How much do you weigh? How to convert kilos to stones and pounds

Selfie photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

I weigh myself every morning, to find out whether my weight has gone up or down.

BMI

Your bmi is your height and weight ratio taking into account your age. You can find charts which tell you whether you are within the ideal range, or too high or too low.

Weigh what you eat

You can weigh what you eat. But an alternative is simply to look at your plate. Losing weight or adding weight is not complicated. If you look at what is on your plate and in your glass, that is what will fill out your stomach. 

Reasons For Weight Variation

Your weight is likely to vary a bit daily, regardless, because of slight variations in how much you ate or drank, when you last used the toilet, how much you perspired in the night.

If you keep a one year check you can plot how much you are going up and down. You could write your weight in your diary every day.

Stone and Pounds

I grew up with stones and lbs. I know I was 7 stone 7 as a teenager so I was thinking of that as my ideal weight. It was an easy to remember number. I knew that really heavyweight people were 20 stones!

How To Record A Chart

You might find it useful to print off a chart and stick it in the back of your diary. If you have a small diary, you could highlight just the relevant numbers such as your current weight and your target weight. Cut that out and fold it and stick it in the back cover of your diary. Or copy the highlighted part into a photo on your mobile phone.

Useful websites 

thecalculatorsite.com/conversions/kg-to-stones-pounds.php

How I learned to love Prunes and Olives

PRUNES

 I didn't like prunes at first. Nasty dried, black things. With tooth-breaking stones. 

Olives, you often see, sometimes free, on bars. Prunes, you don't see so often. But I recommend you try and get used to both of them. Why prunes? I used to hate them.

 

However, we had to include prunes in our cure cancer breakfast after my husband developed a lymphoma lump on his neck overnight. The prunes were to relieve constipation in the dry ingredients of the breakfast mixture of plain porridge (or occasionally cereals), fresh fruits, and a nuts and seeds mixture.

Our first revelation was the discovery that prunes were pruneaux in French, which means plums. Prunes are actually dried dark plums. The word plums is a whole lot nicer.

Prunes came in four types. 

1 Those tinned in sugary syrup. Best taste. But with stones.

2 Those tinned in apple juice. Without stones. Not such as good taste. But healthier. Less annoyance from stones and most importantly, less risk of cracking one's teeth.

3 Dried in packets.

To revive the dried prunes, we tried soaking them in cartons of apple juice. At first, sweetened apple juice. Later, we found a supplier of fresh apple juice from Australia.

At first we saved the leftover syrup. The idea was to not overdose on syrup. But when we opened a new packet of dried prunes and had leftover syrup from the tin, we had the idea of adding syrup to dried prunes, and then adding our own apple juice.

Now, I find that I am keen on the prunes. They are succulent and moist. 

But what about savoury foods, olives? Olives can be green or black.

OLIVES

Watch out for stones. You can buy olives without stones, but they may be more expensive. youtube had videos demonstrating how to remove stones from olives.

Growing Plants From Foreign Fruits

Problem
I eat lovely fruit overseas and would like to grow the same back home. But it's illegal to import it. Or is it? The Australians don't like you importing fruit and vegetables. Even the remains of a sandwich set the sniffer dogs on you at the airport with a dog handler with a leaflet threatening you with a fine.

Answer
Why bother? A trip round your local supermarket will fill your fridge and plate and fruit bowl with enough stones (or pits as Americans say) to keep you busy preparing pips and planting for many happy hours.

Stories
My late mother-in-law used to grow avocado stones over a glass milk bottle. She put a toothpick in both sides of the stone and water in the bottle. The stone grew roots, then sprouted on top. It more or less grew itself.

If you have a ledge behind your sink, it's easy to watch and water. If you have a balcony, just make a routine and check that the soil is neither dried out nor waterlogged.

London Fruit
In London I recently bought dates from Iran in a Turkish mini supermarket and apricots from Spain in a Tesco Express.

Singapore Fruit
I can buy fresh mangoes in Singapore from various countries, the Philippines and Malaysia. Plus durian - but durians and melons grow rather too big to plant in a pot on the balcony.

But the Singapore block of flats, let's call it a condo, has an allotment.  Fine, if you want to spend the money on renting it and the time on cultivating your plants.

Looking up at the 15 floors of balconies, you can see that some people have lots of plants. Others have none.

The increasing trend worldwide is to make use of the sunny flat roof space and turn it into a garden or vegetable garden.

Other people in Singapore leave their from balcony free of plants to leave room for a table and two chairs, but fill the back balcony with plants.

In Singapore the weather is much the same all year, hot and extra hot, humid, sunny and like a sauna. I am afraid of growing too many items on a balcony because of the risk of breeding insects including mosquitos. We are regularly checked for saucers under plant pots and even plastic bags which could collect rain and breed mosquitos.

London
In London we also have had a glut of insects. We used to be plagued by ants in summer.

Now we have moths. We always had moths and moth balls. But now it's worse, with global warming

Recently in London, after eating fruit, I was looking at the stones left by fruit. I decided to check some websites on how to grow fruit from stones.

The first surprise is that you take off the last vestiges of fruit. I thought the idea was that the fruit supplied the nutrients and I was stealing the food of the poor deprived stone. On the contrary, apparently.

I went onto some American websites. One suggestion was to buy fruit from a Farmer's Market. Oddly, in London, you don't have to go out into the countryside. Saturday morning and weekend in both the suburbs and markets right in the centre of London attract traders from outside London.

From the American websites I learned the trick to getting some stones (or pips) - or pits to grow. Basically, you put them in the cold of your fridge freezer at the right temperature. The potential plant thinks it is winter. After ten weeks you take it out into the warm and it thinks: 'Hey - it's springtime, so I must grow!'

If you travel between two countries, with a holiday home or business office in another country, when you are stuck without outings with friends, or having a day off at the weekend, time to look at your plate and save that stone and grow it.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

Americanisms - such as the 'pits'

Problem
Just one word different in a sentence can make you re-read the whole paragraph again to be sure you grasp the subject matter and visualise what you are reading.

Today I ate a plum and a prune and was wondering what use I could make of the stones. I was reading about growing plants from pits. In England if we say the pits, that's slang for the worst place or object, like the pit of hell. But to Americans pits are objects in fruit.

Americanism - Britishism
pits - stones

British word - American word
stones - pits

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I have many more posts on Americanisms and Britishisms and language. Please share links to posts.