So last week I:
- Cycled 99.1 miles,
- Ran 6 miles,
- Ate about 50% of my normal snacks, and
- Gained 2 pounds.
I’m not particularly obsessed by my weight, and never have been – in fact that may be part of the problem. At some point since we’ve moved up here I have managed, quite without noticing it, to put on a whole stone. Or a stone-type unit – we bought our scales extremely cheaply and they’re pretty inaccurate*. And I’m not overweight either, not yet, but I will be if things carry on the way they’ve been. I’m not sure when the damage was done, probably last winter. I was hoping that my increasingly rounded silhouette was down to all the layering, and it’s only now that I’ve fully delayered that the awful truth is revealed. The final proof has been when I dug out my summer trousers and tried them on, because the trousers do not lie. In fact, with one pair of particularly cruel ones, the trousers don’t comfortably sit, either.
There’s no real mystery to this – the problem is having a car. Back when we were living in London, every calorie that entered the house had to be carried back half a mile from the supermarket on foot, along with everything else. When it comes to losing weight, for all the cute mottoes about bikes running on fat etc., cycling doesn’t really replace the amount of tromping about you do all day and every day when you don’t have a car. Back then, all I had to do was cut out the odd snack and any surplus pounds just dropped away. Now, it looks like I’m in for the longer haul.
It gets worse, too. Both pairs of cords – the only trousers which were still roomy enough to allow for easy pedalling – have been cycled to death: they have both worn through on exactly the same place in the rear, a place which renders them indecent even for gardening in. This means one thing and one thing only – I have to go trouser shopping. Cue a bout of self-and-retailer-loathing coming soon to a blog near you.
* I base this assumption on the number of visitors who have wanted to take them home with them. It’s always quite revealing who likes to weigh themselves…
The Laws of Nature dictate that when your winter cords disintegrate, your summer pants are always too small.
Conversely, when you acquire larger trousers, they become much too large shortly thereafter.
Or so my experience would indicate…
My trousers have never become too large in all my time on this earth. I’m still trying, though.
Well, it’s distinctly annoying when, after going to all the work of trouser shopping, you find you’ve shrunk and must now endure the entire humiliating process over again.
Consider yourself lucky.
I suppose you can hang onto them until the next time the snacks get too much for you?
Buying new trousers would be a small price to pay if they did subsequently get too large…
Ugh. I know what you mean. I have a husband who is like a streak of rain and when he gets any excess, it falls off the minute he starts thinking about it. I on the other hand seem to eat less, exercise more and weigh more. Dull dull dull. Better luck next week.
I refuse to buy larger trousers (I’m find with new trousers, but they need to be the same size), however, bloody mindedness isn’t working. Even the eating sensibly and going to the gym thing didn’t work (gained a lb in a week doing that) so I’m about to move to the ‘All salad and much misery compounded with 2 hour-and-a-half long sessions killing myself at the gym every week’ diet. I need to shed 2 stone and loose my rather large middle before the wedding
Dom – I suspect that with men’s trousers they don’t keep moving the goal posts by changing the shape every year.
Amaranthine – it’s a conspiracy. Although the other half is also suffering from the increased gravity we have up here, so at least it’s not just me
No – the trousers do stay roughly the same shape, the only problem being that they’re not all the same size which really annoys me. If I have a trouser in a size 34 that fits me I want to be able to walk into a shop and pick up 4 pairs, all size 34, and buy them without faffing, but no, depending on where they were in the big pile of fabric when they were cut by the big press they can vary in size from fitting very nicely to being too tight to actually wear meaning I need to try on all 4 pairs.
I think its true about putting weight on because you have to drive everywhere, given the huge distances involved just to get to the supermarket. However, my theory, based on 50 years in Liverpool and 3 years in Argyll is this: that when your body acclimatises to the year-round bone chilling cold of the old scottish farmhouse you automatically hold onto a protective layer of blubber to keep you warm.
too true!
Dig more garden!
just makes me hungry