The Fat Bloke Diaries

 

Episode Twenty-Five – Reviewing the Situation

 

Who’d have thought that we’d get this far?  FBD 25. A silver jubilee, six months of fat blokery.

 

When I started on this life-changing adventure I was twenty-some pounds heavier than I am today and a whole lot more sedentary. I was a fair bit richer too, because I had yet to buy any exercise equipment.

 

But things have changed. I walk much more. I run. I static-bike. I make up verbs (see previous sentence). I exercise with the help of various virtual trainers on my TV, and I avoid crisps and chocolate wherever possible. But it’s just sometimes not possible.

 

At the turn of the year I set the following resolutions

 

 

A quarter of the way through 2009 and I’ve mostly stuck to these goals. I can’t honestly say that I’m totally in control of my eating though. Try as I might, I keep getting possessed by the spirit of Big Bobby Chompalot, World Pie-Eating Champion 1927. Probably. There are still times when I surprise myself by finding a half-eaten cheese sandwich in my hand. It’s like I can’t help myself. Some people get voices in their head telling them to do evil things. At least mine only encourage me to help the country’s dairy farmers.

 

So I’ve only been partially successful in keeping to my resolutions, but the overall position is still a positive one. And it’s being noticed.

 

A few of the guys in the office (where I’m still walking to the eighth floor every day) have commented that I look thinner. One woman asked what I was doing to lose weight. I told her that I had started running and a few other things. As we spoke I noticed her gaze started slowly slipping downwards from my face (ladies, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about). Her eyes stopped at my still-considerable belly.

 

“You? Run?” she said, incredulously. “But aren’t you too….?”

 

I was waiting for her to complete the sentence, ready for her to drop the dreaded ‘F’ word. I had two words with ‘F’ in them in my carefully prepared reply, and neither of them was ‘friendly’.

 

But she’s right; despite some early weight loss I am still fat. The majority of my natural insulation is refusing to budge despite a little diet and a lot of exercise. If I’m to seriously decrease my portliness I need a long term goal, something that I can work towards with achievable checkpoints along the way.

 

So with this in mind, a few weeks ago I did something stupid. It was so incredibly ridiculous that I ‘forgot’ to report it in the FBD at the time. Actually it may turn out to be one of the smartest things I’ve ever done but immediately afterwards it felt pretty dumb, scarily so. As a fully fledged, card carrying Fat Bloke with an almost pathological fear of being seen exercising in public, I signed myself up for the Great Yorkshire Run.

 

I’ll pause for a moment so that you can digest that last bit.

 

It’s true, I’m doing a 10k run.

 

I know, unbelievable isn’t it? Ten whole kilometres. That will be over an hour of shuffling through the streets of Sheffield. I’ve done that many times in the past, but rarely without several hours of fortification in The Hog’s Head first. I’ll be heaving my no-doubt increasingly reluctant body around more than six miles of Sheffield’s finest tarmac. And I’ll be even more reluctant to do the bit that goes through Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium. Being a lifelong Sheffield United fan, I may have my eyes shut for that section.

 

This is my Everest (even though it’s flat), and through the next twenty-odd FBDs you’ll hopefully be with me from base camp to planting my metaphorical flag at the pinnacle. It’ll be hard work, it’ll be exhausting but (hopefully) it’ll be fun.

 

And it will undoubtedly be A GOOD THING.

 

Oh, and I lied earlier. It wasn’t just a few weeks ago. I signed up well before Christmas but I was keeping it quiet, ‘just in case’ I decided to quit.

 

But now you know. So there’s no going back.

 

 

© 2009 Shaun Finnie

 

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