A fast day, so not eaten much.
Yes, I’ve not been very good today; tomorrow is my birthday but also a fast day for me as I’m travelling to Middelburg anyway, so I won’t eat too much then. Today I pigged out.
(Getting bored yet?)
When it’s steam engine time, you get steam engines and when your head is in slimming mode, the whole world suddenly turns out to be obsessed by it too. Not that obesity and dieting and all that are obscure subjects otherwise, of course. Anyway, no sooner had I posted last night or a Horizon episode popped up on BBC2
about the science of fasting to live longer/healthier. We long sort of known that if you restrict your calorie intake you can live longer and that doing so also might help protect against developing diabetes or heart diseases and even cancer, but it turns out there are easier ways to get these benefits than through strict everyday calorie counting. The idea is that instead of this you fast every other day, restricting your intake to one meal of roughly 500-600 calories, than eat normally the next day with no restrictions. People doing that tend to lose weight easier and get all sort of nasty cholesterol levels down too.
An even less stringent variant on that, which the Horizon presenter went on to test it, is the 5/2 regime: eat normally five days a week, fast on two days. It sounded interesting as he got good results on it (cholesterol down, weight down) and as importantly, it sounded doable. The greatest problem with every diet is with sticking to it, which is of course easier if you do it for a limited period than for basically the rest of your life. There’s also the problem that if you do stop with a given diet, you might quickly bounce back into unhealthy eating habits.
This method seems to avoid these two traps, while still delivering roughly the same benefits as the more stringent variants of restricted calorie intake diets. I can acutally see myself doing it and keep on doing it for the rest of my life, which is why I’ve decided to try it out. Hence today I’m skipping lunch in favour of eating a light dinner tonight.
Is there a more pathetic figure in popular culture than the fat, nerdy slob? The balding comic book guy with his cheetos and toddler dress sense reading Aquaman, the fortysomething D&D player still living in his mother’s basement, that neckbearded guy in stretchy, clingy, clingy latex at the con who has never heard of deodorant. In every intranerd fight these images are lobbied around like grenades on a battlefield; We don’t need bullies to harass us, we can do it ourselves. You can’t really insult somebody’s race, sex, gender or religion without looking like a dickhead, but you can always call somebody a fat nerd, a loser.
And if you’re a fat, sloppy eater in any piece of fiction, you’re best bet is to be the comic relief, because otherwise you’re the disgusting, revolting villain nobody respects and somebody will kill you in a particularly pathetic way at the end of the story. Especially in comics, where the occasional Kingpin is the exception amongst the larger villains, more likely to resemble the Slug.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t comics that made me fat, though they didn’t help; it was puberty. I was a svelte young god until I was about twelve; now if I still resemble a Greek god, it’s Bacchus and not this one. Over the years, slowly, I’ve grown bigger: eighty kilos, ninety, hundred, hundred and ten, hundred and twenty…
Three years ago I had to change, had to lose weight to get slim enough so that we could do that kidney transplant operation for Sandra. So I started dieting and exercising and I managed to lose ten, fifteen kilos. All it took was three-four evenings in the week going to the gym and not eating anything between meals. Oh, and of course, having the threat of Sandra dying of kidney failure hanging over me if I didn’t get slim fast enough.
No wonder perhaps that in the two years since the operation, I’ve ballooned out again, especially the last year, with her gone. Comfort eating and there’s nothing as comforting as stuffing down a Burger King combo meal with added extra hamburger, is there, even if you feel physically ill and depressed afterwards.
But the good times can’t last forever. I was coming up to one hundred and thirty kilogrammes, which was a bit too much even for me. I’ve lost some weight since, but I need to have a new incentive to do so. Hence this post. I need to know how much I’m eating each day, knowing that I’m eating too much when I am, not being able to cheat and what better way than to do so in public?
Starting today therefore I’ll be posting a food diary each day, though they’ll be a lot shorter. I’ll weight myself each week and will keep an exercise diary as well. Hopefully this will help me keep momentum going and not let me backslide into bad habits. So, without further ado:
Weight this morning: 126.7 kilogrammes.
(Inspired by Tom Spurgeon as well as Hairy Bikers.)
