Obesity is a big problem in prison. For most, it is the easiest health indicator to address. Many (possibly most) health problems diminish or completely disappear when normal weight is achieved. Inmates know that and often visit the gym or at least try the walking track to try to deal with their weight problem. Most studies show that few are successful with those strategies.
But, it is important. You need your health to at least survive your prison sentence. Health problems also predict recidivism. You need good health to not come back to prison. Discrimination in hiring due to obesity is also a real thing and very difficult to prove. An employer just needs to claim that they chose to not hire you because of your conviction. Obesity also gets in the way of romantic relationships and lack of a stable romantic relationship is another predictor of failing to be successful on parole — or in life, in general.
If walking the track or visiting the gym doesn’t work, what does work? The two things that most correlate with losing weight and keeping it off are eating a healthy breakfast and daily measuring your weight.
You can explore the healthy breakfast options elsewhere. The topic of this article is how to measure obesity daily while in prison. The normal method is to step on a scale. OK. But I have served time in three prisons and four jails so far and have never had convenient access to a scale on a daily basis.
Measuring weight is actually a rather poor proxy for obesity anyway. It happens to be very simple at home, and you can sort of come up with a healthy weight goal, but obesity isn’t actually health problem because of your weight. It is a health problem because of fat. Two people of the same gender and different height can weigh 220 pounds, and one be obese, but the other not. That is because height needs to be a part of the equation.
So, science came up with a better measurement of obesity. It is called the BMI or Body Mass Index. It is basically the ratio of height to weight. For some reason, scientists decided to go metric with this measurement, so you have to start by converting your height to meters and your weight to kilograms. Once you do the calculations, the proper BMI is 20-25. In prison, this means you have to not only measure your weight, but also your height and make a bunch of calculations. BMI doesn’t help our problem at all.
But, it leads us to WMI which is doable in prison. WMI or Waist Minus Inseam takes height into account just like BMI. It actually does an even better job because it focuses on the part of height that seems to change with obesity… your inseam.
Did you know that? It’s true. When I was a super-skinny teenager, I wore 28″ X 36″ jeans. When I was fairly obese, I wore 38″ X 32″ jeans. My inseam shrunk by four inches as my waist increased by ten inches.
WMI doesn’t need a metric conversion. You also only need to do one subtraction rather than a bunch of calculations. You just subtract your inseam from your waist to get your WMI. You don’t even have to remember 20-25 for the normal range. A normal WMI is conveniently zero. Your waist size should be the same as your inseam length. Simple; huh?
At my height (6′ 5″), my “normal” is pretty much 35″ X 35″ jeans although 34″ X 34″ also works and is a bit more common. If your prison uses jeans as the uniform (like here in Idaho), you just put your jeans on without the belt and pinch the waist band to estimate your current waist measurement. You then look down to verify that the inseam is still correct (about a half inch off the floor.) Easy.
In Utah, we had elastic white waistband pants. I used a commissary towel to mark my inseam length on the towel. Then, I wrapped the towel around my waist and marked that. Rulers were available on commissary in Utah so I could measure the difference and know my WMI without even knowing the inseam or waist. I just measured the difference between the two marks.
If you can’t even get a ruler, you can measure using lined paper. You can figure out the line spacing by doing trial folds and comparing the size of the paper declared on the tablet or notebook it came on.
So, forget about the scale. Just measure WMI daily and graph your progress with WMI. Your goal is zero inches. In general, one inch is about ten pounds so you can calculate that on occasion if you really need to know how many pounds you probably lost to get to that WMI. Or if your WMI is 5″ you can guestimate that you have about 50 pounds to lose. And that’s how you prison — at least how you track obesity loss in prison. I suppose you can use the same techniques at home if you want.
James D. Brausch is a life coach helping people make their wildest dreams come true. Write him at P.O. Box 1502, Carmichael, CA 95609-1502 or via email at jamesbrausch@proton.me if you are ready make your wildest dreams come true or you have an idea for working together on a project.