1

3 hours spent walking around Deep Sea World today

4

up and biked in to work this morning. Realised that it was only my brain that was tired and in terms of exercise it is not required and can therefore go take a flying ...

Tried something new on the way in today. Intervals. Interval training is perhaps the best way to get your body to burn off fat. It doesn't take long to do and will have the body chew through fat reserves for about 36 hours afterwards. Not a bad return for 20 mins of work. Basically I'm going to start throwing structured sprint sets into my commute to work. Blast it for 30 secs (ramp it up to very nearly the max), cruise for a minute (but not slack) then repeat. Did 3 sets this morning and hope to build up to 6-8. It also gets me places faster as evidenced by the 'Out' time.

Bike
Out - 22:47
In - 20:43

18

managed to get in maybe 15 mins of cardio, certainly no more than that

12

very light weights session. Was going to take the day off but my body wanted to do something.

8

That's right. 8! New record!

Heavy weights session today. Upgraded to a larger storage locker so had to move everything to the new one. Quite a workout. Then there was the weights bench. It came out of storage and into the living room (the futon is going into storage). This meant carrying the bench and weights up to our place on the 3rd floor.

7

again with the light weights and many flights of stairs

4

Had a 2.5 hour walk around town today. More strolling than anything but it was tiring

1

Dammit back to 1!

Light weights

No bike, no bacon, no clothes

Last night was not a good night for me. I went home and decided to try something that I hadn't done but had been meaning to. I decided what clothes I could and couldn't get into. Some expected some disappointments. Turns out I have only 1 pair of jeans that I can almost fit into. Muffin top is the general expression that springs to mind. I therefore have a single pair of trousers available for work (excluding my rather nice suit, gutted about that), a pair of combats and, um, that's it. Everything else either doesn't fit or makes me look as fat as I am. This prompted a trip to ASDA to buy some new clothes. I now have a pair of jeans that fit, in addition to the work trousers and the combats. Interesting point is that I have another pair of combats and can wear them but only because I'm so fat that the button tore off and I hold them up with a belt.

I was up late trying to fix my iPhone (simply put it's a 3G and iOS 4 slows it down appallingly so I tore iOS 4 off and put 3.1.3 back on while downgrading to iTunes 9.1.2 because lets face it, 10 is horrible and Ping is the fail of social networks). As a result I was so tired this morning that I failed to cycle to work, I drove instead.

It's not all bad this morning though, I managed to avoid bacon butties by simply reminding myself that NONE of my clothes actually fit anymore. I have just finised my home made smoothies instead and feel proud of this. It also has something to do with a Karateka called Iain Abernathy. He's a professional martial artist and podcasts once a month. Something he said recently stuck in my head. As martial arts instructors (of which I am one, though a different art) we are supposed to be incredibly disciplined. This includes having the discipline to walk past the pie shop and not buy anything.

It's like I said, I just need to reawaken the parts of myself that allowed me to be the way I was and progress towards there again. Today has been a good day for that.

Hoping to reawaken parts of myself

Here's the thing, I used to have a massive amount of discipline. I was highly motivated and kept myself in great physical shape. I can tell you exactly the moment that changed. I was rock climbing, practicing a move called a 'rock over'. A move which I messed up slightly and shredded my left knee. Shredded it so comprehensively that it required surgery to fix. Surgery I wasn't able to get for almost a year. As a result of this injury it was immensely difficult to exercise, running was out, so was walking most of the time (pain free anyway). I couldn't actually turn corners sharpely I had to take a wide angle swing.

The result of this was my exercise habit was broken. I'm going to have to put in some hard work to get that back. Day 2 is today. On the bike again to work. My legs are tired after yesterday but I still made it in, a decent time as well. I may skip on the weights this afternoon as I have work to do when I get home but we shall see what happens.

Back on the bike

This is useful as it means I'm better again. Todays ride in wasn't too bad, a bit tiring but not like it was the last time. I suspect I was already getting ill last time I rode.

