Lost and found

Well, John said we might be off-radar for a while and I certainly have been. For me, the last four months have been spent either working on the house, working at my day job, or sleeping. I weighed myself tonight, and I'm four pounds heavier than I was in January - I'll weigh myself again tomorrow morning for a more accurate reading, but as we're normally up to 3lb lighter in the mornings, I reckon I've got off lightly, as it were. I can't say the same for John. He's not been tracking regularly, and the weight seems to have crept on. Maybe up to 12 pounds of it has just crept on. That's just a phrase we use, isn't it? 'Just crept on'. When I weigh myself properly tomorrow I might find some weight has 'just crept on' me as well. That's what happens when we don't log everything we eat, when we estimate that portion of cereal, eat six slices of toast but log four, and so the list goes on. It's not helped at all that he's been ill in hospital again twice. Six months ago he could walk 200 yards - just - before having to stop for a rest. Now he can't walk across the room. How is he going to get any exercise in this state? And if he doesn't exercise, how is he going to lose weight? And if he doesn't lose weight, his heart will get even worse. Forgive me if I'm feeling a bit down about all this.

John's been nagging me to blog more. Warning - whine coming up (with a more optomistic bit at the end!). I'll let you into a secret. Over the last few months, I have occasionally felt - gasp- RESENTFUL! of John, sitting on his backside at my Mum's with nothing much to do but write and go to his creative writing class. I've been working particularly long hours the last few months, finding my day job particularly stressful, and the rest of the time has been spent sanding, painting, cleaning, lugging boxes out of the garage, and so on. But obviously, John's situation is not one he would have wished for. And not one I'd wish on myself. Time to snap myself out of that one.

Because now the end is in sight! I'm sitting in my lovely new living room with lime green and white walls (thanks to my friends who came and helped paint), and the rug we bought months ago is now on the floor, and we have a massive new kitchen/diner ready to cook lovely healthy meals in. And I've started writing again! I've decided I really must start earning some money from writing - that's been my ambition since I was a child and I owe it to my six year old self to try. So after looking at a lot of options, some of which pay peanuts, I'm trying out Hubpages. Remember a few months ago I said I was going to post a review of the Weight Watchers iPhone app? I've written it, but decided to post it on Hubpages and link to it from here, rather posting it directly here. Hubpages has millions of readers and scores very well on Google searches, so I can get my writing seen by more people. Please go and have a look!

And please cross your fingers for our proper weigh-in tomorrow. I think a small gain for each of us would probably be the best result - it would show us that we can't get away with letting things slip!

I Fell Off My Bike ...!

Or at least, that's what it felt like.

Many, many apologies for not having being on the blog for seven weeks.

As of late January I started to suffer from strange heart rhythms and palpatations and began to feel truly awful. By mid-February, I took my unpleasantly thumping chest to my local A&E for examination. It turns out I had (or rather have) pneumonia. For the last month I have been battling with the two main symptoms - bouts of palpatations (including entire days of atrial fibrillation) and bouts of breathlessness. The heart rhythms are particularly difficult to deal with - imagine the feelings of an hungry stomach, the gurgling and the emptiness, but transposed twelve inches further north.

As I write, on March 17th (happy Guinness day, by the way!) I am feeling better than I have done since I first became ill, and I'm hoping this will continue. But I'm taking it one day at a time.

I haven't been to Weightwatchers for a month, but was thankful when I last went there to see that my initial bout of illness helped me lose four pounds in a week. I really do have a different relationship with food when I'm feverish like that. In my semi-lucid state, it was even mildly entertaining to see how my interest in food diminished. I suspect at such times, though, it doesn't go below normal levels - it just returns to normal levels!
But there is something wonderfully unshackled about suddenly not having to think quite so much about food, and to get by on a yoghurt or a bowl of soup or half a normal plateful ... it felt like a little bit of freedom, despite the fever.

