I weigh HOW much???

All the people who know me personally such as family, friends, acquaintances, enemies (I'm sure I don't have any, but you never know . . .), know that I am really big. In fact, I am what doctors call morbidly obese, which is a fancy way of saying, "he's enormously big!" Over the years, I have tried various and sundry diets, some having better effect than others, but they all have ultimately been unsuccessful. Several years ago, at the urging of my doctor, I started considering what's known as Bariatric Surgery: the branch of surgical medicine that deals with the causes and prevention of obesity. After a year or so of investigations, I settled on having the Lap Band procedure. This is where a surgeon placed an adjustable band around my stomach in a laparoscopic procedure. I had this done in June of 2006, six months before I got married. The primary reason I settled on this procedure instead of the more common (at that time) gastric bypass is that I wasn't comfortable with the idea of having drastic changes made to my digestive plumbing. If there ever arose complications to the gastric bypass, I would have to live with them because gastric bypass is non-reversible. That is to say, it's a one-way trip; once done, there is no going back. Gastric banding, however, is reversible if necessary.

So, where is all this going? Well, when I moved here to England, I naturally came under the care of the National Health Service. Since I can't afford to fly back and forward to Georgia on a frequent basis, I had to find doctors here in the NHS system to take over the care and maintenance of my gastric band. One of the, um . . . features of the NHS is that all medical care that is not handled by one's GP is done through clinics at various hospitals, according to which hospital speciallizes in what fields of medicine. What this means is that I go to one hospital where they hold clinics for sleep disorders (mine is sleep apnea) and I go to another hospital where they speciallize in, amongst other things, weight management.

When I go to the weight management clinic, down at the Royal Sunderland Hospital, I have to weigh in before I consult with the dietician and the doctor who's pulling duty that particular day. As you might imagine, my weight is measured in kilograms. But when I come back home and my wife, Rebecca, asks me how much I weigh, she expects an answer in the English system of weights, that is to say, she wants to know how much I weigh in stone. When I tell my mother about my visit to the clinic, she wants to know how many pounds I weigh. That's three different measurement systems, all in one day! :-) To answer everyone's curiosity, after a setback in my program, I am now back on track to lose weight. I had regained weight during this setback. So, when the doctors readjusted my band to where it should have been, I weighed 170 kilograms. That translates into 26 stone, 10 pounds or 374 pounds. I told you I was big. :-) Since then, I have lost weight and now I weigh 164 kilograms, ne 361 pounds, ne 25 stone, 10 pounds.

So, what is a stone? Here in England, when one is talking about personal weight, a stone is equal to 14 pounds. Now the question is, why do the English use stone as a measurement of weight - I should point out here that they only use stone (the plural usage is the same as the singular, just like deer) when they are talking about a person's weight. When it comes to other weights, they use either pounds or kilograms . . . or at least, that's what I am told. It won't be the first time I was wrong about these things if I got this backwards. Back to the question, it took some digging to find the answer to this one. According to this website, it came about in this manner:

"In techniques for measuring weights, the Babylonians made important improvements upon the invention of the balance. Instead of just comparing the weights of two objects, they compared the weight of each object with a set of stones kept just for that purpose. In the ruins of their cities, archaeologists have found some of these stones finely shaped and polished. It is believed that these were the world's first weight standards.

The Babylonians used different stones for weighing different commodities. In modern English history, the same basis has been used for weight measurements. For the horseman, the "stone" weight was 14 pounds. In weighing wool the stone was 16 pounds. For the butcher and fishmonger, the stone was 8 pounds. The only legal stone weight in the imperial system was 14 pounds."

So I found out that it could be worse. If you follow the link above, you'll find the whole article and learn the rationale behind many of the methods of measurements we use today. Despite knowing this, that there is a rational explanation behind using stone as a unit of weight measurement, I still find it hard to do the mental arithmetic to change from one to the other or to even think in terms of stone. But then again, I didn't grow up using it. For my wife, it's as natural to think of weight in terms of stone and pounds as it is for me to think in terms of pounds alone. Interestingly enough, I have learned how to do the mathematical gymnastics for the conversion between pounds and kilograms; I simply divide pounds by 2.2 to get the equivalent in kilograms and conversely, multiply by 2.2 to convert kilograms to pounds. That's easy! But I either have to pull out some paper and do it by longhand or get a calculator to do the math to make the conversion between stone and pounds or stone and kilograms.

Now my American readers may be asking why do the English persist in using this somewhat clumsy method of measuring a person's weight. Probably for the very same reason that we Americans still insist upon using similarly clumsy methods of measure; inches divided by a multitude of fractions, 12 inches per foot, 3 feet per yard, 2000 pounds per ton, etc., etc.. It is what they are simply used to using. I am finding it more and more easy in this land of multiple measurement methods, to use the metric system. Having said that, there are some things I don't think will change. Even though I weigh 164 kilograms and stand 179 centimeters tall, I'll always think in terms of miles when I think of distance and speed. The more some things change, the more some things remain the same, I guess.

Despite the fact that the metric system was invented by the French, it is imminently logical and quite easy to use, once you get used to the new units. The arithmetic is so much easier to do! Instead of having to figure out how many yards, feet, inches and whatever fractions of an inch there are in the length of something, the metric system is decimalized. Everything is divisible by 10. It's a shame that the French can't be as logical or use as much common sense in their other activities. LOL

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam...

