I have a terrible relationship with food, my childhood was pained with my mothers dreadful attempts at cooking (nearly everything was either burnt or tasteless, and the menu variety was dismal) which resulted in my binging on sugary treats, cheeses or bowls of cereal to make up the deficit in calories, fine when one was training Karate four times a week and burning the rest off in walking places as I had no car. But a problem as I reached my thirties, with two broken ankles Karate left the options list and furnished with terrible eating habits the weight came on board.
Even the good-food I ate as a child, notably my Grandad's cooking, was heaped on me "big eats" was one of his favourite sayings, fine when I was a growing child, but later in life this feeling of needing to eat stayed with me.
Combine all this with a clear genetic predisposition to be a big lad - my Fathers side of the family are all rotund - and a sedentary job in software I'm now approaching the big four zero in age and too big to be comfortable.
Things have to change, habits, time taken to cook, and my tastes.
Habits are going to be fairly easy, if there's nothing there to tempt me, no biscuits, no cake, no crisps then I can't indulge my habit, if I swear off buying anything I can't consume it. This will have to include Subways and McDonalds when taking a break from the office, and have to include take-aways at home.
Takeaways stray between the line of a habit and the time taken to cook, sometimes a quick meal is needed, however, I think I have to now admit there's a problem and the wife and I must pre-cook and freeze something better for us, rather than getting a pizza or curry or kfc. This is going to be something I think we need do at the start of each month, I'll cook up a pot of pasta sauce or a baked meal, divide it and freeze portions, so instead of a take-away a week, we reach maybe one or two takeaways a month - halving that input.
Now, at one point in my life, before I met Jo, when I was deep into playing Eve-Online and World of Warcraft, as a single man, living alone, earning a good wage, I reached for the take-away menu every night, literally I'd have a dominos delivered every night of the week, five days a week, rather than shop... I can't believe how much I must have spent on that, but at the time, it never struck me as odd. The fact now that spending £25 to £35 a night, could have been the same as a £3 pizza from Asda makes me a little sick. I have to hold onto this feeling, we'll cut the waist line and enhance the wallet.
Finally the tastes, this is hardest, I have a very sweet tooth, this comes from the legacy of my mothers dismal cooking and from the hard fact that she never experimented, Italian cooking was not really ever seen, nor Indian, heck I was over sixteen before I had a Pizza... (seriously). When Indian cuisine was first introduced to me, I was about twenty, had to go out on a Works Night out, and had to pick this meal... We went to a curry house, and I literally had no idea what to have, not a clue... I'd always been taught curry burns, it's horrid, doesn't taste nice...
Indian Curry, proper curries, are lovely - my favourite dish today! - yet my mother, because one of her ex-boyfriends clearly thought an Indian meal should involve petrol bombing your taste-buds and that's all her limited mind would let her remember, we never had curry at home, ever.
When I met my wife however, I also met my mother-in-law and she can cook, oh boy can she. There's also the danger of over eating, but through this good cooking I've learned I like sprouts, like green beans and cabbage... If they're cooked right, the rub goes back to time.
But the time has come for this tum to run.
Exercise is the last spoke of this wheel of strategy, with my ankles not being what they were, and never being able to I can't take up running nor do I want to, but we did take up swimming earlier in the year, I think the swimming has to now take up time, we need to go from one 30-45 minute session a week to at least two, or three. I'm even thinking about bugging the wife to arrange a morning swim time, so we go before work for me one day a week - this will mean going to bed early to get up early.
The other exercise is to be found in walking the dogs and exercising the pony. With the dogs, I need to embrace the walking, do more of it, we already walk between 3/4 and a mile each night, but I think we need do this at a higher pace, to get up a sweat without killing my ankles.
And as for the pony, we need to take her out more and lunge her more.
Lunging, is quite good exercise for you, when you do it right, as you are constantly moving, and even running with the horse to let them take up the line.
Then there's the carting, the recent videos I posted of this, don't show that for a long part of this journey I was actually running along behind the cart, as we dismount to let the pony pull up hills - and it's quite hilly where we live. So that can happen, jogging along behind the cart.
Scarily though my target weight is going to have to be split into two halves, the first is my prime target, what I must loose... Two Stones.... This has to come off of me within six months, this means losing about 4.5 pounds a calendar month, and the calorie intake for this based on my current life-style is 1200 calories a day. I'm going to feel pretty rough on that, so the exercise levels have to rise in order to let me eat and feel comfortable but still loose this weight.
So there, that's my plan, a bit personal maybe, but the gut has gotta go.