So ... now I'm back, what now? Well, I start tracking my food again, rejoin Weightwatchers, get fitter, and get back on the bike. Deirdre has been marvellous this month, slowly preparing our new home for habitation with paintbrush in hand, and many of my friends and family have gone far above and beyond the call of duty to help me get fit, and help our house get fit for purpose. Thank you all.
Also, and finally, a thank you to member of staff at my local hospital who took me aside a few weeks ago and asked "Do you right a blog?" (she recognised the Frankie-Boyle-but-happy fizog from the top of this page). Her encouragement and kind words were genuinely affecting - as she said herself, you don't often get feedback in "the real world".


Anyway, I'd better go. I think this is me back for good. I shall poke Deirdre with sticks and try to get her to write something soon.

The Twelve Weighs of Christmas

My weightloss has hit a snag these last few weeks... fluid retention. Despite adhering to the diet, I gained four pounds two weeks ago, lost three and a half pounds last week, and then gained another five when I was weighed at Weightwatchers yesterday. This is yo-yoing of the worst kind, and to have it happen just before Christmas (and after months of reasonably careful eating) seems a bit unfair. But who do I blame? Is there a god of dieting? Is Dionysus still in business, looking down and laughing?


Sadly, the only way to cope with fluid retention is a regime of socially-inconvenient water tablets (which I'm on anyway; I've just increased my dose for 160mg to 200mg) and fluid restriction. This should be 1500ml a day, which is the rough equivalent of 4 cans of cola and a tiny cup of tea. At the moment, I'm aiming for 2000ml, working slowly down to 1500ml as I can - but it isn't easy.

Restricting food and restricting fluid at the same time is particularly tortuous; the last time I managed it successfully, I was in hospital, and it was a tremendous shock to the system. Eventually after around two weeks, I settled down and got used to my restricted fluids - but those initial fourteen days were very, very difficult. Going back to 1500ml now is something that fills me with dread, if I'm honest - which is why I'm trying to cut in down incrementally. But, if at least some of my weight gain is purely fluid, it should be worth it in the long-run: when I left hospital I had lost nearly two stone in two weeks...

What I intend to do over the Christmas holidays is weigh myself with the same scales every day, at the same time, after taking my water tablets at the same time, and see if it fluctuates. I've decided to call this "The Twelve Weighs of Christmas" (if nothing else, because it gives this post a snappy title) and any drastic fluctuations in weight should give me an idea of just how bad my fluid retention is...

Anyway, Christmas...

... come round fast this year, hasn't it?

For those desiring weight loss, this time of year can seem a bit of a poisoned chalice. What is it actually for if you can't indulge and revel when the nights are at their shortest? The need for a midwinter celebration is common through many cultures and many religions. So how does a dieter cope? How do you avoid putting on another half stone while still joining in the week-long party?

Many people at my Weightwatchers meetings are either (a) just going to take "a week off", or (b) try to use "lighter" alternatives in their Christmas meals (pigs-in-blankets with lean bacon, steamed rather than roasted veg, sparrow rather than turkey, etc.) At first glance, the latter might seem the better option, but only - and it's a big "only" - if you can cope with the extra preparation and the (let's be honest) distinct possibility of culinary disappointment on December 25th.

For me, I intend to be good ... but not that good. I shall weigh myself every day (scout's honour) and try and restrict my fluids to 2 litres. As a diabetic, chocolates and sugary puddings and alcohol are all something I instinctively avoid, so that's an area of indulgence which thankfully is easily shut for me. But other things - genuine indulgences, particularly snacks and eating out - may prove far more resistant. Although whether their pull will be any stronger over the next week than over a dull weekend in February is yet to be seen!

Anyway - a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our readers from the Quarter-Ton Couple! Have a good one, and we hope to see you all here again in the New Year: with fresh gym kits, blank weight trackers, sharp pencils and even sharper resolutions!

X

Beyond the Dreams of Licourice

... So: one and a half pounds on.

Bugger!

