40 years later, are the ones feeling the consequences of somebodies bad choice?
Obesity percentage isn’t getting lower, but higher, hearth diseases, cardiovascular diseases are a huge problem. Diabetes is beginning to sky rocket. Sometimes I even get a feeling smoking isn’t that much of a problem. I’m aware it’s actually still a huge problem and closely connected to previously mentioned cardiovascular and hearth diseases.
So after so many years of “correct” nutrition we should have seen quite the opposite effect, improvements, right?
How many of you have heard, even these days: “if you eat so many eggs, each day, you’ll have cholesterol problems”. This is so 1970s we can’t get away from it.

Since this ain’t the 70s anymore and because the information travels much faster now, because the studies, ideas, research, etc. can be published on the web and all the lobbies have a much harder time controlling the information, if any at all, since it’s becoming impossible to control the information flow these days (more or less).
Are we running into completely different icebergs ahead now? The food industry is enormous, so are the drug companies, lobbies are influential, they got powerful over the years and they sure know how to play “the game”. So how and who is gonna fight the tilting windmills?
And the food industry keeps coming out with new light, diet, without this, with that, etc. product. And when you read the product’s nutrition facts label you can just shrug and walk on.
A few years ago I’ve read a recipe on one of the slovenian cooking portals for a cake and I’ve also found the light version of this same cake. When I compared the recipes and the preparing procedure, I’ve noticed that the author used only light cottage cheese instead of ordinary cottage cheese, the 2kg (4 and a half pounds) of sugar stayed unchanged. It was a cake. A light cake.

If anyone, then the Americans are god-know-how-many-years dealing with the problem of obesity and diabetes. But they aren’t alone. Europe isn’t trailing behind at all.
Just this saturday, while having our mexican meat plate for 2 persons, we were watching the kids, who had a birthday party at the same restaurant, outside on the playground. Nothing bothering, except for those few kids, who came by and on the way moved two chairs and one table. Not because of the playing and running around or being fast. Because they had trouble getting past the “obstacles”, cause they were obese.
While I was watching this, it immediately went thru my head, what kind of irresponsible parents, how are they feeding their child, like they’re gonna feast on him/her. But immediately the next thought stroke: how hard is it to raise your child, who is overweight already at the age of 8 and you have to take food away from him/her and watch his meal ratios, calorie intake, etc.. I know it’s damn hard, I’m doing this to myself. Unfair not only to the child, also for the parents themselves.
But where is the initial, ground zero problem? Are the parents incapable of choosing the suitable food quality when the child is still younger? Is the everyday life, the 8 to 4, the 9 to 5 job taking it’s tool and the parents are to tired to prepare suitable nutrition meals? Or is the problem the lack of parent knowledge regarding daily protein/carbohydrates/fat ratio? All that matters is the child is quiet, cause she/he is full. Of junk food.

One idea is also interesting me enormously. If you regularly deny your child sugar or her or his desire of craving for sugar, lets say, for the first 10 year of your child’s life, so you reduce the amount of consumed sugar in the first 10 years, does his or her desire for sugar drop after 10 years, so he or she doesn’t have trouble with overdosing sugar later in her or his life?

I’ve been fat twice in my life. First at the age of 27, when i peaked my weight at 124kg (273 lbs) and lost it by the age of 28 coming down to 81kg (178 lbs) max. Second at the age of 31/32 (aka now) when i peaked at 108 kg (238 lbs) and i’m dropping it (still), currently around 88kg (194 pounds).
At this age I strongly believe it’s much easier to drop weight. I can’t imagine how is this for younger people or even teenagers, since the way I comprehend them these days, they aren’t nearly as tuff and strong willed as previous generations.

Back when I was younger, doing sports was just training hard and competing. Nobody cared how you ate and what you ate. Does anyone, the coaches, the trainers of for example swimmers, age 8 to 13, prescribe diets which are suitable for the needs of an individual and not all of the swimmers? Or do all of them get general guidelines if any at all?
A few years back, a friend of mine told me about a father who came to him for advice. His son was training hockey, age 14 and he was constantly tired but otherwise healthy. After a two hour talk with the father, my friend wrote him a simple diet for his son, which had the suitable protein/carbs/fats ratio and meal substitutes if they were necessary, so the son would get necessary nutritional intake thru out the day. The results were more than obvious, less then 14 days later.

When do the obesity and diabetes problems, errors, troubles really begin? If we have sex talk in the schools should we start thinking about nutrition talks also?

And after one year of knowing each other we have decided to create our own common blog.

Visiting different places, knowing interesting people repeatedly brought us to discuss about various topics.
Our views, thoughts, opinions are usually not contradictory, but a lot of times just different. We know that we are both right, but always with that backdoor of being able to be persuaded otherwise with appropriate arguments.

And that’s what people are like. We share this world, we all live in the same age, but we all possess our one special and unique views.

So we decided to start sharing our thoughts, views and different stories, with the rest of the world so others can dive in someone else’s thought and dig in life of one adventurous and open-minded couple as we like to be or at least we think we are.