RELUCTANT RUNNER: Body scanner reveals I am now....normal!

That’s what the dictionary says, and if we are all being honest, we’d all like to be normal. That was one of my aims when I started this project – get to a normal weight, have a normal BMI rating.

When I was at a meeting recently, leisure managers from East Riding Council were talking about a new machine at the centre in Beverley. A scanner which can tell you all sorts of facts and figures about your body.

This was precisely the machine which could tell me if I had reached “normal”.

When I told people I was going to a body scanner, they looked aghast. I wondered if it might be like the type you see in a hospital and someone else got me worried that I might be presented with an X-ray type picture of my body, which certainly wouldn’t be suitable for printing in this column,

So with some trepidation, I met Danny Moore, an instructor at the Beverley Leisure Centre, and he explained the hi-tech piece of kit.

Basically, all you do is take your shoes and socks off, stand on the scales and press the touch screen to register yourself.

An electrical pulse is then sent all around your body and within seconds, the results are at your fingertips. No pain, no delays, no embarrassing scan photographs.

It tells you the percentage of muscle and fat in each arm and leg, how much water is in your body, you name it, it tells you. I’d had my BMI and body fat percentages checked in previous weeks, but this went way beyond that. Download the Boditrax app and everything is there on a colour-coded wheel, green being normal.

Surely, something would come back red. But no, my BMI was 25.3 which is fine.

My weight was green, my “fat free mass” was green, my muscle score was green, my “hidden” fat score was green and my metabolic age was 38 – I’m 38 in six weeks.

It would be brilliant if one of these machines arrives in Bridlington in the future.

But for now, normal. Officially normal. And being normal never felt so good.