Customised Learning

Last week I blogged that I was planning to come out the other side of Christmas and New Year the same weight as I was on 3 December. That weight was 83.5kg, and I wanted to go into the Christmas period below that, to give me a little wriggle-room. To be honest, nothing much has happening in the last week - it's wobbled up and down slightly, and this morning I was 83.3kg - but there's still a couple of weeks to go.

But what I really wanted to blog about this week is a new course I have spotted. I am very keen on being well-informed about weight control. After all, it's already difficult enough to manage my weight, without being hampered by doing things I have read about or heard about, which are in fact rubbish. These things may do nothing to help, and sometimes are even harmful to keeping weight under control.

So I was really pleased to find an email from Cardiff University in my inbox about a new (and free) online course they are running. They say that health research is big business and over a million papers are now published annually on health-related topics. I'm sure that a lot of those million papers are about what we should and shouldn't eat, so I was pleased to see that their course will help me to find the evidence the papers include, and then help me to judge how good that evidence is. One specific thing they mention is that it's important to find out who paid for the research, which seems highly relevant to the world of food and drink!

This looks like my kind of course - exactly what I'm interested in, and costs me nothing. It's called 'Making Sense of Health Evidence: The Informed Consumer'. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/informed-health-consumer

Anyway, the course doesn't start until the end of January; in the meantime I need to get back to watching my weight over Christmas!