A lady at my weightwatchers meeting asked me what I ate for lunch? Personal question, I thought before remembering where I was. I’m one of the few vegetarians in the meeting and I have been losing weight. I misinformed the lady about the pate base; it is yeast, not soya. Here’s my weight loss so far:
Unsure how to run a spreadsheet in imperial measures, I converted it to kilos. In old money, which is what I actually use (along with everybody else), over the last 23 weeks I’ve gone from 16 stone and half a pound to 14 stone. Please note, this is with my clothes and shoes on. After all, I have to carry them around; they might as well be part of my weight.
You’ll notice a sudden drop in the 22nd week. That was the week I visited the shoemaker. Hard to explain why filming a shoemaker would have such a dramatic effect on my weight loss but there it is.
One thing I often each for lunch is Suma’s Organic Mushroom Pate, spread on a slice of bread. It’s filling, nutritous and tasty.
A lucky man can find treasure but an unlucky man can't even find a mushroom
There’s 200g in each tube. I’m generous with it. Maybe I get five slices out of it, maybe four. You’re meant to keep it in the fridge but that does make it tough to squeeze out of the tube. I’m not really strong enough. I keep thinking of patenting some device to squeeze it all out efficiently (or at all). I’m not sure that you need to keep it in the fridge; it is sealed in its tube. If you click on the picture above, you’ll see the condensation on it just after I pulled it out of the fridge. So what’s inside the tube?
Suma’s Organic Mushroom Pate contains water, yeast (14%), mushrooms (10%), sunflower oil, palm fat, potato flour, onions, dried onions, sea salt, yeast extract, paprika, cloves, nutmeg, thyme and garlic. One tube contains 1692kj/406kcal, 16.8g of protein, 21.2g of carbohydrate and 28.6g of fat.
Weightwatchers has this ludicrous system of measuring food by something they’ve branded called ProPoints. The idea of this system is to get you to really think about what you consume, orally. It’s geared to people who do not exercise as they have evolved to do. For example, yesterday I walked two and a half miles to get to B&Q to buy a lawn mower, which I returned with in a taxi. Wasn’t feeling too good yesterday but on another day I would have walked back with the lawn mower, which weighs 8kg. The taxi driver said he hadn’t walked that far in “thirty years”. The woman who runs the Patcham weightwatchers is very good at her job (can’t argue with the chart above) but whenever she suggests taking exercise, the meeting puts up fierce resistance. The problem being that most people seem unable to grasp how to incorporate exercise into their daily lives. For me the solution is obvious: walking. Walk wherever you can. It’s good for your health and its good for your soul. It’s what we’ve evolved to do. We’re walking creatures.
Weightwatchers has a website for its members who pay on a monthly basis. The website is not user friendly. The pop out for the food database does not respond to Firefox’s <ctrl><+> to make the text bigger. Nor is there a button on the page to increase the font size. In effect, the site is disability unfriendly. I’m not sure that there has been any litigation against websites which are unfriendly those with impaired sight but it is certainly bad practice to make it like this. Looking at the source code, the site is scripted in html, javascript and flash. The pop out is a flash pop out. Presumably this has been done because the weightwatchers company knows much about making money and very little about the procurement of IT services.
An entire tube of Suma’s Organic Mushroom Pate contains 11 weightwatchers ProPoints. Since this is a branded since and a money making machine, I expect weightwatchers will be in touch for me revealing this information. Bring it on. I’m not called Scrapper Duncan for nothing!
Suma do a number of different flavours of these pates. There’s spicy mexican, tomato, classic flavour, herb & garlic, herb, olive, roasted onion pink pepper and organic savoury herb. Those links go to Suma’s wholesale website.
Why do I attend weightwatchers and slag it off? Although I’m ignoring their ludicrous point counting system, being weighed by Dee at the Patcham weightwatchers meeting once a week gives me a focus which I wouldn’t otherwise have had. I tried to lose weight for ten years. Most of that time, I actually gained weight! After joining weightwatchers 23 weeks ago, I cut out drinking alcohol and eating cheese, butter, chocolate and crisps. Each of the weeks where my weight went up were weeks when I consumed those fattening products. I’ve begun to walk or cycle everywhere I can manage. This often means that I’m walking six or seven miles a day, which wasn’t very pleasant to start with but as the weight has come off, it has got easier.
Congratulations on the continued weight loss. I also like to walk at least a couple of miles each day – especially now my knee is improving. Given that my employers don’t value me enough to offer me a space in the staff car-park, and the roads around the office are impossible to find a space to park in, this is surprisingly easy to incorporate into my lifestyle. I simply, and by necessity, park about a mile from the office and walk in. In my case there hasn’t been a marked weight loss, but then again I’ve not given up beer and dairy products. Oddly enough though walking does help me to order my thoughts before I start work.
I was discussing with some friends the other night what the best speed is to appreciate or explore a landscape. They, like you I suspect, were advocates of the bicycle. Personally, I prefer to either walk or drive – I’ve not actually used a bicycle for years, but I recently read David Brett’s ‘A Book Around the Irish Sea’. This tome is, in part, a reflection on the history of the regions bordered by the Irish Sea written from a nautical rather than national perspective. The author appears to have been inspired to write the book whilst cycling around the Irish Sea and the book contains several passages about cycling into the wind and the rain. To be honest neither the travelogue or the history are that inspiring, although Brett’s idea of mixing the author’s biography with historical analysis is interesting. I’m not sure that I could write something that stylistically slips back and forth from the first to the third person.
Thanks for your encouragement Bob! Personally I believe that walking speed is best for observational prowess but cycling speed runs it a close second… and has many other advantages. I suspect there could be an argument for horse riding speed too, since we have been evolving with domesticated horses for a long time, but that is not mode of transport I have any experience of.