I'm unsure as to what I did wrong as everything was religiously pointed, but I'm going to wait and give the system another week and see if the weight starts going in the right direction again. Other people at the meeting had lost 3, 4 or 5 (and someone at another meeting in the local area had apparently lost 13) pounds all in one week. Such dramatic weighloss seems beyond the dreams of avarice (or should that be licourice?) at the moment!

I stayed for the meeting again and this week a second "going over"of the basics of Pro-Points seemed to sink in more. It is, as our leader said, a big sea change - not so much for me, but for people who were on the old points system for years and years and thought they could portion and point just by looking at something - and everything still needs to settle down. Even the "Weightwatchers" magazine is still based around the old version of the Points system (apart from copies sold at the meetings, which have both) and the full roll out isn't until January - when the Weightwatchers lines grow long with those who overindulged in front of "Doctor Who" and "It's a Wonderful Life" during the festivities!


Anyway, this is all getting a bit technical. I just wanted to say that Deirdre and I were both very touched and pleased with the messages of support and good wishes that were posted to both this blog and our Facebooks after Monday night's Panorama. And as you can see from some of the various comments posted below some of our previous posts, many people have many different ways of achieving a weighloss goal.

In fact, there seems to be as many ways of losing weight as there are overweight people. And I do wonder if the reason for this is that total abstincence - the ultimate aim in most other addiction battles - is simply not an option with weightloss. "I haven't had a drink in five years" means you are tackling your alcoholism. "I haven't eaten for five years" means you are talking via a ouija board. The impossibility of food cold turkey (but not cold turkey food), means that all kinds measures and restrictions and diets fill the gap.

And talking of filling gaps, I'm off to have my lunch. Properly Propointed, of course!

Against the Buffers (we're on iPlayer)

Our appearance on Panorama is now "live" on BBC iPlayer, for viewers in the UK, for the next seven days. In fact, it seems it's on the site for a whole year - the internet never lets you forget ...

Deirdre and I can be seen at various points throughout the programme, making sandwiches, talking and updating this very blog.

We actually had a bit of a post-mortem last night after broadcast, and were a bit unsure whether we'd done the right thing in appearing - but the programme seemed well-balanced and I hope we came across well. Sadly, they mispelled Deirdre's surname and replaced me with Frankie Boyle, but apart from that ...

Anyway, back to life, back to reality tomorrow: the first full week of the new Weightwatchers regime.

To B-52 or not B-52?

So, this is my first post-meeting day on the new Weightwatchers regime - and lunchtime brought about a rather strange glitch in my on-line tracker ...

A Morrison's "Eat Smart" Chicken Arabiatta ready meal isn't listed automatically, but after entering all the nutritional information required to calculate the Propoint value of the meal (including this new thing called "fibre") the eSource program calculated the total as:


I went a bit wobbly at this. My daily allocation is 71 Propoints, and to waste such a huge proportion on one nice (but hardly Michelin star level) plastic tray of pasta, chicken and spicy tomato was really quite upsetting! So, I entered the information again. Tap-tap-tap. And again I got:


By now, I was looking at the little nutritional information panel on the side of the ready meal with a lot of resentment. 'Right,' I thought, 'clearly the supermarkets are lying to us. Only 3 percent fat. Eat Smart, Eat Healthily. It's all bollocks - and I'm never going near any of their products again.' And to just make tripley sure, I tried to calculate the points a third time and still got the same answer:


Now, what made me try a fourth time, I have no idea (except maybe a tiny suspicioun that I had done something wrong somewhere) but this time - to my massive, massive relief - the total I got was:

which is far more manageable and means I can put away the celery and the tap water for another night. But it just goes to show that when taking on a new dieting system like this, mistakes can occur in your calculations. I wonder how many other people who have started the Weightwatchers Propoint plan this week are having problems? And remember, this is using the on-line calculator, not the whirly-wheel thing in the back of the information pack I spoke about yesterday.

