Diet Stuff (1): My Numbers

At the moment I weigh just over 90 kgs (198 lbs), down, thanks to a bout of food poisoning, from what had been a stable 92 kgs. That's not a viable long-term weight-loss regime, though it got me to 89.5 kgs, or just over 14 stone. (Being English, I still think in terms of Stones.) At university I was about 11 stone (69 kgs, 154 lbs). When I started weight-training, I was around 13 stone (82 kgs, 182 lbs). My new-scale BMI comes out at 26.8, but every doctor in the world takes one look at me and tells me to ignore it. I'm clearly not a Fat Bastard, I am clearly a Big Fit Man. To be BMI-friendly, I would need to be back at 82 kgs again. That's an 8 kgs (17 lbs) loss. My body-fat is around 23% - don't you dare say a word - and it always has been. On a really good day I can get down to 21%. Let's say I lost all those 8 kgs in fat. That would put my body fat around 15%. According to some calculator at my age, 15% is "lean" and 23% is "ideal". At 15% I would look like a freaking Greek God. Seriously. So how about losing more of the weight in body fat than muscle? When I very first started at the gym, and held on to a vicious 1,500 calorie / day diet, I got down to about 85 kgs and 20.5% body fat, but that was unsustainable.

According to this calculator I need 2,400 calories a day to "maintain" my weight. 1,500 would be "extreme" fat loss, and 1,900 would be "regular fat loss". 

Know what the difference between 1,500 and 1,900 calories is? Or between 1,900 and 2,400 calories? It's a 120g bar of chocolate, or six digestive biscuits, or a Pret smoked salmon sandwich, your five-a-day fruit choice, a Krispy Kreme donut... You get the picture. One slip and you've blown your diet for the day. My carrot/parsnip/beans/onion and tomato stew is about 300 calories (I use larger vegetables). A Pret Tuna sandwhich is 550 calories. Two eggs and ham for breakfast, with a small fruit smoothie, is about 500 calories.

The idea anyone can lose weight by cutting out a couple of biscuits a day is simply silly. Mainly because while they might be able to control their food intake, they can't decree the day-to-day calorie burn their body decides it's going to do. Your body does not burn a constant amount every day. You can't find a measure of the variation, so I'm allowed as a first approximation to assume a 10% coefficient of variation on a Normal distribution. In other words, to be 95% sure I am always eating less than my body is burning, I need to be eating 80% (two standard deviations) of 2,400, or 1,920 calories a day. I know you're going to point out that a 1,920 calorie day should be balanced by a 2,400 calorie day, but we both know it doesn't work like that. You're slower more days than you're quicker. The distribution isn't really Normal - it's skewed over to the slower side. So if I really want to cut down the weight at a speed that gets you results this side of next year, it's 1,500 calories a day for me. 

The standard calculation is that a kilo of fat is 7,700 calories (3,500 calories / lb x2.2 lbs / kg). With a "maintain" of 2,400 and an actual of 1,500, that's 1kg every nine days. That's 72 days, or eleven weeks. Isn't that do-able with a bit of will-power? Three months at 1,500 calories a day? Yeah. Sure. 

Damn good thing it doesn't work like that.

February Review

February started with a Thai massage at Thai Charms in Teddington, which I have about every five-six weeks and stops me having problems with my back, no matter how slack my posture is at work. I got a new pair of trainers at Sweat Shop in Teddington, after they used all sorts of gadgets to examine the shape of my arches and the way I hit the ground when running. So now my knees don't hurt after a gentle 2km jog with gradients on the treadmill. I had the fireplaces out a few years ago, and left, for reasons that made sense at the time, an MDF patch in the back room. The reasons had stopped making sense a while back, so I got the Mark from Evolution Sanding round to make my floor look piney and shiny and new. My back room is now sharp. I put some shoes in for a re-build at Crockett and Jones, and got the car MOT'ed. I saw Playing Cards: Spades at the Camden Roundhouse one Friday evening. Fabulous sets, good acting, cliched script, no real stories. What the hell is it about English theatres that they only put on bad writers? Sis and I had our monthly supper at the Savoy Grill. Good food, but not great food, and an excellent setting. Why can't I just live at the Savoy all the time? The month ended with a farewell supper at the Hoxton Grill for one of the team who is moving on to another product area in The Bank. Oh, and British Gas actually showed up to do the service call on the boiler. I saw Shiro: Dreams of Sushi at the ICA, NO and Cloud Atlas at the Curzon Soho, and Die Hard 19 at the local cinema. I have made some serious progress with reading Musil, but it's tough going.

Now for the flip side. It was cold, cold, cold. It was freezing walking from the Savoy to Waterloo station. I gave up going out in the week and just scuttled straight back home every evening. And I have so far had three massage sessions with the wonderful Peta at Sports Massage Zone to get my frakked-up arms sorted out. I've had what gets called "tennis elbow" for a while and it didn't go away, so I had to get treatment. I could not push weights of any magnitude without my elbows shouting "stop that now" at me. It is better, but I may need some osteo to get the bones back in their rightful place.

