Eating Well – A Diet Blog
February 10, 2009 8:52 A.M. Weight: 357.6 lbs.
February 10, 2009 8:52 A.M. Weight: 357.6 lbs.
Category: Eating Well – A Diet Blog
This are posts imported from my original diet blog.
Eating Well – A Diet Blog:
January 6, 2009 6:50 P.M. Weight: 359.6 lbs.
January 6, 2009 6:50 P.M. Weight: 359.6 lbs.
I’ve been asked to help out on percussion for some friends who are playing a gig in February. Thinking back, it has been over a year since I last played the drums. Anyway, the kit has been retrieved from the garage and is now set up in the lounge, and I need to build up with some practice every day.
Then it occurred to me – this is exercise, no? Doing a web search came up with various calorific values for drumming, but for now I am going to take a very conservative view and record it as 4 kcals per minute.
Every little helps.
Eating Well – A Diet Blog:
January 6, 2009 12:08 P.M. Weight: 359.6 lbs.
January 6, 2009 12:08 P.M. Weight: 359.6 lbs.
Things were going fairly well in 2008, until I went on holiday in September. I was not net-connected while away, so just decided to ‘eat sensibly’, and not worry about SYD.
However, when I got back, I didn’t get straight back into SYD again. Up until the holiday, I had been pretty good at keeping my meals logged, but on my return… well, a week went by, then two weeks, with me always thinking ‘I’ll start again next week’.
Around December, I think, I rebooted, but after a couple of days stopped again.
So now I am back with a vengeance, and determined to keep it up.Unfortunately, all the good work I did last year has been undone, and I am heavier than I have been for a while – although I seem to have hungonto my general fitness, which is something. However, from last year, I now know I can lose weight, so it is just a case of getting back up on that (figurative) horse again.
Eating Well – A Diet Blog:
August 14, 2008 6:05 P.M. Weight: 345.0 lbs.
August 14, 2008 6:05 P.M. Weight: 345.0 lbs.
Probably not the best move, when you are on a diet, but I have just bought myself a barbecue.
When I moved into this house, a few years ago, it had an old brick barbecue. For some time I have been planning to get the parts – tray, grill etc – to get it working again. However, it is in a bit on an inconvenient place, down the bottom of my garden.
So instead, the brick barbecue has been transformed into a potting table, and I have just bought a Weber charcoal kettle. I’ve been reading up on it, and shopping around for a month or so, and it did seem to do everything I wanted – easy to use, easy to clean, and big enough to handle things like beef joints, whole chickens, and even pizza stones. Although it’s a big barbecue, it’s easy enough to create a small cooking area for just just one or two people.
I have some friends coming over in a few weeks time, who I’ve promised barbecue. So I am about to go out there and do some experimentation.
Wish me luck!
Eating Well – A Diet Blog:
August 14, 2008 5:44 P.M. Weight: 345.0 lbs.
August 14, 2008 5:44 P.M. Weight: 345.0 lbs.
It’s been a little while since I posted about my garden here – part of the reason is that I have been… in the garden.
Last year, the big disappointment I had was working hard on the couple of beds I had planted, then going away for a week, and coming back to find plants drying out everywhere. Neighbours can be helpful with watering, but you still worry about what you are going to come back to.
So this year, I decided I was going to build some kind of irrigation system, starting off with two water butts, taking water off my garage roof.
I bought a HozeLock “Water Butt Border Watering Kit”, which – in my naivety – I thought would be suitable for watering my borders from a water butt. On the packaging, it showed it all connected to a butt, not more than a foot off the ground, and mine were higher than that, so it must work, no?
No chance. It worked in a fashion when the water butt was filled to the brim, but the soaker hose closest to the butt got all the water, and the beds furthest away got none. On inquiring of HoseLock, they explained how I wouldn’t get a consistent water pressure along a long soaker hose. “So why does your kit contain 15 metres of the stuff?” No answer.
So, this week, I took it all apart, and put it back together again. Whereas before, I had a length of standard hose, then some soaker when it reached the planting bed, then some more standard hose, then some more soaker, this time I laid a black semi-rigid pipe around the perimeter of the garden. Then at each planting points I inserted a T junction, connected to a small inline tap, connected to a short length of soaker hose.
Success – steady constant pressure throughout the system. Still not sure there will enough pressure when the butts are only half full, but provided the hose seeps something, I can just leave it on for longer. Longer term, I intend to put another butt by the house, which will be at the opposite end of the system, so that may improve things. If not, I buy a simple little pump to put in one of the butts.
Eating Well – A Diet Blog
July 31, 2008 9:15 A.M. Weight: 345.0 lbs.
July 31, 2008 9:15 A.M. Weight: 345.0 lbs.