If anyone else is reading this and doing the "new" Weightwatchers, here is a quick photo of the nutritional information on the Arabiatta pack. See if you can calculate the Propoints (either on paper, with a WW calculator, or using the e-source program) and see if you come up with 12 or 52!

We're all in this together! :-))

The Weightwatchers new regime is unveiled

... Listen. Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?

Let me whisper in your ear: Weighwatchers have changed their points system, seemingly for the first time in fifteen years. No longer is it based around saturated fat, but instead it looks at fibre and takes into account the energy your body uses to consume food. The example our Group Leader used this morning was that of a lamb chop - you "count" or "point" the larger part of the chop, but the small tapering boney bit is what is used by the body to process the rest of it, so you don't count that.

As I looked around the group, I could see this was causing a lot of scratched heads, and the small "counter wheel" at the back of our new Weightwatchers pack for calculating these new "Pro-points" only made things more complicated. For me, having the eSource (which allows you to key things straight into the website, and it calculates the new points automatically) is really coming into its own with this new regime. And not having to faff about with something that looks like Vic Reeves's "Wheel of Justice" but made by Anthea Turner on "Blue Peter" is going to be a bonus!



For more info on the problems of calculating Pro-Points with the new wheel, have a look at the current discussions on both the weightwatchers.co.uk forum and the mighty Mumset (lurkers can browse both without registering).

Now if only we could get UK Weighwatchers smart phone app for the new system, I would be really rather happy this week!

Oh, and finally, some great news on the weightloss front: I lost another 4 pounds! This now means I now weigh 26 stone 3 pounds (or 166.5 kilograms, as we say in the 21st century) and every week the seat belt in our car is getting just that little bit looser. This also means I got my first proper "silver seven" star on my Weightwatchers card (and on the website) this morning.



It's the first time I've got a silver star since 2005 (and before that, 1983 in class 5A) and I'm actually quite excited! My weightloss was so dramatic this week that I actually got a warning message that it was too fast and sudden (the ideal weightloss is 2lb a week) - but I do think that I have the leeway to lose a little faster than most, as long as it's only for a few weeks.

I wonder what next Wednesday will bring ...?

Between Fantasy and Reality

Today was Weightwatchers day! (Opens envelope. Camera sweeps over a lot of anxious-looking different weightloss options) And I lost half a pound! (Half a pound bursts into tears. All the other options, particularly those above three pounds or more, smile through gritted teeth) ...

Half a pound. Well, I suppose it's better than nothing, and it's "in the right direction", but I can't help be given pause for thought. This is what usually happens at Weighwatchers for me - bobbing around the 26-27 stone mark, without any real downward descent to the hideously magical "20 Stone, Just Like I Was in 2004" landmark. I didn't take my water tablets this morning before going, so I'm trying to justify this to myself as being a bit of fluid retention, but I'm not really convincing myself of that argument. I also think, well I was at "TGI Fridays" last week, maybe that added something, even though I was careful with my points ... but again, I'm not sure.

I stayed for the meeting this week, as I did last week. Hearing the other members talk about their experiences is both salient and thought-provoking. I can see myself following their routes and rules to weightloss and making significant in-roads myself. The trouble is, almost immediately my mind wanders to ridiculous images of me being able to run athletically or to stop taking my pills or to even just be one of the fitter members of my own peer group, and I have to reign in the fantasies before I start imagining "The Chariots of Fire" music and the sand and the wind in my hair. The reality of the situation is, there is a lot about my weightloss that I just don't understand. Hearing skelf-like women recount how they previous used to consume 120 points worth of food and drink regularly on a Saturday, or two packets of McCoys in a bun and a Snickers bar for their lunch every work day, it did make me wonder why they aren't a 27-stone man with gout, diabetes and a full beard too. Maybe they didn't spent most nights for four years consuming King Nan kebabs and full-fat Coke, admittedly - but the disparity between what one person eats and another, and the resultant weigh gain, is something which bugs. And the sentence "it's my metabolism" bugs me ever more. So it's a Catch-22!

