10 - Double Figures!

That's right, 10 straight days of exercise, quite pleased with myself for this one. I'm aware some folk view this as extreme but for years I trained every single day, the hardest part is getting the habit. As long as you train smart there isn't a problem (i.e. don't work every muscle group every time).

It was my first session of the Ultimate Warrior and it was tough. I made a slight booboo in that I did 2 days of exercise by mistake, oops. I'll fix this though by going for a run or something instead of UW later in the week.

I have a basic weights bench at home and to be honest I have never had a workout on it as hard as I had using this system. Its tough but just the sort of challenge I need.

My diet is slowly changing as well. Managing to break the takeout habit and avoid the work canteen. Friday night will remain as takeout but there is a Mexican takeaway at the end of the street that is quite healthy so we try to go there

2

Alright, seeming to get back on track here. Hopped on the bike to work this morning. sadly though i had pizza last night

Out: - 24:16
In - 23:22

I am also hoping to make it to training tomorrow. I dont think i'm doing enough in general to lose weight so am going to try to increase the amount of exercise Im getting.

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.

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.

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 having a pizza

I have been working insanely hard this last couple of days. Mostly on my new website. Part of that 2 jobs thing is that I'm starting a business and was advised to get a URL and Landing Page up for it. I've been doing that and have given up for the night

For the interested the location is Campaign Cartography. It's going to be the next big thing so tell all your friends. Well, I hope it's going to be the next big thing because if it isn't I'm humped and christmas will be cancelled this year.

Anyway, as I'm now very drained of energy I'm having a large pizza for dinner and not caring about it. I've been carrying my heavy rucksack around all day so I don't feel quite so bad about it.

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.

Today I lost the battle

I cracked and had the breakfast I shouldn't have had, but I was exhausted, so what's a guy to do.

I have a picture of what I used to look like before I gained the weight. I may post it here. It's currently my desktop background to guilt trip me into doing more exercise. It's sort of working.

TO ARMS!

I despise working until 5pm. That's why I wake up at 6:30am every morning. I'm in work an hour later and get paid a daily rate. This means I can leave at 3:30 and be home by 4. Depending on how much energy I have that day I either have time for breakfast or not. If I don't have breakfast then I face one of the toughest challenges of my weight loss day.

The work canteen.

They do a full cooked breakfast, more importantly they also provide rolls and it's self service. This led to a habit of having a sausage roll and a bacon roll for breakfast most mornings. It only cost £2 as well. This has led to an expansion of the waistline.

Happily they also make porridge. Porridge is 50p for a huge polystyrene cup of it, so it's healthier and cheaper but lets face it, bacon tastes so good. If you disagree you are simply wrong.

My daily battle then can consist of going into the canteen to get porridge which is horribly located beside the fried food. It's tough, especially for a dyed in the wool carnivore like myself. More often than not I am able to win this battle. Today was tough though, what can I say, I want a bacon buttie. They taste sooooo good.

Today I won the battle, tomorrow I might lose, what's important though is that I win the war.