Fat Maths

Would you like to know some facts? Of course you would, facts are fun!

• In a recent poll, 21% of women said they would give up 10 years of their life to be their ideal weight.
• A feature in The Times claimed that the average woman thinks about her weight every 15 minutes.

You know how much I love maths, so let’s try and work this out shall we…

The average life expectancy in the UK for women is 81.6… let’s call it 82. There’s 24 hours in the day, and 4 lots of 15 minutes in an hour. So 4 X 24 = 96 (that’s 96 times a day a woman thinks about her weight.) 365 days a year = 35,040 times a year. If we presume women become conscious of their weight at around 12 - that’s 70 years of worrying about their weight, which equals to 2,452,800 times in a lifetime. We’ll assume each thought lasts roughly 5 seconds: that’s 12,264,000 seconds a lifetime women spend worrying about their weight. There are 86400 seconds in a day. 12,264,000 / 86400 = 141.93.

So that’s 141.93 days of their lives that the average UK woman spends thinking about her weight.

Looking at the facts, I’d rather just carry on with my life worrying every 15 minutes than lose 10 years of it. I can’t help thinking I’ve done the maths wrong. I probably have, but that’s not the point. The point is, women shouldn’t feel that they have to worry this much – every 15 minutes… that’s more often than the average man thinks about sex! Something is very wrong here.