The Fat Bloke Diaries

 

Episode Seven – Progress, and the Lack Thereof

 

This is getting ridiculous. Over a thousand kilometres cycled on my static bike now – that’s a direct line from my northern English home straight into the heel of the Italian boot – and the pounds are resolutely staying put. My neck, my arms, my ‘moobs’ and especially my belly all seem to be just as wobbly as when I first leapt majestically aboard the tubular steel pain in the arse that is my exercise bike. The scales say otherwise – I’m now officially back down to the weight I never thought I’d get up to – but the mirror doesn’t lie. And surely my friends and loved ones would have commented if I appeared to be any thinner? My mum would have been first in the queue: “Ooh, have you lost weight? Good for you, love. Exercise, is it? At your size? Oh, you want to be careful….especially at your age…”

 

It has to be my diet. It can’t be the lack of physical exertion – I’m doing loads of that now, the problem has to be what’s going in at the top end. I’m not one of these luvvy food critics who compare the beauty and elegance of their beetroot rosti to Gielgud’s Hamlet. I’m your typical Northern carnivore, a beer-and-chips-and-gravy bloke. Food is fuel. If it’s on a plate in front of me, I’ll more than likely just wolf it down without it touching the sides, or the taste buds. Which is why over the years I became a fully fledged, card carrying fat bloke. Maybe I should get a smaller plate.

 

Vegetables? My foodstuff of choice had already eaten plenty of greenery for me before it was placed in the bun and the Styrofoam box. Technically vegetarians are voluntarily putting themselves lower down the food chain than me. They do tend to be much thinner than I am though, but they should watch out if I ever start to get really peckish.

 

So that’s one of the things I have to change. Cut back on the dead pigs and increase the dead plant life intake. I’ve made a start, munching fruit and veg like there’s no tomorrow, and downing home-made smoothies by the gallon. And to be fair it’s certainly working it fibrous magic. There’s a predictable effect from all this fruity intake though, and it isn’t going down too well in the office. I don’t really want to go into unpleasant details, but let’s just say that I’m stepping away from my desk pretty frequently, and I’m seeing things coming through that I lost in the seventies. I’m still waiting for the Kermit-the-Frog Spacehopper.

 

Being in the office is a problem in itself. Don’t tell my boss, but work can be a little dull, and the boredom means that I eat more in my workplace than I do in my house. Strangely enough this ‘more work equals more food’ rule doesn’t apply on the days when I’m working from home.

 

It’s the office snacks that are doing me. The close proximity of the sweetie machine to my desk was always going to be a temptation, but I didn’t think that I’d still be succumbing to the daily monotony-relieving trip to the in-house coffee shop. Crisps, chocolates, biscuits; I’m trying hard to replace these with extra bananas, apples and grapes. It’s not only because of the weight and health factors either. I keep a jar in my desk these days. The change that the snack machine would have stolen from me is now going into there. Shrapnel builds up. Pretty soon I’ll have enough to buy an entire dragon fruit. I might buy one too if I knew what they looked like. So I’m getting richer, but not really lighter. All the change must be to my insides – which I’m sure that my pathologist will one day appreciate. They say that inside every fat bloke there’s a thin bloke trying to get out. I know for certain there’s one inside me because I ate him in 1997, with a nice pint of Old Speckled Hen (as Hannibal Lecter famously didn’t say).

 

I recently read that exercising purely to lose weight is useless unless I’m doing ninety minutes at least five times a week. Add that lot up and it’s an entire working day, and I already have quite enough of those, thank you. Where am I supposed to find that amount of time? And the much-vaunted fatburner technique – where you do ninety seconds flat out sprint, followed by ninety seconds medium speed before going into the sprint again – is good in theory, but in reality it just means that I get knackered twice as quickly. What’s the point if I can’t actually do more than about five minutes of this style of exercise?

 

But at least all my stationary cycling is starting to show some pleasant side-benefits. I’m developing good looking calf muscles. My partner thinks they’re great, but they don’t really go well with the world’s largest muffin-top. I remember what went into it – 100% chocolate chip. I guess I should vary my workout a little more, and hopefully balance my body shape.

 

Perhaps it’s time I tried something new…

 

 

© 2008 Shaun Finnie

 

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