Invariably, when I meet someone new, there are the usual questions asked of me about my move to England. They all ask me how long am I visiting here for. When I explain that I now live here, without fail, I get the amazed look along with, "why on earth would you want to move here?" This one always amuses me. People over here in England think that it's so much better in America than it is here. Well, yes and no. It is better in many ways, back in America, but in other ways, it's pretty nice here. Then they will ask me if I ever get homesick. The short answer to this is, yes I do! Sometimes I get very homesick and at the strangest of times too. Just yesterday, while sitting in church, I got to missing my home church back in Adairsville, Georgia, and my church family. So, what do I miss the most about my life back home in the United States?

Naturally, I miss my family a great deal! I miss my mother and my two sisters. I miss going out to my sister Nancy's home and seeing all the farm animals she and my brother-in-law, Joe, have. They usually have several goats and sheep; here lately, they also have a donkey or two in the pasture right behind their home. I miss seeing whatever is Joe's latest project. One time, he bought a small tractor with a back-hoe (that's a digger for all you Brits reading this) similar to the one above, so that he could dig trenches to plant loads of tomato plants so that he could sell tomatos. More recently, he and Nancy bought a motor home very much like the one to the left, and a boat so that they could go camping down at Lake Allatoona on weekends. He has rigged up solar panels and a wind-driven generator to charge all the batteries for all his "toys." He's always into something and it's always facinating to see what's new. It's always nice to sit on their back poarch and look out across the valley from their hilltop perspective.

I miss spending time with my mother! She and I are very close and the 4000 mile separation is hard to bear. As she is now 80 and her eye sight is failing. She suffers from Macular Degeneration and she is not able to read like she used to. My mother taught me how to read when I was four and five years old and she instilled in me her passion for reading. Because of this and because she has relied on me for so much ever since my father died more than twenty years ago, I miss spending time with her!

As I mentioned above, I miss my church family. Thirty years ago, my family and I joined the Adairsville First United Methodist Church and I have been a member there for most of those thirty years. For a few years, I was a member of another United Methodist church because I was more involved there than I was at Adairsville UMC, but after a while, I felt the call to move back to my home church. Most of my oldest friends are part of my church family; that is to say, they have been my friends longer than any others. Many of them I have known for all of those thirty years. Others have joined over the years and became good and dear friends. In the past few years, before I moved to England, I became involved with the Senior Saints and their Wednesday morning Bible study group. Since this group didn't adhere to a particular program, they set their own agenda and move along at their own pace. Because of this, the discussions are often meaty and thought provoking! I miss the Wednesday morning Bible study group because I learned so much and I came to love and trust this group of people as my own family!

Twelve years ago, I went on the Walk to Emmaus, a three day non-denominational program designed to develop leadership within church congregations. The Walk to Emmaus, for those of you who have never heard of it, is not a physical walk, but a spiritual walk; a mini-course in Christianity, if you will, that is based upon the model that Jesus used when He taught the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24). The Walk to Emmaus organization is centered around regional "communities" which hold the Walks on a regular basis. The Mountain Top Walk to Emmaus Community is the particular community that I am a part of. These people, from all walks of life, from various denominations and churches, are a very dedicated group of people spread from Asheville, North Carolina to Bartow County, Georgia. Since my Walk to Emmaus, I have become very much involved in the Mountain Top community and have many dear friends scattered all over the North Georgia/Western North Carolina region. I miss these folks very much and I miss being involved in the five or six Walks they hold every year. It has been my privilege to be a part of four different Walk teams. And I have lost count of the many Walks I have worked either in the kitchen, the dining room as a servant or in the prayer chapel as a prayer warrior. I have walked many a spiritual mile with these awesome people and they are my Emmaus family. I so look forward to the day when I can rejoin them in ministry!

And this brings me to what else I miss most dearly: the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. I cannot tell you how many days of my life I have spent wandering and exploring as many different roads in these mountains. I must have driven a hundred thousand miles over the years trying to find new places and revisiting all the old places I love so much. I have seen some pretty awesome scenery all over the United States. Of these places, like the Grand Canyon, or the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, none surpass the beauty and majesty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, especially during the Fall! I miss driving through the communities, villages and towns of these mountains. Places like Tellico Plains, Tennessee; Andrews and Franklin, North Carolina; or Blairsville, Hiawassee and Young Harris, Georgia seem to be calling out to me, begging me to return home, my spiritual home. It was in these mountains where my family, as I was growing up, met and overcame one of our biggest challenges: our unity during a crisis where my father had open heart surgery in Asheville, North Carolina at a time when open heart surgery was still quite novel. It was here in these mountains, on a hill overlooking Lake Chatuge, that I went on my Walk to Emmaus and my Christian faith took on new and vibrant dimensions. It is in these mountains that I feel most alive and closest to God!

There are other things I miss, like the sound and feel of power from a good V-8 engine. In a land where a 2 liter engine is considered to be big, the opportunity to enjoy driving a V-8 equipped vehicle are far and few between. I miss going down to watch the Rome Braves play baseball. I miss going out to eat with my family and friends back home. But all of these are trivial to the big things I listed above. It is the things like my families and the mountains that I miss the most. However, in spite of missing all of these things, I would still give them up if it meant having to choose them over my wife, Rebecca, and my step-daughter, Emily. They are my greatest treasures here on earth!