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.

“Bog off” to scales and the body mass index

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.

My pride at my four-year-old son, Arch, felt so overwhelming I felt it should not be seen in public. I wondered how other parents handled (or concealed) this obscenely primitive emotion.

As a result I have had three very helpful conversations, two on Facebook and one in the flesh, about the dilemma. (Is it a coincidence that the three people who helped me did not have children themselves?)

Our collective ambivalence about pride

One discussion was about our ambivalence about pride of any kind. Is it good or is it bad?

We expect people to take a pride in their work, for example, but if they are too proud we wag our fingers at them: “Pride comes before a fall.”

I look in the dictionary and see it means both “excessive self-esteem” and “self-respect, personal dignity.”  Those are two very different things – opposites even – and yet the same word covers both. No wonder it’s confusing.

And then there’s that interesting point about whether we can be proud of something that has got nothing to do with us. I would not think so – and yet I am.

I’m proud to be a citizen of a country with a national health service. Did I have anything to do with the creation of the NHS? No, but I’m proud of it nonetheless.

My pride in Arch feels like that kind of thing.

Is gratitude a better word than pride?

One Facebook friend suggested gratitude might be a better word for the kind of emotion I was describing than pride.

I like that idea. It certainly neatly evades all the ambiguities about “pride” and therefore makes the experience of the feeling easier.

Was I proud to see Arch playing the part of a star in his first nativity play earlier this week?

Let’s put it like this. The day he was born I dropped to my knees and said: “No matter how long I live, I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude that this archangel has come to make his home with us.”

I haven’t stood up since.

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.

The truth – the full truth – is that many months before I had an NHS local business card, I had another one beautifully designed by lower case design, which said: “Jo Ind – Writer” on it.

When I left the Birmingham Post and became self-employed earlier this year, I was asking myself who I am and what I do.

I could have tried to sell myself as a journalist, editor, teacher, manager, consultant, social-media-thingy because I am all of those things but it seemed to me that what I am, at heart, is a writer. Everything else I do comes out of that.

That was the simple  – and deeply truthful – message that I put on my business cards.

But for some reason I didn’t share that at the time. I shared my position at Maverick TV instead.

Well, I am deputy site editor with NHS local and do you know what? I thoroughly enjoy it.

But before that I was a writer. And when I am old and grey (perhaps I should say older and greyer) I will still be writer.

That is what I am and that is what I need to say.

That’s all.

(Clearly I’m not a photographer. But I’m getting Photoshop next week, so I hope to learn how to improve the images on my blog very soon.)