WEIGH IN WEIGH OUT

day 8/9

So, the first full week of my getting fit experiment and I have lost 1.5kg which is great considering i was going for 0.5kg a week. I am better at swimming, can now swim a mile with not to much stress.

I was told by a good friend JRF, to cut out the bread about two years ago, to lose weight, so finally i have. Before the regime i would often have 2 slices for toast and then two rounds of sandwich for lunch with cheese and mayo etc etc, and possibly a pizza late at night. bergh!

The diet coke drinks are now making me very sick, so am trying to vary it with gin+ slimline tonic or wine. Not great but better than a pint.

I am also allowing more leniency with the diet as I am way over target at 1.5kg, the amount of exercise seems to cancel out any drinking that I am doing.

It was really windy today and i didn't get pushed over so I still have some way to go.

sat breakfast - carboardflakes and fruit
sat dinner - veggie mush with rice and pork chop

sun breakfast - cardboard flakes and fruit
sun lunch - Salad sanwich, low fat cheese + a meaty snack thing from ALDI
sun dinner - fish and boiled potatoes

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.

The introduction...

The challenge: To lose two stone in six months.

I have always been a big chap, and come from a large family, so being rounded is perhaps part of my makeup as a uman' bean, and my mental image of myself, is as a large man. Even perhaps being over weight could be part of my personality? I like the idea of the body being a little more flexible, I have been proportionally been around the same body size, for ever, i would like to perhaps have a slightly different relation to my fleshy casing, or be able to pushed around by the wind a little more, or what ever it is that skinny people do that large people can't.

I don't have a big hang up about being over weight, i feel getting slimmer is something that i need to try, like lawn bowls or origami, I mean, there is always the possibility that I might lose weight from the wrong places, argh my shrinking rist!

If i do lose the weight, It will be a real joy to go into H&M and not feel like a right idiot when i ask, "do you have jean in a 36 waist - 32 leg?" , "erm, sorry mate we don't do those sizes , you will have to go to Marks and Spencer and look at the fat old man with beer gut range" I have to buy my jeans from Marks & Spencer, its a true story.

As a kid being large had its advantages, in replacement for strength, i would always win at bundles and grappling, I was also very good a cuddles, you can't feel the bones! According to my friends I was never huge, just erm, 'big boned'. I remember at middle school, the other kids chanting, 'co'mon Brucie show us your flab, show us your flab', in the changing rooms, but the chants were never abusive or nasty, it was friendly kid banter ( or maybe i fabricated a large fantasy world to deal with the onslaught of abuse?), in response i would dance along the wooden beams of the changing room seats doing a sort of chuffle-shuffle type dance. My belly button even had its own name, imagine that! ok, so "The channel Tunnel", ain't that cool, but at least i didn't have a werid 'outy' belly button. At least i 'my thing' that people knew about be was that i was big and lived on a farm (i didn't, it just the road it was on had lots of pot holes) it was kinda fun, this other kids 'thing' was a rumor was that his uncle was his dad, so in comparison, i was lucky with the flab and the farm.

I also had a girlfriend at the time, her name was Carly and we used to kiss in the playground, it was oh-so-cute, the other kids we're not so sure and liken my pre-teen smoochin' to 'Guerillas in the Mist', ah well, you can't win them all.

At the same time i acquired the nick name 'beef' which i didn't mind because there was another kid and his nickname was chunk, so i was rather happy with my lot (beef = crisps, OXO cubes and mummies sunday roast, chunk = cat sick). Again it was an affectionate name, which i may have actually picked for my self. (oh, dear oh dear, what was i thinking, surely i could have picked something cool like, 'Switch' or 'Ace' or something Rad, as we used to say.)

Not liking sport much as a kid, has developed into not bothering with much exercise as an adult, but very occasionally, i will go for five times in two weeks then get a cold, or go on holiday or something and forget all about going to the swimming pool and exercising which was sooo important in those two weeks. More recently, I have consumed many, many, curries during my short stint as a curry reviewer, which didn't really help the expanding buldge. But mostly, I am the way i am because i don't do any exercise, and my passion of drinking beers. Which means unless i change, one is poised to stay rotund for the rest of my years, and er perhaps earn myself a heart attack at 40, unless, of course, I do something about it! So here is my plan....

I will lose (positive thinking from the start eh!) 2 Stone = roughly 12.7 kg (just under 13 bags of sugar) in six months.

From March 10th to September 10th is 185 days or 26 weeks

currently 14.5 stone - 92 kg (ish)

means that I will have to lose 0.07 kg a day or 0.5 kg a week (half bag of sugar!)


Start - 92
end Wk 1 91.5 kg
end wk 2 91
end wk 3 90.5
end wk 4 90
end wk 5 89.5
end wk 6 89
end wk 7 88.5
end wk 8 88
end wk 9 87.5
end wk 10 87
end wk 11 86.5
end wk 12 86
end wk 13 85.5
end wk 14 85
end wk 15 84.5
end wk 16 84
end wk 17 83.5
end wk 18 83
end wk 19 82.5
end wk 20 82
end wk 21 81.5
end wk 22 81
end wk 23 80.5
end wk 24 80
end wk 25 79.5
endwk 26 79 (just under 12. 5 stone)

I will achieve this by going swimming twice a week and reducing the amount of booze and pizza i eat per week. EASY!

Wish me luck, I will need it!