I bought a blender, nice heavy glass, and am having a home-made smoothie (banana, kiwi / orange / apple, milk) each morning. I make two glasses worth every two days in the evening and keep them in the fridge. It does add a kick to the start of my day.

I have also been playing this song a lot.

Okay, it's Tegan and Sara and that's girly. Get over it. The song is about someone who has taken a hard emotional shock and actually doesn't know how they feel anymore. And the girls are explaining it to them: "what you are is lonely / what you are..." And that's what I am. Lonely. It's just that the hormones are low enough that I don't really feel the pain, and, of course, I know about the bad stuff I'm missing, so I'm prepared to take the trade-off. This is the first time I've thought of my situation like that. (No, I do not want to "share my/your life". If you knew what that phrase was code for, you wouldn't either.)

London In The Snow

We get extreme weather in the UK, but not enough of it to justify air conditioning for the hot days and snow clearing gear for when it snows. As a result, when it snows, everyone has a day when it takes them three hours to get to work. These photographs were taken on the Sunday before that Monday. I just love it when the guard tells us that the driver is "going to reboot the train". Ctrl-Alt-Del and we're on our way again? It could only be England.

January 2013 Review

Eight per cent of the year over already. I finished January with a nasty bout of food poisoning that started the evening of Saturday 26th and had me on a telephone consultation with my GP late Monday morning after a visit to the Teddington Walk-In Centre. If you have never had food poisoning, you have no idea what I went through: if you have, you do. It leaves you weak, distrusting food, dehydrated and wondering if all of your life has been a vain effort at nothing. I cancelled a massage I had booked that Monday evening, got hit with a cancellation charge, told them to keep the appointment open and made it. I found out which muscles in my right arm were tense so that my right elbow was hurting, and that there was some knotted stuff in my left shoulder that made it a little unstable when bench-pressing. Not sure that the guy did much to fix it though. A couple of mornings later I woke up and my arm was tense and sore, which it hadn't been the previous night: aha! I'm clenching my fist in my sleep. I am going to be taping up my right hand lightly each night for a while to discourage it from clenching. 

I bought three new pairs of flat-front wool trousers and four blue shirts for work, all from T M Lewin, and it's a much cleaner look. The trousers are 37" waist, two inches thinner than the previous pairs I bought about three years ago. I got a decent haircut at Huckle The Barber to go with all that as well.

I shifted my eating habits: I have a sandwich at 11:00, take a lunch break at 13:00 when I buy another sandwich, but I don't eat it until 15:00. I don't feel as dopey in the early afternoon. Instead of sitting in a cafe, and despite the fact that it's been freaking cold, I've been taking some walks: it's really not that far down to the Thames and back and it makes me feel like I'm in the real world for a while.

I've talked about the preview visit to The Shard, with lunch at Mildred's in Soho afterwards, and let's add in Django Unchained, McCullin, Looper and Gangster Squad as well. Sis and I had our monthly supper at Skylon, and I had a month-end lunch at St John Bread and Wine, and I'm sure it wasn't the deep-fried rabbit that did the harm. Maybe the test results will show. 

I'm stuck on the Ezra Pound's final Cantos: the Pisan and later are nowhere near as comprehensible as the earlier ones. All that polyglot stuff is just showing off - like people who quote "from the original". As soon as those are done, I'm moving on to Musil to get one of my objectives started.

Training has been iffy because of the arms, and delayed by the food poisoning: you do not lift weights when de-hydrated. 

In summary, I have been experimenting with my daily routine until I can get more zip back, and I have done some stuff "just because".  The CV and agent mailing is pretty much drafted. I'm clearer on the terms I want to go back into dating and whatever else. I'm still not sure about the logistics, but I did give myself the first three months to sort this stuff out. 

And everything you have read about the benefits of magnesium oil rubbed on your skin (aka "topical magnesium") is true. Works for me. Not sure what 200mg is, but I put three spritzes on each leg and rub in. Leg because there's less between the skin and the bloodstream: don't want to be running it in on fat. Sleeping better and feeling... calmer, more whole.

Views From The Shard: Part Two

The owners were having trade-related folk through to debug the whole process and get the staff used to the procedures. The Shard is the only super-tall office building, along with the Heron Tower with an observation floor in London - you can't go up One Canada Square, and the Heron Tower and Tower 42 aren't quite in the same league. The lifts whizz up in two stages and the final ascent is made by stairs. You can go out into the open air, as you could on the World Trades, but I found it all a bit too exciting when I tried - I've had my feet on the ground for too long and I'm not good with heights any more. People were playing "Spot the landmark" and "I can see my flat from here", and on a clear day I'm fairly sure I could see Hilltop House. Not that Saturday, as it was all a little misty as well as being very cold and windy. We stayed up there over an hour and barely noticed the time passing.

