The Last Smoke

It's a funny thing when you decide to stop smoking.

No matter how much you've convinced yourself that you want to stop smoking, the final cigarette is a looming, destructive bastard.

You see, when you're hooked on something as insipid as nicotine, your brain can play tricks on you. How ever much you hate smoking and however strong your resolve is to quit, if you have a "final" smoke it is like breathing in the nectar of the gods.

You savour it, you enjoy it, you reminisce about the times when it was cool and cheap to smoke, all those great times with your mates sat around an ash tray and enjoying yourselves.

It's corrosive and horrible. Plenty of times I've wanted to quit and never actually stopped because that last cigarette was just too damn sweet.

I've just had what I hope is going to be my last smoke and for the first time, I felt complete indifference towards it. The last cigarette didn't feel special, it didn't draw up the good times. No, all that was going through my head was "it's 11pm, windy and wet out here, I'm sick of this shit".

Maybe this is what it is to quit and really mean it. Every other time I've had that yearning to buy some more and it's usually ended up with me doing exactly that.  Not this time though, which is very curious indeed.

Hopefully this time I can stick to it and not fall back to what boils down to a very expensive way to slowly kill myself.

Being as overweight as I am AND smoking is a recipe for death before 40 and I don't want that. I also don't want to turn into one of those ex - smokers who condemns everyone who still is smoking. I just want to be healthy and have a bit of change in my pocket to play with.

That's not too much to ask, is it?

July 1st 2013

Hello... is there anyone still there?

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated, though rumours that I've fallen off the wagon are pretty much spot on.

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks due to a tumultuous time in my personal life (before you start, don't ask, I wont tell). Because of these issues, I haven't been exercising like I have before and I have been eating more out of necessity than of desire, so I've been eating crap.

Not literally of course, but I haven't been eating with a diet in mind. I've just been eating what I can find when I can find it.

I've also had a bout of what can be described as either food poisoning or stomach flu. Either way, I spent most of last week off work, within sprinting distance of a toilet. Bad times.

I'm posting again today because, of course, today is the final day of this first month. Yes, this is the last weigh day before my work event so I can see how much I've (hopefully) lost in total.

As of the last time weigh day came around (two weeks ago), I had lost almost a stone in weight. I don't think I will have lost much more than that if I'm honest, but I'm hopeful that I haven't put any back on.

I will be heading to the gym tonight for the first time in a fortnight to weigh myself and get back into some form of exercising ahead of the work event on thursday which will be a chance for me to really blow out and have a good eat and drink with some colleagues.

I'll post my latest statistics up tonight, fingers crossed everything is still reducing.

June 17th 2013

Wait... is it Monday again? Who said it could be Monday again?

I seem to be getting out of the habit of blogging at the weekend. I should rectify that..

Anyway, this weekend was a quiet one for me. Given how much pressure I put on my body last week and the effect it had on me when working out on Thursday, I decided to rest over the weekend and let my body recover. I did manage to do a couple of miles of walking on Saturday morning, but over all, I kept the weekend relatively quiet.

On the food front, I stayed relatively on course with the diet. On Saturday we attended a friend's birthday barbecue (or Braai, for the South Africans in attendance) where I pretty much gorged on meat. Just meat though. Lots of chicken wings, sausage, burgers, all cleanly cooked and all carb free. Nothing more manly than a dinner consisting of meat, meat and more meat. I had a couple of burger buns but definitely had less than my 100g of carbs across the day.

Sunday, I was a touch more relaxed, in that for dinner I had fishcakes and potatoes, which was comparatively heavy on the carbs, but it was all good clean food, so I don't feel guilty about it.

Over the weekend, I also discovered something amazing. I've been struggling a bit with hunger on this diet and I do feel myself wanting to snack during the days at work, especially when people around me are munching their way through the day. So a friend recommended I try making spinach crisps. They give you the crunch and the flavour you crave, but they're positively good for you. They're also a doddle to make. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:
A couple of handfuls of baby leaf spinach
1 tablespoon of oil (olive, sunflower, or vegetable)
Salt
Pepper
Whatever flavouring you want

Put the spinach in a bowl and pour the oil on top. You only need a tablespoon of it, a little oil goes a long way.  Sprinkle the salt, pepper and your chosen flavouring on top (in this case, I'm using chilli flakes) and get your hands in, rolling the spinach and flavouring around in the oil until every leaf is covered.

Pre-heat an oven to 125 degrees centigrade. Place non-stick baking parchment or non-stick foil onto a baking tray. Lay out the leaves individually, making sure they don't overlap. Place the tray in the oven and bake.

Check the leaves after 10 minutes. Some leaves will cook faster than others. You want them to dry out and the oil to dissipate. It took about half an hour of mine to be ready in total. If you want, you can turn some of the bigger leaves over halfway through.

Once they're cooked, take the tray out of the oven and let them cool for a few minutes. Once they're cool, serve and enjoy.

They're so good and very moreish. Give it a try, I really like them.

