Are you thinking about losing some weight?
Up until two months ago I wasn’t and then I realised that whilst I am 6’2” tall there is only a certain amount of waistline fat that I could conveniently disguise by breathing in!
I decided I needed to do something about it.
There are two things that I have discovered since then about dieting.
First, it won’t work for me if it is perceived as a punishment.
It is pretty pointless trying to deny that there are certain things that I like to eat and drink. For me there are a couple of must haves. The first is red wine and the second is cheese.
I don’t want to sound like I have some problem because my wine consumption doesn’t take me above the recommended weekly number of units for a bloke.
In fact apart from at Christmas and a few other special occasions I fall well short of that weekly limit.
But we all know that alcohol of any kind has quite a few calories so caution is sensible.
Cheese doesn’t form a part of breakfast, lunch and dinner for me either but I do like it and I decided it wasn’t going to be completely absent from my diet.
Just less of it and certainly not every evening.
Second I learned that something has to go. So what was that?
Biscuits, cake, chocolate, sweets, and pretty much all bread and potatoes.
I also cut back on my tea consumption.
Not so much the tea but I still take sugar and I reckon by cutting down to 3 cups a day I was reducing sugar intake by about 7 spoons per day.
I drink far more water each day and have replaced some of the aforementioned calorific treats with things like raw carrots; I can see much better in the dark now and my front incisors have got longer.
I am also easily bored by exercise, although I do like walking.
But I dusted off the mountain bike and got going on a regular cycle down the old railway line out of Cranleigh and that certainly helped to burn a few calories.
So the result of all this on 17th July I weighed in at 14st 9lbs and at the start of this week 13st 1lb so 21lbs lighter. And interestingly (cross fingers) my back pain has eased up significantly.
My challenge now is not to slide back.
I know I have achieved a good result because this week Andy said to me “you don’t need to lose anymore weight” and she hasn’t said that to me since I was about 18 years old!
