Days 33 to 50 – 11th February to 28th February 2012

Hello everybody! 

I’m been very undisciplined regarding the blog for a couple of weeks now, as those of you who take an interest may have noticed. In fact I’ve actually written the blog post offline twice but didn’t quite finish it and the moment passed by without publication. As I am now at Day 50 in this change of lifestyle it seems a good moment to pull my finger out and update the blog ! Maybe some bullet points are the best way to summarise the salient points since the last blog post.

·         Clare & I had a great night out on the 11^th February and it’s fair to say that I broke several dietary rules!  I had already decided that I wasn’t going to worry about the weigh-in consequences. Read on for the results

·         Despite the above I still haven’t had beer since 7^th January !

·         I’m back on full weights at the gym and my previously reported back injury has been more or less fine until …… I got back on the cross trainer!  It was really bad after that and, even though I enjoy that type of exercise, I won’t be back on it again for a while.

·         Have been using the pedometer for 22 days now and the results have made me think about how active I am at the weekend. I’ve made some changes, but not on a regular basis as of yet.

·         I’ve stopped taking diet drinks. Maybe this is too paranoid. See the Food section for details.

·         Continuing with the nuts for snacks approach. They are great and they take the edge off hunger really effectively.

·         For some reason last weekend I got incredible cravings for everything that I shouldn’t have. Choco, wine, beer, toast, potatoes, chips !!  Still don’t know what was the catalyst for this as it’s usually never that bad as constantly as it was. However I resisted temptation and going back to the gym seemed to sort it out.   

WEIGHTS & MEASURES

Well, the night out with Clare (which included, amongst other things, lots of wine and Jaeger bombs) did seem to have an impact on my weekly weight change. The Tuesday weigh-in after it showed my lowest weekly drop in weight since I started this regime (0.7kg). At least it’s still going in the right direction, and I haven’t plateaued yet as you’ll see from the graph below.

FOOD
I had introduced some standard paragraphs into this section in previous posts, but I’ve decided to ditch them and to become a bit more random again. Partly because I didn’t always have content for each sub-section!

I want to explore further my earlier statement about not taking diet drinks any more. I have read(!) that taking diet drinks might not be so good for a couple of reasons.

1.       They are made from chemical rubbish which isn’t really any good for you.

2.       They stimulate your pancreas by fooling it into thinking you need to process sugar. This can gave you a greater craving for the real thing.

Any thoughts on this? At the moment San Pellegrino is my favourite tipple!

EXERCISE
It’s been pedometer crazy ! (well, not quite)

Obviously a pedometer counts the number of steps you do, but it will also extrapolate other data if you provide it with additional information. For example, it can use your average stride length to calculate the distance you’re covering and it can use your age and weight to estimate the number of calories you are burning. However, when I started using it on the treadmill in the gym I quickly noticed that not all strides are created equally. Seems obvious really but your running stride is significantly longer than the walking stride. In my case my average when walking is 60cm, but when running it’s 85cm! I was able to work this out by triangulating the distance covered as shown on the treadmill with the number of steps and the distance travelled as shown on the pedometer. The stats below take this into account where appropriate.

The stats below also show the huge difference in steps taken during the week and at the weekend. Especially the aerobic steps (which are fast walking or running). You’ll see that I’ve already taken steps (ho ho ho) one weekend to improve things, but I need to introduce this more regularly.

Losing the will to live yet? J

Bye !