Out of the way

I'm not really into any serious diet, and I have no organised exercise regime. I hate going to the gym so haven't done it for a decade, I dislike running and have been running once in five years, I don't have a bicycle at home, and I am not involved in any organised sport.

So my way to maintain a reaonable weight and fitness is to be reasonable about it. I am not, by comparison with my peers, fat. But I am not skinny, and certainly not muscle-bound and rippling like a Chippendale. Which is fine by me.

However I would like to be reasonably fit, and reasonably thin. I was pleased a while ago when I attended a conference, and I could wear my old suit - not because it is especially nice (although I happen to like it ) but because for the last couple of years I couldn't quite do up the trousers.

For that time I have been weighing almost 105kg. Weight is a terrible indicator really. My "ideal" weight (as decided by me) is about 95kg - just exactly enough to have a Body Mass Index of 25.0, which is described as "overweight". Actually, it is almost 5 years since I weighed so little.

Earlier this year I managed to creep up to about 107, and I thought maybe I should be a little more thoughtful about how much I need to eat. And then in August I was in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan). One of the things i did was go swimming, in the Olympic swimming centre in Tashkent. It's a very nice pool - but the fact that swimming 600m more or less knocked me out was a bit of a shock.

So I haven't taken to the treadmill, I'm not on a diet, I didn't even join the tennis club. I did eat or drink something in Uzbekistan that didn't agree with me, and a week of checking exactly where the nearest toilet was and making sure I had some spare toilet paper in my bag meant I lost a couple of kilos. I have needed a new hole in my belt since I came back, weighing around 102. I managed to maintain that through a week in the US (often a place where I add a kg or two), and through a month or so, without really thinking about it too much.

And after a week in Paris, where naturally I ate things I liked (and liked the sound of), I wondered what I would weigh this morning...

The scales said 100.0 kg, and for the first time in some years they were hesitating between that and a number that was under a hundred.

Tonight I will be trapped, travelling to South Africa, so mostly eating airline food. But maybe tomorrow I will find myself somewhere to have a nice dinner