Yesterday, it looked like I was going to miss my monthly goal by just 0.6lb, even allowing for my normal weight loss.
So last night, I was going to just have a salad or something, but when I got to the kitchen, I was actually quite hungry.
‘Oh well, its only a target,’ I thought, and ended up having a pretty good dinner – grilled chicken, and steamed potatoes and peas, a low-fat desert, and lots of fruit.
So today was the moment of judgement., I got up, pulled on my joggers, and, picking up the polo shirt I wore last night, stepped on the scales. I was 0.2lb over!
Then I thought – ‘this polo is actually quite a thick one’, so dumped it in the laundry basket, put on a light Cotton Traders T-shirt, and stepped on the scales again.
The scales were alternating between 344.8 and 345, so I made my goal weight! It’s a bit cheeky that my success depended on what shirt I wore, but, to be fair, the Cotton Trader shirts are what I normally wear, day to day, so it’s no foul.
Eating Well – A Diet Blog:
July 30, 2008 2:48 P.M. Weight: 345.6 lbs.
July 30, 2008 2:48 P.M. Weight: 345.6 lbs.
I’ve just had a bit of a shock. I can’t stand artificial sweeteners of any sort, so if I buy squash or cordial, I buy something fruit-based. Lately, I have been drinking Ribena, a popular blackcurrant drink in the UK.
However, logging my calories for lunch, I discovered – according to the Ribena figures, that 100ml diluted is 45 calories. That means the pint of Ribena I have just drunk is over 250 calories – more than the prawn and mayonnaise sandwich I ate.
Thinking about this further, a good British ale is only 180-200 calories per pint, so it would be better for my diet to replace my fruit drinks with beer. I like the sound of that!
Of course, on looking into this, I discover that it is not all as it seems. Checking the side of the bottle shows that the manufacturer’s figures are based on a dilution of 1 part Ribena to 4 parts water – essentially a syrupy kid’s drink. I reckon I dilute it 1 part to 10 of water, at least – just enough to flavour it. So it isn’t as bad as I thought.
I still like that beer idea, though!
Eating Well – A Diet Blog
July 26, 2008 6:42 P.M. Weight: 345.6 lbs.
July 26, 2008 6:42 P.M. Weight: 345.6 lbs.
I spent most of yesterday putting my garden back to rights, and I have just spent another hour out there finishing off.
Socially, I’ve been fairly busy lately, which means things like the garden have been a little neglected. While I have been gallivanting, my cabbages and broccoli have fallen foul of the Cabbage White Butterfly – eggs and caterpillars galore, all the plants have some outer leaf damage, and a couple were beyond saving. Meanwhile, two of my beetroot plants suddenly wilted – I pulled them up to find the beet had been eaten by something.
Anyway, my cabbages and broccoli now have a net cage around them, a piece of engineering that I am proud of. I will try to get a picture of it before it falls apart. I’ve also just planted a whole tray of beet seed, to see if I can get some plants in to replace the eaten ones.
I feel that the garden and my diet are connected, not in a mystical way, but practically – when I don’t have time for the garden, I’m probably not finding time to eat well, either. Also the exercise is useful.
This week I came across an interesting little book called The Half-hour Allotment – which describes how to tend and keep an allotment in just 30 minutes a day. Of course, my garden is a fraction of the size of an allotment, so it’s got to be worth a go.
Eating Well – A Diet Blog
July 10, 2008 7:44 P.M. Weight: 345.6 lbs.
Well, I am back; and although I haven’t been tracking these last few days, I seem to have dropped 3.5lbs.
I haven’t tracked so far today, and it’s pizza for tea, so I think I will start logging again tomorrow.
Eating Well – A Diet Blog
July 3, 2008 1:09 P.M. Weight: 349.2 lbs.
So it seems that my body likes the number 349.2 – I’ve been bouncing either side of it for the last week.
To be fair, I have been fairly busy, socially, and it isn’t really a great mystery why I have stopped losing. I had people round on Saturday for board games, and so there was coke and cookies in the house, and on Sunday I went out to lunch with a friend – the full roast beef and yorkshire pudding.
Also, as I am off work for the next week, I’ve been pretty busy, work-wise, so have missed out on my lunchtime walks.
Tonight, I am off to stay with my Mum for a few days in London, so see you all when I get back.
Eating Well – A Diet Blog
June 25, 2008 2:42 P.M. Weight: 349.2 lbs.
…well almost. My perpetual spinach was coming up thick and fast, and I need to thin the plants out. Then I thought ‘why let these sprouts go to waste?’.
So I trimmed and washed them, cut a couple of outer leaves from one of the lettuces, and I had my first homegrown salad. Just an assortment of leaves, really, as my tomatoes are nowhere near ready. But it tasted extra special.