Diet

With all the spending cuts stuff I haven't written about myself lately. I'm going through a period of relative calm and stability and taking the opportunity to go on a diet. My weight has crept up due to reduced capacity for exercise (fibromyalgia affects my legs now as well as my upper body), over eating due to depression, and a while back a couple of months on the drug tegratol (which made me ravenously hungry all the time). I reached 99kg with a body-mass index (BMI) of 32. The official cut off for obesity is a BMI of 30. I'd become part of the obesity epidemic. It was a bit embarrassing and depressing.

So I've cut down drastically on what I eat, restricting fats and simple carbs, focussing on fresh fruit and veg, and trying to get out for a walk every day (though I've also started a Tai Chi class). I've been losing on average a little over 1kg (about 2.5 lbs in old money) a week for the last 5 weeks. My BMI is now just 30.02 and next week I'll only be fat and not obese!

I plan to keep on losing about 1kg a week until Christmas to get down to something approaching my ideal weight.

I have a new appreciation for how hard it is to diet. I sympathise with those people who continually fail. It takes a lot of positivity, determination, and perseverance - and until recently I certainly did not have what it took. Some positive things have happened to help create the necessary conditions. I don't think the advice on losing weight pays enough attention to setting up the right conditions, to the environment in which obese people live. Resisting craving takes a lot more than simply will power, especially when the habit is to give in to it.

One of my favourite Buddhist writers emphasises the problem of thinking that pleasure is happiness; or that maximising pleasure and minimising pain, maximises happiness. Actually as many chronically ill people will tell you it is possible to have a lot of pain and still be happy. Equally it is clear that people who pursue pleasure most vigorously seldom seem genuinely happy. My trouble is partly that I eat for pleasure, or because I feel emotional pain. Eating for reasons other than to sate hunger mean that eventually you get fat, like me. But you can't just give up an strategy for dealing with emotional discomfort, and food is actually quite effective for this, and expect there to be no reaction, no increase in discomfort. I could say a lot more about this, and perhaps I will, but that's enough for now.