MATLOCK BATHS

day two

So, last night was the first 'drinking' night, were usually i would get completely bladdered on 7 pints or so (depending on start time) and get a pizza on the way home. I had four rum and diet cokes, and no pizza after. The taste of the rum made the fake sugar in the coke taste nicer, so it wasn't as bad as previously imagined, and I mixed the drinks i was having with a couple of pints of water throughout the night, admittedly this was more a money saving technique than anything diet related.

I figured that four rum and cokes, even if 'diet' can't be dieter's friend, so went walking in the hills of Derby. Fresh air too, great!

Breakfast - cardboard flakes with banana and skimmed milk
Lunch - 1/3 baguette with cottage cheese lettuce and choritzo slices, and asda puffed rice thai 'good for you!' thingys.
Dinner - yesterdays Pasta (I make it sound so bad, it was great!) with low fat greek yogurt on pineapple. (I make it sound great, it was bad! the Pinapple was old)

After the walk we went to Matlock Baths, a kind of seaside resort without any sea, just a river, it has all the arcade and ice-cream parlors you need for a good seaside town. Perhaps Matlock Bath was built just incase Brighton or Bournmouth get bombed by Al keida and his mates. The people still need penny arcades and Ice Cream! Or maybe is a weird quirk in environmental planning , just in case the lower half of england gets washed away, by rising sea levels; there will still be the mighty Matlock Baths - On - Sea.

Matlock Baths also has a great hairdresser called..wait for it..."I am Spartacuts!" genius, pure genius.

Matlock Baths is certainly dieters hell, pubs, fish and chip restaurants and ice cream parlors, oh yeah and the odd motorbike shop thrown in for some sort of Feng Shui balancing act. "No sir you need, three chippies for every bike shop, or otherwise positive energy will flow out of the town, and the confused customers will end up in Derby" "I can't let that happen, let there be chippies"

But I managed to avoid, the chippies, and just have a pint of diet coke in the pub. There must be more on offer in pubs which is low in bad stuff aside from water and diet coke? I can't imagine that the J20s are good for you. I got very excited when I realised that summer drinking diet style can include Gin and 'slim line tonic'. Drinks for winners!

I still feel a little odd doing this whole slimming thing, it does feel very setup for women, blokes I suppose just have heart attacks. But why the bias towards women, why the pressure on women to look slim or more importantly the lack of pressure on men to be healthy? Maybe its the choice of words, Slimming, Dieting, Getting fit, Exercising, 'going to the gym' all have slightly different connotations, but essentially meaning the same thing. Maybe there is a pressure on men to beef up rather than lose fat. something to do with gaining and losing? gambling? sorry for the psudo tenius links, just trying to work things out.

I guess part of me likes the feeling of going 'on a diet' as a young man, that slightly awkward conversations you have with people in which their first thoughts are that you are making them part of some elaborate joke. It almost feels (one assumes of course!) like some sort of cross dressing, using the language of middle aged women's magazine, lose a dress size! lose four pounds in four days! my brother killed my son with my cat!

So theoretically yes I am slimming, there's a nice outfit that i must simply have for the summer. In the pub the blog came up, and it was suggested that perhaps 'slimming' is the ultimate metro-sexual statement. But I guess that its a statement, rather than 'normal', if a middle aged woman who works in an office is slimming, its hardly a statement, more an occupational hazard. So there.