Made a couple of other changes, porridge is out, it's proximity to bacon, sausages, fried eggs etc is entirely too tempting. I'm going to try and have fruit smoothies for breakfast instead. Make them the night before, leave in fridge, shove into saddlebags and have them at work. This has worked for today. Hopefully this will save me 50p minimum daily. It's in the actual making that the hard part is.

I have a goal now though. This is a good thing. I'm going on holiday in September, hopefully, to Cyprus. That means I have 6 months to get into the shape I want to be in so that I won't be embarrassed if I take my shirt off. Probably just enough time.

Other motiviational factors, when I was off sick I had a bath. Random European woman (extremely attractive I couldn't help but notice) came to the door canvassing for some pointless charity. Due to my location I answered door wearing only a towel. Nothing, not even a glance below the neckline. Been a long time since that happened, a sad day indeed.

Today I start on the wheels again

After taking quite sometime away from it I am officially back on my bike today. My bus ticket ran out so instead of renewing it I bought brakes for my bicycle and repaired them. When it comes to bicycles I consider them to be disposable items. The reason for this is that it's cheaper to buy a bike for ~£100, ride it into the ground (usually between 2,000 and 3,000 miles) toss it and buy a new one than it is to get an expensive one and maintain it. Brake pads are about the only thing I'll replace on a bike. Don't get me wrong though, I keep it in reasonable nick, I just don't repair it. My current one is dicing with death thoguh as 2 of the spokes on the back wheel have snapped but it still appears to be ridable.

Anyway, getting back to cycling to work has many advantages. To start with I'm forced into 30 mins cardio twice a day, 5 times a week. There's no way around that. Secondly I'm going to save a fortune in bus fares (£45/month) and no longer be beholden to a bus timetable. Which is nice. Further, thanks to the governments everybody be green policies, I can claim 20 pence a mile in expenses for cycling, which is pretty sweet.

It takes my 5 minutes longer to cycle than it does to take the bus, currently. It's been 4 months since I've cycled to work so I expect that number will decline as I get fitter. I certainly need to, all but killed me this morning. It's mostly uphill to work and about 6 miles, I was more than a little wrecked when I arrived.

I'm hoping that this will have a serious impact on the spare tyre around my middle. Stopping cycling is when it appeared so now that I've started again it will hopefully help it deflate.

I have also decided that I'm most likely having a bacon roll for breakfast. I slept like crap the last couple of nights and am feeling good about myself for having cycled to work.

I knew I wouldn't post much

Been on and off with the food thing recently. Managed to gain a couple of pound last week, not impressed, but to lose them again this week.  Hoping to get my bike fixed over the next couple of days and start cycling to work again. That's the plan, it remains to be seen if it happens. Since my bus ticket runs out on Tuesday though there's a good chance it'll work. Also, it's a good time of year to start cycling again.

Today though I'm off up the road for training.

Vaguely irritated

So I head up to training yesterday with the idea of getting in a good 3 hours of exercise. This sounds more impressive than it really is. It's martial arts training and I'm the instructor so it's not really that sustained or energetic for me unless I really push myself at it. I was planning to yesterday and suddenly found myself mightily annoyed as the training session was cancelled. We only had 1hour total.

I was not the only person to be a little put out but I was able to kick it quite hard for the 1 hour that we did have.

At some point today I shall be getting the weights out for a bit of a session. When I was in New Zealand I was unable to afford a gym membership so I bought a stack of weights for use at home. They were shipped back to the UK on my return and have been in storage. I got them out a few weeks back and have been gradually building up in their use.

1 of the handy things about increased muscle mass is that it takes more energy to supply them with fuel, in other words, the more muscle you have the more calories you can burn off by merely breathing. However, I have no intention of turning into a walking wall of muscle. My target weight is 12 stone. I'm currently heading for 14.

Why 12 stone?

