October 2014 – Rory Parle

October 27, 2014

Sober October

I’m taking part in Sober October. This is a fund-raising campaign for Macmillan Cancer Support, which does something worthwhile related to cancer. Curing it probably. Or helping people who have it. Something like that. The idea of the campaign is that you don’t consume alcohol during the month of October, Macmillan’s social media marketing people send you frequent emails implying that skipping the sauce for a few weeks is dreadfully challenging, and then people give money to Macmillan.

Except in my way of doing this, I’m not especially bothered about nagging my friends for charity money. I assume most of my friends already give to the charities they choose to support, and many will have good reason not to give any more in response to ad hoc requests. Some may not have the extra income. Others are part of gift matching programs that make it more effective to make their donations in a smaller number of larger sums. So I’m not asking for donations, but if you want to donate, you can do so on my profile page.

What I am doing is keeping track of the amount of money I save by not buying alcohol and donating that amount myself.

The bulk of the savings so far have been from a weekend trip to Vienna, where I would have spent quite a lot on wine with dinner on several nights.

My total saving for the month wasn’t as much as it might have been, because for reasons unrelated to Sober October I missed out on two stag parties this month. One was the same weekend as the Vienna trip. The other was the same weekend we moved. The second party completed the London Monopoly pub crawl. I would have loved to be there to witness and participate in such a momentous feat — even not drinking — but it wasn’t to be. I’ve decided to throw a bit more money in for both of these parties anyway.

I was at a Halloween party this weekend, which meant another few beers traded for soft drinks (and made for a pretty smug Rory on Sunday morning). I have an evening of birthday drinks for a friend coming up on the 31st. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m rather hoping for the birthday drinks to last until the stroke of midnight so this beautiful sober stagecoach can turn back into a tipsy pumpkin.

And no, I’m not planning on taking part in Movember.

October 23, 2014

And now we play the weighting game

Over the last few years I’ve made occasional efforts to lose some of my extra weight. A few days or weeks eating slightly less and feeling guilty about the food I did eat. Brief flirtations with activity or calorie tracking apps that always felt lacking. A surprising stream of new and imaginative reasons why “this one doesn’t count”.

Weigh is not a topic that comes up frequently in conversation, at least in my circles, but it raises its head just enough that I know that people are thinking about it even when they’re not talking about it. I think maybe we could do with talking about it.

Even at my worst I don’t think I ever really considered that I was any more overweight or out of shape than “normal”, which I would have defined as a pretty wide range. There’s always someone else nearby I can point at (not literally) and say, “I’m not fat. That person is fat.” As if a decade or two down the line I’d be diagnosed with diabetes or heart disease and wriggle out of it by pointing at someone else and pleading, “What about him?”

Bubble football

In fact several times over the last few years, including as recently as this July, I edged over 90 kg (about 200 lbs). At only 174 cm (5′ 8″) that weight put me into the category of obese. I had more than 30% body fat. I was technically too heavy to safely play bubble football (not that it stopped me).

After that weigh-in on July 21st I decided it would be the last time I weighed more than 90 kg. It wasn’t my first time making such a resolution, but I think it will be the last.

I set out first to find out what my goal weight should be, and then to reach it. Body mass index (BMI) is an imperfect tool for many reasons, but for most people it’s a reasonable guideline for ideal weight. It’s recommended that you aim for a BMI between 18.5 and 25, which for me at 174 cm means a goal weight of 66 kg ± 10 kg. That took me by surprise. Having lumbered around with the delusion that I was “a little on the heavy side of normal”, it was striking to learn that I was really 14 kg heavier than the top end of the normal weight range.

Three months later I’m happy to report that I’m now more than 10 kg closer to my goal, and I haven’t slowed down. Looking at myself today I realise two things: that the first 10 kg already makes a really big difference to how I look and feel; and that it’s much easier to see now that I actually do have another 5 – 10 kg to go. That surprising number I worked out back in July wasn’t a mistake. There are just more ways to hide extra fat on a human body than I thought.

If I keep up my current rate — and I’ve been pretty consistent up until now — I could be in the recommended healthy weight range by the beginning of next year. With Christmas in between it might be more reasonable to expect it will take a couple of weeks longer. But it doesn’t really matter all that much how long it takes. What matters is how long it lasts.

October 20, 2014

The times they are a-changin’

It’s a strange thing, moving house. It’s always much more work than you think it’s going to be, even if you take into account that it’s going to be more work than you think it’s going to be. Taking your possessions out of one home to put them in another is like trying to move all the toothpaste from one tube to another. It doesn’t really help all that much that the second tube is a little bit bigger.

This move had an additional wrinkle. We negotiated quite a bit on the rent, and part of the deal was that we accepted the flat unfurnished. We’re likely to buy our own place at some point and now seemed like as good a time as any time to start aquiring some of our own furniture. The day after moving, we spent a few hours in IKEA collecting four large trolleys full of flat-pack furniture. We’ve spent much of the week since then slowly constructing it.

It’s an interesting game of constraints to try to clear enough room to build a storage unit that will house enough of our stuff that we can clear enough room to build… and so on. It’s like one of those sliding picture puzzles in which only one space is ever free to move into. We’re more than half way through the furniture building phase, though the second bedroom looks like an Amazon fulfilment center. We have top men working on unpacking them.

I bet these cubes aren't nearly as heavy as this box of books. — I bet these cubes aren’t nearly as heavy as this box of books.

We haven’t moved far. But as with any major city you don’t need to move far in London to make a significant difference. We’re now on a quiet street off a quiet street, where we were previously on a busy main road that’s used by two bus routes and apparently most of the ambulance service and the Metropolitan Police.

We’re still a very reasonable walking distance from the old flat and all the places we love near it. But we’re also that much closer to some new places: an independent bookshop, one of our favourite cinemas, even a grocery store with an Irish food section for when I’m homesick and craving a rock shandy.

It’s only been a week, and there’s plenty to do before I’ll say we’re properly settled here, but we’re getting there. I no longer get that uncomfortable trespassing feeling when I let myself in after a day at work. The cardboard is receding. And we’ve moved on finally from an inflatable airbed, then briefly a futon, to a proper grown-up king size bed.

I’m looking forward to our time in this new home. Curling up on the giant sofa watching Christmas movies. Seeing the leaves come back to the trees outside the bedroom windows in Spring. Trying to figure out how to turn the heating off in July. I foresee good times ahead.

Now where did I pack the coffee grinder?