Dirty Burger

Was stuck at the station for a while the other night. Ithought "I know, I've not had a meal from burger king for a while, I'll buy a burger." I had thought that I didn't eat them because of the moral cost, badly raised meat looked after by badly paid people but after eating the burger I realise it is something else. They are bloody horrid. The bun was dry, the burger was like a piece of cork board burger, big chunks of onion and cold tasteless chips. Nasty.

Smiling

£115.43 pounds just donated from about 3 months resisting. Seeing the amount on the just giving web page made me smile. Can you see why I don't do it often now. I look like a maniac.

Our "privaledge" might not just be about geography

I was thinking today after starting to read a book called "Blueprint For Survival" (I love my laugh a minute books me) how the privileges we have in terms of enough food on the table and choice in the shops may be a privilege of our time as well as where we are lucky enough to be born. It is widely acknowledged that this haze of resources we are currently swimming in can't last forever. Whatever you think about the other risks like global warming and societal cracks its common sense that in a closed system like earth there are only so many non renewable or slow renewable things on it. So many experts are now saying that we are living on future generations stuff,oil, natural gases, Iron, water, you name it it is anticipated that the way we are going stocks will be depleted in the very near future. But there is hope to be gleamed from humans nature and history. We don't have fast legs to run, venom to stun, big pointy teeth to tear. What we do have are big brains, skilful hands and the ability to adapt. Should we choose to adapt it could be that, as George Marshal states in his book "Carbon Detox" we come to a life, different, possibly more intensive but in lots of ways more rewarding. Try to remember the last time you took a walk. Before you set off you may have sat in front of the tele/computer/xbox etc etc etc, a bit cold even though the heating was on or you were encamped under a blanket thinking "I can't be bothered going for a walk". But then you did. And in your wonderfully low carbon, un-resource depleting activity maybe you found warmth, joy, fun, mud, sunshine, rain, adventure, reward etc etc etc. Or the last time you went to a party and in getting together only had one set of heating on or maybe just the body heat of other people and bad dancing to keep you warm. This idea that a low carbon, low resource future might not be about giving up explains why the Privilege in the title of this blog is in speech marks, because maybe its not privilege having too much food and a tele in every home, maybe there are also some things we have lost in our clamour to get more, consume more and take part in this process, which the system tells us will make "us" more.
If I consider the food I eat in this respect maybe there is more reward if I make sure that I try to work for it. This could be growing some myself, a real effort for me because I'm not a natural gardener, maybe making a journey on foot or bike to a further away shop. I will have to ponder on this one and any thoughts from you the reader would be gratefully received. Add a comment below.

Money

I have just totted up the money saved so far and it stands at £115.43p. Not sure where the 43p came from but I am sure that I need to get rid of it to a charity as soon as possible before either 1)I am too skint to afford to send it or 2)I begin to think about what I could spend the money on 3) My son goes on about our financial situation more and I get scared and squirrel it away.

Taken from "Small is Beautiful" by EF Schumacher

"I sit on a mans back, choking him,and making him carry me, and yet assure myself that I am sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back." Leo Tolstoy

Methods to measure body fat

Over the next few days I will be wondering about some of these alternative ways to measure weight loss.
**Body fat percentage using a tape measure, "Rope and Choke"
**Calipers, Skin fold method
**Bioelectric Impedance Analysis (BIA)

Also wondering if there are historical methods of measuring fat. Maybe not.
11-2-10
Today I measured myself according to the Rope and Choke method. The name was given to it by members of the army who used it as a way of measuring people. Of course I documented it. I am fairly objective about my body, I don't hate it all but the one major spot I dislike is my belly. Its all very well for the man on Shirley Valentine to say that stretch marks are a sign of your life but I can't really grow to love them. But, I want to be as truthful as possible in this project. Including my vanities my petty insecurities, the moments when I am selfish and don't see a big belly as a sign of luck and choice. I have posted the pictures below un-doctored. I wanted to make them more arty, maybe black and white, do a bit of airbrushing. I feel that by showing myself in all my unflattering glory I can start to balance out my use of pictures of anonymous starving people a little. To Show my fat bits shows the other side of the grizzly coin.

Gone all High Brow

It had to happen at some point. Here comes the theory.

Am reading "Small is Beautiful-Economics as if people mattered" by Eric Shumacher. He was talking about Divergent and Convergent problems. Convergent being easy to come to solutions about, write down and sell to others and divergent "Which have to be lived and are solved by death" and allow contradicting thoughts to exist in the same place. Divergent thoughts keep life going forcing us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves whilst convergant thinking leads us away from life. I was thinking about the Starvation Diet Project in relation to this and it seems to smack of the Divergent. The two clauses I hold in my head are the "Want to Loose weight, want to look better, want to care for myself." the second is the "Want to redress the balance between having too much and having too little in the world, want to make the place a bit fairer, better, stronger" . They are not mutually exclusive but often they have seemed that way. When I focus on how I have or have not lost weight I become introspective and this leads me to take actions to swing back the other way, looking for pictures of starvation reality, seeking out the right charity etc. the challenge is to hold both thoughts in my head at the same time. That is the core of the project, two ideas which constantly bounce off each other, move apart, cross paths. The other element which I thought was true to divergent thinking is the way that the project has to be lived through and may only be resolved in death, (when I would no doubt loose a lot of weight pretty rapidly). I guess I could falsify information or just plane make it up but what would be the point of that?