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Ah, how I love the early days of a diet. I’ve dropped 2 kgs in four days. The key to rapid weight loss is to spend ages stuffing your face before you start. Then it’s pimpsy. Diets would be great if you could just lose a pound a day, right?
I am not back to the disgustingly huge weight I was before the holiday. But feeling like this time might be one of the successful ones. But I said that six months ago. Four years ago in an attempt to show BMI was stupid I attempted to get from 97kg to 72kg and show the world how I was too skinny. I got to just under 80, which surprised me (and to be fair there was a little more to lose) and I thought that was probably the least I had weighed in my adult life.
But when going through all my stuff the other month I found a weight graph (although phones now give I had made (not sure when, possibly about ten years ago, when I also got pretty fit) and I was about 76kg at the low point. So close to my BMI. Why didn’t I go all the way?
Five years ago I had the time and energy to go pretty hard into exercising, and I doubt I can ever achieve that level of fitness again. But at the moment I’d be very happy to get under 90kg, which should be achievable and only be 18kg heavier than is healthy for me!
You’ve probably been with me long enough to know how this is going to go. But I haven’t drunk since Saturday night and I’ve been making hearty meals out of legumes, which I am feeling very happy about. Cooking is like magic. Very easy magic. With easily available books of spells. Even so, it still amazes me when a bunch of ingredients somehow turn into proper food before your eyes. But then I am from Somerset etc.
I cooked a recipe from Sarah Brown’s Vegetarian Kitchen, a book my mum gave me shortly after I became a vegetarian in 1985 (I managed to stay one until the early 2000s, then relapsed quite heavily, though now have as many veggie meals as meaty ones). I like to think that Sarah looks as eighties now as she does in her picture and also hope she hasn’t aged a day (which given her vegetarian diet is a possibility) - please do not provide me with any evidence to the contrary.
The cookbook is well used (though I mainly concentrated on three or four bean based dishes) and imbued with spillages from over the last four decades. It might actually now be as nutritious as the meals I am preparing from it. Tonight was a spicy number made from chick peas and peppers - I had a huge portion that was still under 500 calories. It was excellent. I will never go back to the old ways.
But will the consequences of eating all these beans be worth the health benefits?
Two more good dog walks today. In the morning one I saw a tiny still figure standing in the morning mist. I didn’t know if it was a bird or a leprechaun, but Wolfie made a beeline for it and it turned out to be a hare. The dog was never going to catch it. Weirdly, on our evening walk, the hare was back in exactly the same place, as if waiting for the chase. Animals are idiots.
Wolfie was also very attracted to a tiny dead baby rat or vole or something lying near the path and tried to devour it. I was disgusted by her disrespect for the dead baby. That’s the difference between people and dogs. If people see a dead baby mouse they’re all “Boo hoo, that’s sad,” but a dog is all “Oooo, dinner.” Likewise if a person sees a dead frog they’re all “Urgh, that’s gross,”but a dog is all “Oooo, dinner.”
This is a stand up routine I wrote on the walk just in case there is a comedy club in the future that welcomes both humans and dogs. They can all get something out of that.
And the interesting thing is that at least the dog is consistent. Whilst the human’s attitude to tiny dead animals is all over the place. Why is a mouse cadaver sad and a frog one repellant? Is it just our loyalty to mammals that guides us?
