unusually long arms?
Since getting skinny again i've been forced (against my will!) to at least look into finding some clothes that fit.
On the weekend I went to look at some locally made woolen stuff (expensive!) and the smallest size was still a bit baggy for the thin tshirts (but they are intentionally a rather loose cut). But the jumpers of the same size were just too short in the arms and the shop assistant kindly suggested my arms were unusually long! Hah, maybe, maybe not. I went with a medium jumper and some small tshirts and i'm probably all shopped out for a while after that effort so I wont find out if she was right till I try other clothes. God knows when i'll wear them.
In high school photos I was always at the side in the first standing row and with rows being ordered by height that put me squarely in short-arse territory. When I did work experience at the end of year 11 they kept joking how I was going to "grow up" to be a jocky (funny men!), yet somehow by the time I started uni 2 and a bit years later i'd reached 6'; so maybe i am an odd shape (or it's not me that's odd!).
I had resigned myself to being about 90kg for the foreseeable future at least and I even expected that to be a little optimistic. Losing nigh on 4 1/2 bags of spuds in 9 months seems ... excessive; that was just under 25% of my total mass. I seem to recall measuring myself rather inaccurately at over 1m around the waist at some point, ... and now it's easily under 800mm (those spuds had to fit somewhere I guess). An old mate I worked with before Ximian reckons i'm thinner than when I left to start at Ximian nearly 16 years ago. Yay I guess? FWIW I asked the dr if i was underweight last week and he said no way and even if he just based it on BMI == 20 that's good enough for me.
It certainly makes riding up hills a lot easier. I took the roadie out for a roll last weekend for a 65km round-trip to Port Noarlunga which has a few rises and on the day sported a stiff (and cold!) southerly to head into on the way up. Given its been so long since i've been that far or that hilly (such as it is) it was about the right distance from a cold-start - i was a bit tired when I got home but barely sore the next day (well apart from the arse, it will take a few more trips to get saddle hardened to that seat again). I've also been going to the beach any day it's hot enough and splashing around like a drowning cat-in-a-sack which makes for some solid exercise together with the 1 hour riding required. It's pretty dull though and the 1/2 hour ride home is enough to heat up again but I had to get out of the house.
So apart from the gout i'm probably on my way to being physically in better shape than ever. And on the gout, after a bit of a hiccup of misunderstanding that should be working towards becoming a mostly-non-issue too (albeit with a daily pill).
Pity about the head though, "utterly miserable" pretty much sums that up. But that summation has rarely been very wrong at any time for as far back as I care to remember.