Jo Ind

I’m a writer. I write books. I write for newspapers. I write  for the web. I’m a writer. I am – honestly.

Just look in my loft. There are boxes packed with all the pages I have written.

Look on Amazon. You can find my books there.

Look at my home. Apart from gifts, everything I own has been paid for through my hours of labour putting one word in front of the other.

I am a writer – it must be true.

So why is it that all these years (decades), there is nothing that is as hard as writing? All the other things – training adults, filing my accounts, managing a team, teaching children, making websites – none of that is as difficult as the blank page,

the empty brain,

the silent room.

I have always said that the hallmark of a good writer is one who is changed through her words.

The purpose of writing is to make a difference. If words don’t make a difference to the author, then why should they have an effect upon anybody else?

It is now almost a year since I have been working for NHS local, a digital service for the NHS in the West Midlands.

I have been handling the words and video on the site for long enough to ask myself the question: “What difference has this content made to my life?”

As it happens it has made a difference in so many ways I will need to write not just one post, but a series to explain it all.  This is the first.

I no longer weigh myself

I used to find it so disheartening to find that the more I worked out, the more I weighed.

“Muscle weighs more than fat,” my friends would tell me, as I noted that I had lost two inches from waist and gained seven kgs.

I know, I know – or at least I did at one level.

And yet the NHS continues to use the bloody body mass index (BMI) as a way of assessing if someone is obese, even though the index does not measure if the weight is due to muscle or fat.

It’s very difficult to really believe that weighing yourself is a waste of time, when our national institution responsible for health asks you to step on the scales in an attempt to assess your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer.

Thanks to NHS local, I can now say: “Bog off” to my scales and to the body mass index. The service has made a film of two women, of similar height, both classed as overweight in BMI terms.  The women were put through a body volume index (BVI) scanner that can distinguish between muscle and fat at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham.  Despite being a similar height and weight, the scanner found one woman was healthy and the other needed to lose some fat.

At last, I can fully believe what my friends and Phil, my highly-toned and clincially obese (in BMI terms) personal trainer is telling me.  “Muscle weighs more than fat.” It really does. Thank you, Dr Asad Rahim, from Heartlands Hospital.

As for you, scales. “Bye bye.”  I measure my waist and that’s all.

When I announced in my last post that I’d got a new business card  – deputy site editor of NHS local – I made a mistake.

Do you know that feeling of having told a half-truth? It’s not about telling a lie. It’s about settling for less than the truth deserves, neglecting to tell the most important part of a story. (more…)

When Virginia Woolf famously said a room of one’s own was necessary for a woman to write, she could not have envisaged a room that looked like this:

But for me, having my own space on the web in which to doodle my thoughts and write my life feels every bit as important as the hut at the bottom of the garden, for which so many women yearn. (more…)