Today I weighed myself for the first time in ages. I didn’t really know what to expect, as it’s been a long time since I’ve done any of the Slimming World stuff or whatever.

Obviously while not expecting much in the way of good news, I was also still hoping I hadn’t put too much on. I know the recent period has been pretty stressed, but still I know I’ve been pretty good on food too.

Anyway, weighed myself and came in at 134Kg. 21 stone 1 pound.

And I’m actually pretty damn pleased with that. It means that even with everything that’s been going on, and with not going to Slimming World or anything else, I’ve kept that weight the same for a year.

So yeah, I’m quite pleased with that. I do want to lose more when things settle down, but right now I’m happy to be just staying the same as before.

This week at work, I’ve broken the chair I’ve been using since October. Completely, categorically broken it. The central piston (for raising/lowering the seat) has cracked through the plastic baseplate, and now hits the floor. This has resulted in a chair that is politely known as “broken”. Or in my terminology, it’s “totally fucked”.

Thankfully the directors are OK about it – it’s wear and tear (and me being a weighty bastard) rather than that I’ve wilfully abused/broken the chair.

But because I know that at least some of the blame is due to being rather bulkier than most people, I had a look at the specs for some new office chairs as a replacement. And I know Argos isn’t exactly the centre of the office-furniture world, but it’s a useful reference point.

So looking through the chairs they’ve got listed, and all of them seem to have a ‘recommended max weight’ of 110kg – 17ish stone. You can see what I mean by looking at this one. And don’t just think it’s the cheap-ass ones – even this one for £150 has the same limitaton.

I know I’m not an average size – I’d need to lose four stone just to get down to that ‘max recommended weight’ – but equally I’m not massively obese. Fairly solid, I think it’s fair to say, but not supersized or owt. So why is it that chairs just aren’t available (in Argos, I know, I know) that are designed to support – or at least not fuck up and break – for someone my size?

via Twitter, I came across Withings scales – a set of scales that’s connected to t’Internet. (via wireless network)

I still can’t decide whether it’s a great idea or an incredibly bad one. I love the concept of being able to keep track of your weight, graph it out and monitor it. I hate the idea of it connecting to t’Internet rather than just recording the data on a card for uploading to your own computer. I get the idea of it, but yeah, that connection to t’Internet means I probably wouldn’t want one.

Interesting idea, though.

Last year, I was working on losing some weight, and went to the local Slimming World group with Herself in order to look at doing so.

With the way work’s been, I stopped having the time to go to the meetings back at the start of December, but pretty much kept to what we’d been doing while attending.

With things calming down a bit, we’ve started going back, and of course one of the things that had to be done was weighing-in again.

I knew I’d done OK in the interceding time, hadn’t put on too much even with the Festering Season. So it was nice to see that in that time I’d put on 2½ lbs.

I’ve still got a way to go – a long way, if I’m honest – but at least I’m doing OK, and intend to keep on doing so.

Over the last few months, as I’ve written about before, we’ve been attending one of the local Slimming World groups in an effort to lose a bit of weight. Obviously I’ve got more to lose than Herself, but we’re both working on it.

So far it’s been fairly successful – we’ve both lost a stone over that time. We could, in all honesty, have lost more, and/or in less time if we followed all the rules and weighed everything obsessively.

But that’s the key word – in my opinion, there’s an awful lot of this weight-loss stuff that is actually about doing stuff obsessively. We’ve seen three (I think) “group leaders” now, all of whom have lost significant amounts of weight – and absolutely fair play to them for doing so, they’ve done fantastically well – but all of whom are (to be polite about it) just a little bit crackers. There’s a number of examples of this, although right now I can’t be arsed to list them.

The one that keeps on coming back to me, though, was the one who was still utterly obsessed by food – all she’d done was replace high-calorie foods with low-calorie ones. But there was still that slightly crackers gleam in the eye when she was talking about being able to eat “whole bowls of no-Syn trifle to yourself” and so on.

And I find I just don’t have that obsessive part to me – and to some degree it actually leaves me feeling quite uncomfortable. I’m not obsessed with food, nor do I collect anything obsessively, or really anything else. It’s simply not part of me.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, to be honest. It’s just something I’ve noticed and wanted to write about it. And maybe that’s it, maybe writing is my obsessive behaviour, whether it be D4D™ or other writing projects. In some ways I’d actually be quite happy if that were the case. I just don’t know if it is.

Last night, I finally officially got rid of my first full stone of weight. It’s taken a while, although some of that is because of the working-away of the last six weeks, where I have slipped a few times and not been quite as good as I should’ve been.

All the same, I’m still pleased with having lost that stone. I’ve a fair way to go – this means I’m halfway through my first phase of the weightloss – I finally feel like I’m beginning to make some progress with it.