Tag: weight

The battle continues…

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The battle between the allied forces of my diet and my exercise, and my love of beer continues to rage on around my midriff. On the plus side, I’ve been exercising pretty regularly: just about every day to some degree.
Sadly, the high temperatures and my lack of will power has led to some erosion of the benefits of that exercise, in that I have enjoyed some (or more) beers next to the pool, with dinner or – in one particular case – next to the pool with dinner over the last week or so.

It could be worse. I could be drinking and not exercising. Or, if you choose to look at it another way, exercising and not drinking. And so while I’m not necessarily getting all that I could be from my runs or gym visits, I’m happy enough. Everything in moderation. Including, it would seem, progress on my fitness.

But there is progress. A few centimetres here, a couple of kilos there. I’m getting there (slowly). And the great news is that the bits that were the most hurty before Christmas are not the bits that are (temporarily) hurting after my exertions.

This morning’s 5km was my fastest of the year: indeed, looking back, (surprisingly) my fastest since 1st September last year. Evidently, things are on the mend.

Even if I won’t be able to stand up once I finish writing this post.

Ja. I’m a bit stuck. Could someone get me a beer, please?

Hello? Anyone?

Updweight

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That title was supposed to be a combination of ‘update’ and ‘weight’. I’m not sure it worked. Sorry about that.

We’re back in Cape Town and back with the bathroom scales that I have used to record my mass over recent times. There’s no point (in my humble scientific opinion) of using different sets of scales to weigh oneself, since unless they are regularly serviced and calibrated, bathroom scales are notoriously unreliable and will only (eventually) upset you. So sure, it’s not perfect to be using the ones upstairs Chez 6000, but at least the error in my weight is hopefully somewhat consistent.

I’m delaying the inevitable here though. The upshot is that I seem to have gained 1.7kg over the festive period. To be honest, it seems to me (if you’ll pardon the pun) that I’ve got away lightly. There was an awful lot of beer, chocolate, fish and chips and brandy all happily put away. And then there was everything after breakfast too. All for 1.8kg. Add to that the fact that – although I have kept up some modicum of activity with my steps (10000 or more each day since I was sick in November) – I haven’t been near a gym for at least a couple of weeks.

Oops. Looks like we need to make that 3 weeks.

Look, there’s still time to go before the finishing line, what with the kids off school for another 6 days, sushi tonight (that’s last night if you’re reading this today) and at least two days of extreme laziness coming up in (or near) Robertson in the intervening period. But considering what has gone before over the last month or so, I’ll very readily settle for sitting about 2kg heavier (by my bathroom scales) than before all this madness started.

Give me a fortnight to get back to where I was and then we go again. (He said, over-confidently.)

Best Currency Converter

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There are a lot of online currency converters and most of them are wholly depressing if you live in South Africa and you’re paid in Rands. Fortunately, this one that I’ve found doesn’t convert one appallingly weak currency to another, much stronger, currency and make you cry. It converts Pounds to size – and weight. Hugely useful for drug dealers. I chucked in £100 (about 3g of Charlie in London) in £1 coins to see how it got on:

100gbp

It’s a spin-off of a German Euro-calculating site, so please excuse ze langvich, and also the assumption that you have a handbag, ja?

From there, it was time to knock up the value to One Bar and have a look at £50 notes and 1p coins (the Samsung method of payment of choice).

It turns out that £1,000,000 in £50 notes would be 2.66m high and weigh 24.2kg. Surprisingly little, I thought, and thus I was concerned by their suggestion that:

With 2 strong men, this weight still can be transported well.

That’s 12.1kg for each strong man. TWELVE POINT ONE. HOWEVER WILL THEY MANAGE???!!!!?!?!?!?
What’s going on here? Is there a problem with the general musculature of German men? Can anyone please explain?

We move on. A million squids in penny coins. Let’s do this…

£1,000,000 in 1p coins would weigh a massive 365 tonnes (“For transportation, you should already have a fleet of trucks” – fair enough this time) and a single stack of coins would stretch 165km into the sky. I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and I reckon that a tower of penny coins worth £3 million would endanger the International Space Station. Golly.

We need someone to do this (make a calculator, not endanger the ISS) for South African currency. I can’t imagine that it would be very difficult for someone with even a basic knowledge of coding.

Get to it, readers.