Get some exercise

Try cycling to work, get off at the bus stop before your usual one and walk the rest, travel to the supermarket by space hopper. All very good advice, but not very relevant to my life, except for the last one, which I did regularly, until the painful bursting incident.

I suppose I could cycle to work, generally it would be ok. The down point is that my route involves going up that narrow and steep hill next to the Wolferston Arms in Shuttington. In the unlikely event that I manage to avoid being hurled off my bike by a Frisbee salesman from Newton Regis eager to get to a meeting, my work colleagues wouldn’t appreciate sitting next to a large panting intumescent lump of heat and sweat. For them, it would be like being stood in the queue at McDonalds during a heatwave.

Instead, I’ve decided to find ways of being useful and doing things in my spare time that will also be good exercise. This week my next-door neighbour is decking my back-garden. To make it awkward for him, we decided that we wanted it to be two-tier, this involved him digging out a large part of our garden leaving a big pile of rubble, clay and soil ready to be shovelled into a skip. The night before, I decided I would get out first thing and start shovelling it myself. I kept it to myself in case my enthusiasm had disappeared by the morning.
First thing Saturday morning I was up and out and digging away. He joined me shortly after and for the next couple of hours we worked away together chatting away. We’ve been neighbours for nearly 5 years, we’ve always been friendly, a bit of small talk as we get into the car etc, but it’s the first time we’ve had a good conversation and found we had interests in common, it was a good day for community relations as well as weight-loss.

I’d filled the skip and spent the rest of the day waiting for another one that didn’t arrive. He said I must have shifted about 1.5 – 2 tons of earth. I’m not sure if he was trying to flatter me but when I worked out online that I’d burnt over 1000 calories I was gratified.

I’ve lost 1.6Kg (3.5lbs) this week, I’ve made friends, and have started to see more muscle appear on my arms, this dieting lark’s been well worth the effort so far.

Reprising my dieting career

I embarked on my dieting career about 10 years ago. I learned all about dieting from my girlfriend of the time, who is now my wife. As a bloke without a sister you learn all sorts of new things during your first few relationships, perfume names, women’s clothes sizes, when to keep your mouth shut. Keeping my mouth shut was my biggest problem, when rubbish wasn’t coming out, something rubbish was going in, my waistline suffered the consequences of the latter.

My first diet was a low calorie diet. Going from pork pie and chocolate milkshake for breakfast to a slice of toast was quite a shock. I was hungry all of the time and was still going over my 1500 calorie limit. This is where I learned the value of diet drinks. I was drinking over a litre of Pepsi per day, there’s 500 calories gone already. My hunger got the better of me this time.

“You can’t go wrong with a low-fat diet” said someone of questionable authority. A couple of weeks of hunger followed, not quite as bad as on the low-calorie, but hunger was still an alien concept to me. I felt really healthy, but the hunger got to me. I convinced myself that failure was inevitable and so it was.

I did the Atkins, it defeated the hunger problem, I never felt hungry and promptly went from 48” to 38” waist, I must have shed about 6 stone. I decided to have some celebratory chocolate, I’d not eaten a single piece all year, that proved to be my “one harmless cigarette” that ruins many a smoker’s quitting attempt. I put it all back on in 24 months.

So here I am, 32 years old, I’ve been on a break from my dieting career. I am now a father, a husband, a part-time student, and full time IT account manager. I coming back off sabbatical and reprising the career I embarked on 10 years ago, I’m stood at the foot of the mountain and this time I’m determined.