A 19 Year Circle

As I’ve reached various mini weight goals on this weight loss journey, I’ve mentioned several times “hey, I haven’t been this weight since probably middle school or even elementary school.”  Many people may have thought that I was exaggerating.

Not so and now I have proof!

I posted a while back about the horror that was my elementary school days and the terror that lied within my gym class.  My teacher did these horrible “Physical Education Reports” about twice a year.  I think once at the beginning of the school year and once at the end of the year.  Well, I did some digging in old papers and found one of these reports.

Oh the terror that seeing that paper brought back. 

Apparently I have a company called Cramer Education Services to thank for making my life a living hell.  Or, more specifically, their “Fit-N-Dex for Physical Education.”  Obviously, for people like me who liked to eat and hated to work out, it was merely a tool to point out our loser-ness.  The only thing these reports ever accomplished was to make me feel that much worse about myself and make me eat more.  After doing a Google search, it appears that there are still schools that use this program.

The report I found was the last one that I was ever tortured with.  It is from the beginning of 1990 (4/1/90 to be exact), almost 19 years ago, and I was in the sixth grade.

So what was my weight, you may ask.  192 pounds!  No joke.  That’s more than I weigh now and I was also almost five inches shorter.  According to this sheet, I gained 21 pounds over the course of my sixth grade year, since I weighed 171 at the beginning of the year.  I also grew 1.25 inches in height that year.

Have I mentioned I hated sixth grade?  I was obviously an extremely unhappy little girl.

It seems I was able to do 17 sit-ups a minute.  My gym teacher obviously wasn’t impressed with the miracle that I could do more than one, since my goal was to do 27 a minute.  Interestingly, at the beginning of that year, I could do 21 sit-ups a minute.  Which is also how much weight I gained.  Hmmm.

The report also comes with this handy note:

Percentiles are scores that compare your child to other children [what did we just discover in my previous blog post on comparisons???]  in his/her age group.  A percentile score of 50 is average and means that he/she has measured better than 50% of the other children in his/her age group. Also, 49% of the children in his/her age group are considered to be in better condition than your child.

I tested in the bottom 10 percent, of course, on everything except the flexed arm hang.  Apparently I wasn’t the only loser who could only hang for one second (instead of the goal of four seconds).

We won’t even go into the scary results from my triceps skinfold test.  I’m telling you that those torture devices should be banned.  The result of which did come along with this lovely note:

SKINFOLDS:  A measure of body fat which indicates susceptibility to degenerative diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, psychological disorders, and impaired tolerance to heat.

Okay, number one – skinny people get those diseases, too.  Number two – fat causing psychological disorders?  I won’t say it’s not possible, but I, for one, think that it’s more likely the other way around.  Not to mention the psychological disorders this damn test wreaked.  And number three – impaired tolerance to heat?!?  What the hell??  I’m not saying that’s not true, but does it really rank up there with heart disease??

Anyway, I just thought I would share my little trip through nightmares past.  Instead of being able to say that I’m smarter than a 5th grader, I can say I’m skinnier than a sixth grader!