Men don't do queuing!

Today we fly home and I'm bracing myself for the 'airport experience'. Mike doesn't like airports or queuing. We don't arrive too early, so that we don't have to queue for long to check-in. We will be the last ones to stand up to join the queue to board the aircraft - which actually is quite a shrewd move as the last on the coach to the plane is first off when you get there. we will probably be the last ones to get off the plane and then we will have to queue for Passport Control at East Midlands. Let's hope there is a full complement of Passport Control Officers on duty today.

Mike isn't unusual - all men hate queuing. And that is exactly why men won't attend 'men only' slimming classes even though the majority of the male population would find attending a class a very effective way of shedding their excess baggage.

Men prefer to attend a gym because they can select whichever piece of apparatus that is available, chat to their mates and make their own decisions about what activity they want to do that day. Sometimes they will attend classes there but often find this difficult because men are not as naturally co-ordinated as women and they are reluctant to potentially embarrass themselves. This is a shame, because with practise they can be great movers.

Often it has been suggested to me that we open our classes specifically for men and twice we have tried and failed. We even had one instructor who was a retired professional footballer but still, it didn't work.

The good news is that , with the growing obesity problem, more and more men seem to be happy to come along to our predominantly female classes because we do fitness as well as weight-loss. Some come with their wives and others brave it on their own. Last October we had no less that four male Regional Slimmers of the Year along with the twelve women who had lost massive amounts of weight. One of them Neil Davies is featured in the current issue of my magazine. Neil, a traffic cop, has lost almost seven stone and now feels he is a new man. He feels fighting fit and life is a whole new experience for him now.

Neil explained that exercising in the class initially was hard but the women were always encouraging and enthusiastic about his achievements. Men make great slimmers and often take on the challenge of losing weight as a new competitive sport - seeing how many Slimmer of the Week certificates they can win. Once they get over that threshold into the class, there's no stopping them, even if they do have to queue to get on the scales!