Weight maintenance achieved

Over the past couple of weeks my weight actually went up a bit to 164lb as of this morning. I have had unusually many days off-diet lately, for our annual users' meeting at work, with houseguests, a couple of birthdays, etc. and yesterday evening I ate over one-and-a-half pizzas. Still, I would guess that the gain is a sign that with my usual behavior my weight might stabilize at around 160lb (or 11½ stone) which is fine. When I am on-diet, in total each week I am eating 15-16Mcal and my exercise is now down to 3,000 of the cross-trainer's calories, which feels quite sustainable.

Incomplete nutrition information

For me a pleasant easy dessert is canned fruit. I do not have much of a sweet tooth so I prefer the fruit to be in juice rather than syrup. Asda sell some canned fruit cheaply but the labeling of their own-brand cans is annoying: they tend to give nutrition information only for the drained contents. I do not know why I would be expected to buy the fruit in juice then pour the juice away down the sink. Is that what people normally do or is it just a cheap tactic to make the numbers smaller? I submitted a comment through their website about this and heard nothing back.

Plausible bicycling

In Boston I used to bicycle to work and also a little around the area for exercise. I enjoyed it: I felt quite safe mixing with the traffic in my area. We had limited funds for our move to Scotland and our bicycles got left behind.

The cross-trainer does not offer much of a view. Lately I have wondered if on some of my days off from my exercise schedule I could usefully bicycle around here. Our village is so small that only walking makes sense and in the vicinity I am not much of a fan of,

• the steep gradients, of which Dundee in particular has many, but also the Sidlaws


• the A90, the main road locally, which has a sidewalk and high-speed traffic


• winding country roads, with fairly fast cars and poor visibility around bends.

Perhaps I could avoid paying for a campus parking pass: find a fairly flat route to work from somewhere in Dundee where I can easily park the car for free. More likely, maybe there are pleasant trails hereabouts the carse near the firth which are not much challenging for the casual rider. I am not hopeful but I am again starting to think about how bicycling could make sense despite how I feel about the local roads.

I freely admit that I am probably inaccurate in my sense of the risks: National Cycle Route 77 runs along these roads to which I am averse. I am content to claim such misjudgment as my prerogative. I am greatly cautious because my family rely on my ability to work.