This afternoon, I have my first diabetic check for three months, with the hot-and-cold nurse that can sometimes be the tersest human being in Scotland (which is against some fair competition, believe me). But that is the reality of the my situation: I need to get thinner, or my ambitions (being a writer, buying a villa in Tuscany, and still being around for the next return of Halley's Comet) will crumble to dust (along with me).

I need to find some way of turning these idle, seemingly-unachievable dreams of being fit and healthy into active, achievable goals.

D'yer wanna be a spaceman?

The Background Growl ...

So, it's been a week since I started doing Weightwatchers properly, and what have I learned? Well, first of all, their e-source service is fine if you always have access to a switched-on PC. If not, then if you're anything like me (deeply lazy and not wanting to faff about with paper and calculators) you'll be powering up the laptop every time you want to record anything more than a Rich Tea. And the temptation to then while away an idle hour surfing the web is something I've always found hard to resist ...! Why Weightwatchers clients in the States have access to a mobile phone app while we British customers are restricted to the (iPhone Safari browser unfriendly) WW.co.uk website is a bit of mystery to me. It's not like WW is a charity or anything - I pay them £20 a month. And for nearly a quarter of a grand a year, I certainly think the phrase "we got an app for that!" isn't too much to ask for.

And the second thing I've learned is this: dieting does not necessarily mean your life no longer revolves around food. At the moment anyway, my pleasure in gluttony has been replaced by the (much more uncommon) thrill of losing weight. But I'm aware that this novelty could very soon wear off. Then there's this odd contradiction: whether dieting or morbidly obese with an over-eating problem, both ways of life lead to you constantly thinking about food.

So how do I stop this? Well, of course, it's a very healthy thing to be wondering about which vegetables to cook, planning future meals and menus, and point and calorie-counting everything. But there's a touch of the "Poacher Turned Gamekeeper" about it all (two food references in that one phrase, I notice!) and sometimes I'd just like to just be free of the whole damn business. I don't smoke, so I don't think about cigarettes. I drink about four pints a year, so I effectively don't think about alcohol much either.

Could I have a similar relationship with food? Well, for a start, let me say I realise I'm lucky to have any kind of choice in the matter at all: most of the human race can only dream of the quantities I (and you) consume every day. But an ability to enjoy the good things about food (a nice meal in a restaurant once in a while, for example) without diving into excess would see me halfway along the road back to full health.

Most importantly of all I want to finally silence the strange, all-permeating empty growl of hunger that swells within me from time to time. It's the sound (and feel) of an empty stomach - usually when no empty stomach is actually there. And it has slowly grown inside me again this week. After seven days of sticking to Weightwatchers, this growl is still not at a fairly high level, but I have an awful feeling that healthy homecooked meals will not placate it forever! And over the last two days especially it has just become very noticeably restless.

Maybe I'm just down today, and a short sharp shock of carbs will do the trick (I have, after all, "saved" weightwatchers points this week so far, for a later splurge at some point). We shall see.

My next WW meeting is on Wednesday. See you then!

Postcard from the edge and back

After some gentle encouragement from Deirdre (see photograph), I have finally decided to step up to the plate and add another post to the blog.

Things have changed for me a lot in the eighteen months since I last wrote on here - or rather, they've come full circle. I was bouncing along quite happily in 2009 until, in mid-June, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. After that, it felt like I effectively ceased to exist for a few months.

From July until September, my blood sugars were regularly over 30mmoh/l (a lot of the time, my testing kit gave up and just said "HI" - which is fine as a friendly greeting, but useless as a diagnostic tool) and I had all the classic symptoms: tiredness, thirst and perma-weeing. By November though, thanks to the wonder that is Metformin 500mg and some informed dietary choices (brown rice and pasta and no chocolate or orange juice at all for three months), I was beginning to get some equilibrium back. Just in time, in fact, for me to then get Swine Flu just after Hallowe'en.