Onto this week and the pressure is back on. This weekend will the point I get measured for the suit for the work event so I need to keep the intensity up across the week to try and lose as many inches as I can. Today is weigh day so later on today I'll know how much work I need to put in to try and maximise what I can for the week.

Expect my stats and another picture this evening. For now though, go and try the spinach crisps.

June 13th 2013

Me - "You there! Boy in the street! What day is today?"
Boy - "Me? guv'nor?"
Me - "Yes you! What day is today?"
Boy - "Why it's the tenf day of your diet guv"

Yes, butchering A Christmas Carol to the point that Charles Dickens is positively drilling for crude oil due to the speed his coffin is spinning indicates that I've made it through the first 10 days of this monumental effort to lose weight and I get to have my first cheat day!

Oh, precious carbohydrates, come to me, fuel me!

As you can guess, I've been looking forward to this. Mostly because tonight I get to indulge myself after a week and a half of carb abstinence. Given how tight time scales are, I'm not going to go ballistic as some people do, but I'm going to treat myself to a big plate of Pasta Bolognese to reward myself for being as strong as I have been.

However...

The exercise must continue so with a full belly I will be hitting the gym again tonight, so the treats will be short lived, but well enjoyed.

I'm still stiff as a board from Tuesday's foray into P90X, so I'm glad I've decided to leave trying that again until Friday because I think at this point I'm just far to broken to even consider it. The gym tonight will be a mix of cardio and resistance, with focus on my back and arms. I've done plenty of work on my legs in the past week or so, but seeing as they increased in size by an inch I think I could do with laying off them and toning my upper body. Expect me to be more broken tomorrow.

I'm maintaining a high rate of activity this week and I'm trying to stay on the wagon. It's not helping that it appears to be biscuit and sweets week at work as I'm constantly receiving group emails saying some tasty treat has been left on a desk for everyone to share. So far though i haven't cracked and I haven't inflicted wrath upon anyone, so I think I'm doing well.

That said, I'm practically salivating at the chance to have some pasta tonight...

June 10th 2013

Is it monday again already? Ugh.

Everyone was telling me that the weekend was going to be the hardest part of my diet. That it would be a struggle to stay clean and healthy because everyone naturally treats themselves on weekend.

Well, bugger that. It wasn't any harder than during the week. I'm thinking that's because I slept in later on both days, so I had less time of actual fasting before I could eat. Either way though, it wasn't too difficult to stay good.

The hardest part of the whole weekend is when me and Mrs D popped to the cinema (saw Star Trek, brilliant film, go and see it) on saturday night. Instinctively when you go to the cinema you want the largest popcorn available and an enormous fizzy drink to wash it down with. I managed to resist, partly due to the fact that a large popcorn and drink combo is nearly £9 but also because I had earlier managed to convince myself that I wasn't going to buy sweets. Instead, I popped into Tesco on the way to the cinema and bought a bag of mixed nuts and a bottle of mineral water. Much more filling, much more satisfying and slightly quieter. I also burped less.

I managed to get to the gym on Sunday morning and walloped through a quick workout. It was much busier than when I normally go on an evening, so I didn't really want to hang around with groups of people flocking past me. I did discover a great way to keep me going at the gym, though and it's not music. Audio Books. I've been listening to the Game Of Thrones books for a while through the Audible app on my phone and it honestly wiles away the time on the cardio machines so much better than music ever could. When I'm listening to music, I'm picking the song to bits and analysing it, or I'm wondering what the next song to come on is. When I'm listening to the book, it's just the story that's happening and I get lost in the tale being told. It's a revelation, I'd recommend you try it.

Today is monday (you can imagine my displeasure) so that means it's also weight and measurement day. I'll be posting another picture of myself today too, so you can all go and compare me to last week. Hopefully I've lost a nice chunk of weight and prove that all this hard work and suffering is working.

June 4th 2013, part 2

Evening all

So today I feel has been a fairly successful day. I've done a lot of exercise and I've eaten very well. However, the exercise has come at a price. I'm utterly broken.

Today I walked a total of about 5 miles around the business park where I work. You can see the walks I do on the runkeeper widget on the side of this blog. Today has been an utter scorcher with temperatures around about the 21 degree mark. Today I was power walking as hard as I could to maximise my potential calorie burn. When wearing business dress and sweating like a bastard in the midday sun, things aren't going to go to well.

Without getting into graphic detail (I appreciate many of you may be reading this at breakfast time), I've over exerted and the natural friction that comes from my thighs and a poor choice of boxer short for the day have provided me with an almighty and very painful rash across my inner thighs. Added to the gargantuan blisters I've got from walking in rubber soled shoes that aren't trainers, I'm a bit of a wreck right now. It hurts to even walk.

So, with that in mind, tomorrow I will probably still walk around work, but not as much or as intensely. Tomorrow's exercise I feel will need to be a touch gentler. This will probably be a great juncture to break out Your Shape on the Xbox again and do some Tai-Chi, Yoga and Boxercise.

Today was the first real day of my 30 day challenge and I think it has gone well. Granted, yes, I'm in pain and I'm uncomfortably hot, but I think all things considered I could be in a much worse state.

Lets see what tomorrow brings

Michael