Views From The Shard: Part One

My sister works in the designing-your-expensive-Head-Office business, and can gaze across London from her office windows, point at various landmark buildings and say "we did floors in that one, that one, that one..." - which is a pretty neat connection to have with one of the greatest cities in the world. The firm isn't in The Shard yet, no-one is, as the landlords are playing it very close for fear of having salesmen camping outside their doors. Everyone wants to be The First In The Shard.

Being in the trade, Sis got hold of the chance to buy two preview tickets (yea! In before Boris!) the other weekend and so off we went. I even took the 1100D along and at times it shows. If you get the chance or the notion... go, but book in advance.

As ever, click on the photographs to see the originals which have way more detail. I'll say a bit more about the visit in the next post.

Evo-Psycho vs Economics As Explanation: Part Two

Misandrist feminism was a free-rider in all this. It was Capital and State that needed women in the workforce in the 1970's and modified the laws accordingly. Militant feminism never was effective: women over thirty got the vote in 1918 because their actions in the 1914-18 War made the rhetoric that denied them the vote embarrassing. They didn't get it because Emily Davison stepped in front of a horse at the Epsom Derby. But militant feminism makes great press. There has always been a shrewish strain in the female population, and now it was being paid: the shrews grabbed the stand-up mic, the documentary and the pop-sociology book. What no-one knew was that under the cover of pop-culture, misandrist feminists would execute entrist tactics into the "women's issues" industry and embed sexist misandry into family law, social work, child protection and in some companies, HR policy.

At the same time, the value and number of full-salary jobs was declining. The price of family-sized houses was going up, pushing the cost of a traditional life up, and the opportunities for starting one at a sensible age were getting smaller. Even if the boys wanted to be traditional men, many of them could not afford it, and even if they could, there wasn't always a girl who wanted to be a traditional woman available at the right time. In the meantime, why not party a while longer? Or go for the promotion? With fewer people saving for capital outlays in the near future, there was more disposable income for partying, holidays and toys. The dark secret that office work was a damn sight easier than running a home and raising a child was out in the light by the mid-1980's. Wife or career-girl? Gee, that's a tough call. By the late 1990's any attempt to tell girls that a sensible aim on leaving education was not a career but a husband would have been answered by a swift economic explanation involving salaries, house prices, inflation and the difficulty a young man has of ever earning enough to support a wife and family in the traditional way.

I'm not suggesting that the fact you can't get laid except by flakey, slightly overweight entitlement princesses is one giant conspiracy between Barclays Bank, Tesco and Camden Social Services. Those guys are quick-response reactionaries, not revolutionaries. I am suggesting that most of the changes in the behaviour of women can be explained by reactions to economic change, to fit in with what was presented in the pop-culture as the prevailing, or perhaps cutting-edge, mores, and to react rationally to what they saw in their own families. I'll go with this kind of explanation any time. It's messy, and that's one of its advantages. It doesn't immediately suggest a way to Make Everything Right Again, which is always suspicious in a supposedly descriptive theory. 

This is the future for the Anglosphere. Nothing has changed, it's just got honest. This is how women always wanted to behave. Turns out they are every bit the same bunch of thoughtless, selfish, mixed-strength assholes than men always were. And that's what disappoints the guys in the Manosphere, who for some reason thought they could expect something rather better. Because they believed the hype. Which is where the Red Pill / Blue Pill thing comes from.

So what's an honest, decent man to do? He stays single, unless he meets That Special Woman^TM. Since that is by definition unlikely (I couldn't even tell you what I would look for), and since he's not dead yet, he will want to get laid, so he needs some kind of Game. Whatever works for him. And contraceptives. He will work out, read, travel and have creative pastimes. He will understand that everything the girls say and do is intended to advance their class and personal interests, and therefore anything they say can be dismissed as a kind of propaganda. He won't bother with pop-culture opinion columnists, whom he knows make careers on fake controversy. He will aim to learn about and appreciate the Real Thing, and leave the latest entertainment industry sensation to the girls and children.

He will also understand that, no matter how the girl he is trying to Game appears to him, she is, in her eyes, an honest decent girl trying to answer the same question. She too will stay single, unless she meets That Special Man^TM. Since that is by definition unlikely, and since she's not dead yet, she wants to get laid, have someone to take her out and pay her attention, so she needs some kind of Game. Too many girls think that their Game consists of showing up. It doesn't. But that's another story.

Sometimes neither have any success. The guy will shrug his shoulders and split, muttering something about how awful girls are. The girl will  split and mutter something about how awful men are. He will blog about it, she will Facebook it. Somewhere in the back of their minds will be the thought "at least I'm not stuck with a child and someone I don't actually care much about, like my parents were". 

And because they can't afford their own place, they will have flat- or house-mates waiting to chat to them and share a late-night vodka. Their parents had their own places, and were lonely.