"...it's possible but it's not the most healthy thing in the world to do I'd have to give up stuffing my face on the sofa and go outdoors so, fuck that..."

A quick bit of maths reveals that 330lbs is a shade over 25 1/2 stone, or "a tad overweight for a prop forward" as I like to call it.

SpaceX may need to revise their payload maths to first assume a spherical human...

BMI of 47.5!!

Any diet is going to be healthier than being that size.

Worth remembering that the American BMI is a bit more relaxed about these things compared to the UK version.

Whats more, BMI is total bollocks anyway. It doesn't account for bone density and body shapes. It's far more nuanced than being X tall and Y heavy.

He's a carrier pilot too from the article - so given his dimensions/mass, he will presumably be aware of Weight and Balance/Forward CoG limits

He's a CRJ captain for Endeavor Air in Florida.

Ah - different sort of carrier - I read that as "aircraft carrier" but did think that he might not fit in a F16/F-35!

If you're 5'10 and 23 ½ stone, losing that five and a half stone as quickly as possible is by far the healthiest thing to do.

I'm not a health nazi, but 5'10 and 23 ½ stone? Christ.

17st 8lb ( the max weight ) isn't exactly tiny.

PS: Why is El Reg using foreign units - American and French, without providing a conversion to either Imperial or El Reg's own units ?

According to the El Reg Standards Soviet, 23 ½ stone is 17.153 Adult Badgers

El Reg unit is much coarser - '1 fat bastard'

And what fraction of a Wales?

"...foreign units - American"

What is not foreign to you?

The article uses _popular_ length and weight/mass units. Besides AWG (and we can debate that with Germans), there is no popular American units that aren't foreign. Even popular "non-unit" standards that have been popularized by America aren't just American/English (or even the majority). For example, the NATO phonetic alphabet has been popularized by America, but most of the words in it are not "American" (A.K.A. "English").

As an American I feel that the entire English language and it's base units are a clusterfuck compilation of "foreign".

FWIW, I can't prove it but I suspect if you go back far enough that even "Imperial" is a set of "foreign" (guessing Germanic / Middle-Eastern / Greecian / the-typical-players / etc. ).

El Reg is British. "Imperial" refers to British customary units.

Stones are extremely popular in Britain for measuring the weight of people ( 14lb in a stone ). I, and many British people, cannot picture what 123kg or 234lb looks like without converting it mentally to stone.

Just as if you're 1.79m tall, I'd have to convert that to feet and inches to work out what you're talking about.

Yes, you're right - imperial units are based on the original Roman units.

'Imperial' measures were implemented by the British in the early 19th century, basically standardising things across the then quite large and growing British Empire.

Imperial in turn was derived from an earlier 'English' set of measures, that had been around in various forms since the late middle ages.

The 'English' measures were in turn based on a mix of Roman and Anglo-Saxon measures.

The American Colonies (i.e. pre USA) were using the 'English' system (English colonies of course), but were then standardised into the US customary units' some time after independency.

So both Imperial and US units derive from early English units, and so on. Common ancestor, but not quite the same as each other (gallons etc).

As you imply, the English language, (and by extension measures), is the bast*rd child of many many peoples over many many years! :-)

I was trying to figure out how I could drop 80lb [36kg]...

Ahem, that is still over 110 kg and still be [a] fat[ass]. Dropping 55..65 kg would be a goal. A healthy goal too.

but his BMI works out at about 47. That's quite high.

Even shifting 50kg would still class him as 'morbidly obese'.

Less of these might help --->

Controversial it may be for fellas that are particularly tall and therefore eternally flirt with "technically obese" despite being fit as a fiddle, but an average-height chap clocking in at 150 kilograms is facing a short road to a particularly unpleasant decline and death whichever measure you opt to use.

Or as my granpa would put it: "have you ever seen a fat old man? no..."

About a decade ago, I shifted quite a bit of weight by switching from beer to spirits on Sunday-Thursday nights.

Well, damn. I'm too fat as well... I guess back to Cracker Barrel.

There's nowhere to exercise here. There's a couple blocks to walk in downtown Titusville (little over a 1/4 mile) but no gyms or anything.

I can't cook, so I either eat out, have microwave, or a grilled cheese sandwich or ramen noodles.

There are plenty of exercises you can do with just your own body weight. [1]Burpees are a fine example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burpee_(exercise)

That's possibly your problem. I managed a 25kg loss over 3-4 months after being diagnosed with T2 diabetes. So hit the reasearch, and decided T2 is basically carb intolerance. So switched pretty ruthlessly to a low carb diet and the weight fell off. Only exercise was spreading out my shopping so I was walking 1-2 miles.