Over the years I have discovered that 12 stone is the perfect weight for me, provided it is made up mostly of muscle. The reason being that if I bulk up beyond that then I'm start to slow down due to the increased muscle mass, any less and I loose the power that is associated with it. As a martial artist these are 2 massively important factors for me to consider. Hence, 12 stone.

With that said I think I'm going to head out shortly on a run.

This should be easy

Seriously, I'm not kidding. Losing weight shouldn't actually be that difficult.

First of all I point blank refuse to count calories. I think that is a monstrously depressing way to live. I really do. It's nigh on impossible to exist in this day and age without knowing what a healthy balanced diet should consist of, so calorie counting seems excessive to me. All it's really attempting to enforce is a sense of portion control. As I see it, we all eat way to much. This leads me to the conclusion that the simplest way to lose weight can be summed up as follows:

PUT DOWN THE FORK!

To be clear, this applies to me as well. I have the habit of picking up the fork and eating, and eating and eating some more. This is 1 of the 2 mistakes I'm making. In the picture I posted below I had a body fat percentage of 14.7%

The second mistake of course being that I'm not taking enough exercise. There are no magical weight loss pills, acupuncture won't make me thinner (though perhaps more religious, sorry, terribly joke) and doing 5000 sit-ups everyday won't give me a visible 6 pack (the fat will still be on top of it, you need <12% body fat for a visible 6 pack). The sad but simple truth is that you can't target the area for fat loss. It all comes off at once. This means cardiovascular exercise. Which sucks because it's so much nicer to sit on the sofa, swallow a pill and get thinner. Sadly that pill doesn't exist so its time to get up and get moving.

This is the part where it becomes less easy, though not difficult. All we really need to ditch the extra kilo's (and I can name 2 people that I think don't need to do this, wish I was 1 of them) is the willpower to exist on a calorie deficient diet. That's it:

lower the amount of food that goes in, increase the amount of work the body does, the weight will then drop off.

To be perfectly frank I believe this to be nothing more than an exercise in discipline. If you've ever kicked a habit then this is the same thing, just a different habit.

In the next couple of posts I'll outline my plan to implement the above.

Couple of things though. The first thing to realise though is that this isn't about dieting. Diet's don't work because we've evolved to believe a  lack of food is famine and our bodies then actually store more fat. No, diet's don't work, lifestyle choices do however. I'm not going on a diet, I'm changing the way I live to become healthier, there is no end to this 'diet' for a very long time.

The other thing is that if I'm not in for the long haul I should just order a pizza and give up right now. Ever see those magazines with a headline, 'Get a beach body in 4 weeks,' 'Slim for the summer in 2 months,' 'Lose that Christmas gut in the 12 days'? Yeah, they're all full of crap. Ugly truth, it's going to take a long time to get my body back the way I want it. It may not even be this year, but that's okay, because I can accept that at the outset, it's why I can do this.

I'm getting better

at not having the unhealthy options that I've let myself become used to. It seems I am still appalling at undertaking the exercise that I should be doing. This is something I find quite strange as I've been reasonably athletic for most of my life. It's habit really, I was in the habit of working out and now I'm not. I need to get myself back into that habit and that's simply a case of discipline.

Finding the time in amongst work though is proving to be somewhat tricky. I'm sure I'll find someway to to work it in though, I could do with taking time off from work to get some exercise. Though I will feel guilty if I'm doing less work, but something somewhere has to give and working all the time just isn't good.

Sire, they are running!

Today I won, though it was a close run thing, especially when I saw the porridge that was on offer. I mean seriously, it fell off the ladel in clumps. Chuck some milk on top and it's golden. Well, off-white, but you get the idea.

I forgot to take my backpack down with me though. Part of the problem is getting time to exercise, so I'm building it into the things that I would do normally. For instance, I've tossed 5 kg of weight into my backpack that I carry around with me. I'm trying to get into the habit of carrying that everywhere.

I also eschew travelling in the lift. I work on the 4th floor and there are 80 stairs between the ground and my level. I take these now instead of the lift.