Now, I know what you're thinking - "swine flu"? He means "man flu"! And yes, swine flu was a hypochondriac's dream last year; and I'm not 100% sure that I definitely had it. But what I did have floored me for over a month, deeply concerned my GP, and involved Tamiflu tablets being delivered to our doorstep late at night from a hospital van, while the driver phoned us up and said "Don't come out until I've driven away!" (Thankfully, when I did venture out to pick up my pills, no red cross had actually been painted on the front door - but it was a bloody scary experience!) So I'll have none of your "man flu" nonsense, thank you very much!

As you can imagine, I started 2010 feeling like a dishrag that had been rung out and hung out on the line in a force nine gale. I was diagnosed as anaemic for a while too, and was guzzling iron tablets (mmm ... they taste of keys ... ) for about three months to try and get some equilibrium back in the bloods. But thankfully, by mid-summer, it seemed as if my health problems (or at least the ones that aren't underlying) were finally ironing themselves out. A week's family holiday in Tuscany was a bit of a shock to the system - trailing slowly around with my DVT-caused limp, 27 stones in weight, guzzling water tablets all day, hating the heat, and feeling like a burden to Deirdre and the rest of her family - but it also proved to be (hopefully) a springboard to better days.

I have started looking to the future, rather than just the underside of my duvet - and it is (just slightly) starting to look brighter. I've embarked upon a creative writing evening class at Strathclyde University and (as of August 2010) rejoined Weightwatchers.

I was actually intending this post to be a description of today's meeting. Last week I didn't go, following a bad case of gout, but the week before I weighed 27 stones on the nose. Today, I weigh 26 stones 8: a drop of 6 pounds. One more pound and I would have got another silver star (although sadly my first one was wiped out by me putting on three and a half pounds the following week!)

But, I think I should leave Weightwatchers for next week. I go regularly every Wednesday morning (I am the only man in a group of twenty women, which to be honest suits me fine) and will hope to report back every Wednesday afternoon from now. Expect full transcripts of discussions on the different ways to cook vegetables, held in community halls in faded Clyde coast seaside towns at ten o'clock on a weekday morning!

Isn't that, alone, worth coming back for?

.

Why I'm not doing WeightWatchers but my boyfriend is

We're losing weight as a couple, but John is doing WeightWatchers and I'm currently using Myfitnesspal. By using different systems, we've already added another complication and haven't made it as easy as we could have done.

So why are we doing it this way?

Well, we're not joined at the hip. We're each responsible for our own food choices and our own logging. When we both did WeightWatchers, I had a tendency to take over and log for both of us, which did nothing to help John pay attention to what he was eating. So when John decided to go back to WeightWatchers a few weeks ago, I had already moved on to myfitnesspal.com and I chose to carry on with that.

Here's how WeightWatchers and Myfitnesspal stack up against each other:

	WeightWatchers	Myfitnesspal.com
Cost	£19.99/month (as of Oct 2010)	Free, ad-supported.
Food database	UK based. Nutritionist verified Can add your own foods but these are not shared with other users.	Mix of US and UK foods. Some verified entries but most are user-shared. Many are duplicated, making it harder to choose correctly.
Tracking units	Units – WW’s proprietary system, not compatible with any other system.	Calories, fat grams etc. Compatible with the nutrition data on most foods and recipes. Sodium is counted in the US style (in mg not g) so you have to watch this when entering foods.
Tracking methods	Online Paper tracker No mobile application	Online Mobile apps (Android, iPhone)
Support	Leader Groups Online community Handbook Magazine (cost extra) Books (cost extra)	Online community, ability to write blogs. Links to Facebook and twitter so your friends away from myfitnesspal can support you.

How did we come to our different choices? For John, the dealbreaker with WeightWatchers is the support from the group. He said to me today: 'The group makes me feel less isolated. It gives a structure to my week.' He also said that most men he knows don't care about dieting so this is the one place where he can go to talk about dieting issues. And yes, there are a couple of men at the local WeightWatchers though as usual the groups are mostly women. You definitely don't get that kind of face to face support with a purely online system.