Biggest challenge was adapting meals to cut down on high carb stuff like bread, spuds, pasta etc and figuring out alternatives. I love BLTs in a nice French baton, but made non-bread BLTs by just parcelling up the filling in lettuce leaves. Neat side effect is now I have cheap treats like bread or chips/fries maybe once a month.

There's growing recognition that a low-carb diet helps with weightloss and T2 diabetes management. Still some challenges, like the official UK and US diet advice is still heavy on the carbs, but that's down to lobbying from the food industry.

There's growing recognition that a low-carb diet helps with weightloss and T2 diabetes management.

Lowering carbs does seem to be key and worked for me.

And exercise. Grab an MP3 player, a couple of kg dumbells, and dance like no one's watching.

I shrug off any feelings of twattishness by knowing how much healthier I am.

Learn to cook?

No, seriously. :) Simple meals are easy to cook (after a while - I get there's a learning curve), healthier, and tastier than any restaurant or takeout. There are a ton of YouTube channels dedicated to helping people to learn. French Cooking Academy, for example, has a lot of (early) videos that cover all the basics of food prep before diving into simple recipes. Just feel free to cut out some of the butter sometimes. ;)

Or services like hellofresh, gousto etc - simple recipes, easy to follow and all the right ingredients in conveniently the correct amounts.

That gives the basis which can lead to experimentation and developing one's own skills.

Yes, they are good options too. :)

I'm kinda dubious about services like HelloFresh. Mainly because of the VFM and cost per meal. It does have value in getting people to cook, but there are cheaper alternatives. I enjoy cooking though, and think the trick is to learn some basics, then start experimenting.

Then some simple meal planning can save on prep time and ways to use leftovers. Wierd thing I've noticed is a correlation between making shopping lists, and diligently following recipes, and inability to improvise.

And I guess the US can have fewer exercise options, and doesn't seem to encourage pedestrians. UK has that challenge as well though.

Apparently you don't have any good restaurants in your area. Or you call McDonalds a restaurant. It isn't.

A good chef in a restaurant is hard to beat. Yes, there are definitely people who know how to cook at home (my wife is one), but just saying learn how to cook and you'll do better than any restaurant chef is a rather tall order.

And, if you do, you can always open a restaurant ;)

Apparently you don't have any good restaurants in your area.

I live in Norway. There isn't a good restaurant in the country. ;)

Well, maybe there are one or two, but none near me.

But my point was that a lot of restaurants don't have good, healthy food - most have mediocre, barely healthy food. Unless you pay for it.

I know how to cook (well - I've never killed anyone that I know of), and enjoy doing so. Too busy engineering software and planning the house I want to build to have time to open a restaurant though. :)

I just scrape in under the weight limit, but expect my high blood pressure and asthma (problems with altitude?) might still exclude me. Maybe also the lack of vast amounts of disposable income...

If you want a space reward to motivate getting fitter the target price for a ride on Starship is about $5000 (what you would currently pay for a vomit comet ticket). It will take a while for the price to drop that low (and for the final lithobraking manoeuvre to not be immediately followed by RUD). In the mean time: one month until Starship's Programmatic Environmental Assessment gets completed delayed.

He never got to experience weightlessness.

There are always options if you want something badly enough, I would have given an arm and a leg...

Or just lost a few stone. It's not that hard if you commit.

That's more than two of me. In the same skin! (I'm the same height and clock in just a smidge over 70kg right now.)

For those enquiring minds out there, eat less. ;) Diseases notwithstanding, it's really that simple.

I dropped just over a kilo (2.2lbs) last week by switching to a slightly healthier diet. I've been having a (very) large milkshake (homemade with fresh or frozen fruit and the like) around 11, and then a salad with chicken or tuna or something for dinner around 18. I drink water and/or juice in between, and usually have some fresh fruit or some yoghurt later in the evening. For someone who spends his entire day sitting down punching keys and nudging a mouse I don't need more calories. Exercise is something that happens to other people.

He's a CRJ captain for Endeavor Air in Florida. He may have been a carrier pilot at one time, but that's like calling me a rugby player, which I gave up 40 years ago after my friend got his femur broken in the first game in university.

How did he break his femur?

I can't imagine any action in rugby that could result in that injury.

A tacklers shoulder would give way before a femur would break.

Did a maul collapse onto him? But surely that would destroy his knee before his femur?

If we could stop fat shaming the guy for a minute, that's a really nice thing for him to do for his friend, he could have just sold it.

It is.

But to be fair he's not just a bit tubby, he's 23 ½ stone. Mr Creosote would be aghast.

Get off the god damn Hobbit diet, there is no need for 7 or 8 meals a day, I get by nicely on a light lunch and dinner until I'm full, breakfast only on the weekends! I used to eat 5 meals a day back in the 80's and it showed.

Getting of the soapbox, that was a damn nice thing to do! He can have only one of these------>