For me, the dealbreaker is easy and quick mobile tracking. WeightWatchers still does not provide any way of using their online tracker on a mobile device which is annoying since Weightwatchers charges fees and is also ad-supported, so they should be able to afford to offer this service. And the US Weight Watchers site has had mobile options for years. So I have tried various mobile programs over the years, and for now have settled on myfitnesspal. It's free as well, which is a major consideration. Almost £40 per month between us is just too much.

John is getting increasingly frustrated with not being able to update his food tracker on the go. He feels that firing up the laptop each time eats up hours as he's always tempted to keep surfing afterwards. But he'd hate to lose the support of the group so I think we'll be sticking with our different systems for the foreseeable. Lets see how we do.  

Tomorrow we're going to TGI Friday's for a friend's birthday. It's notoriously difficult to get healthy options there and they don't publish the calorie count of their dishes, so my next post will be a review of TGI's and a rundown of any nutrition info I manage to get out of them :-)

Deirdre's food diary for Saturday 23 October 2010

A slightly better day today:

Calories: 1548, Carbs: 172, Fat: 65, Protein: 58, Sugar: 43, Fiber 22

 

And how is John doing? Well he's doing WW and he tracked 42 WW points. His allowance is 40. I think that's great but he says he's a bit shocked as he thought he was well under his limit. See how the wrong foods sneak up on you? Happens to me every day. But I'm very glad he's tracking at all. Most days he doesn't and it doesn't take a genius to realise that's not going to work.

 

So, John is doing WW points and I'm doing calories. That does complicate losing weight as a couple. Tomorrow: Weight Watchers and why I'm not doing it.

Is it safe to eat...?

First - a quick update. We both had a bad result at weigh-in on Monday. I put on two pounds. Current weight 14 stone 2 pounds. J was very down before we even went in and almost decided to drive home and come and get me afterwards. But he stuck with it, stayed for the talk and has thrown himself into cooking and meal planning this week. Which brings me to... the freezer is full of frozen vegetables, some of which J regards with some suspicion. Packages of frozen mushrooms in particular. I've been expecting them to turn up at breakfast or in spag bol, but so far, they've stayed in the bottom drawer. So, I found this gem of a site which will hopefully convince him that they're safe:

http://www.stilltasty.com

So our poor mushrooms might not be as tasty as when they were first picked, but they should be pefectly safe. Except... they were wild mushrooms picked from the park outside our house, which also makes him suspicious. Time to get him to read this:



This was a staple in our house since my grandfather used to take us out looking for mushrooms and brambles back in the seventies. It might be an Italian-influenced thing - see this profile of Elish Angiolini (scroll down to see her list of interests!). I can particularly recommend the Collins Gem edition - it's pocket sized for taking on long walks. And you probably know the score - if you buy it from this link we get about 30p towards my Weight Watchers fees...

Wish us luck for Monday.

The 300 Days War (by J)

Between my birthday and the end of the year is exactly 300 days (or 298 days from now, to be exact). In that 300 days I want to lose six, maybe seven, stones in weight - averaging out at 2 pounds a week (which, by lucky coincidence, is the weight loss rate advocated by Weightwatchers). Of course, the problem is - achieving it.

I've been at Weightwatchers now for three weeks, and have learned the hard way that buying the products (ignoring the fact that some of them look suspiciously like scaled down Double Deckers) and flipping hopefully through the magazine at the post weigh-in meeting is not enough. Planning meals, learning to cook (something I managed to avoid back in the last century), choosing quality ingredients, and slowly turning away from the Old Ways of carry outs and Pringles on the couch, would seem to be a far better path. Although, of course, it has two big drawbacks - (1) some weeks it doesn't work, which can be soul-destroying, and (2) when it does work, it can make you smug. But on the whole, I'd rather be smug than morbidly obese.

I make no apology: if this weightloss works, I'm going to be crowing bigheadedly for years. But at least it'll only be above the neck that is big.