What a difference a week makes, here's some blog reading music for you. Last Monday morning was my first day back in the gym, and I hadn't officially started what Kat's calling her 12 Week Transformation Course. That night my beloved Diana and I went to a stand up comedy gig in at the Amersham Arms in New Cross (Rob Delaney, David Cross), so we head out straight from work, have a few beers and a frankly amazing burger and a fine evening. A couple of days later and I'm officially on The Course and we're heading out to another comedy gig. This time at Aces & Eights in Tufnell Park (one of my favourites, Andrew O'Neill, plus Daniel Simonsen, Ari Shaffir and others), and Aces & Eights is home to some of North London's finest pizza. This time though we head home after work and make our own food (quick veggie chili), then get to the venue just as the gig starts and settle in with a tonic water and lime, and another fine night was had. The important part of this for me was the the second gig wasn't any less fun that the first, I didn't feel like I was sacrificing anything by making healthier choices (beers and pizza are still obviously awesome, I'm not insane) but for the first time in months I was feeing motivated to be healthy in a way that made me actually WANT to make better choices rather than forcing myself to do so. This, I think, is key.
So, I've been in the gym 3 mornings a week hitting the bags and as we finish each session Kat's been asking us to focus every day on what we want to achieve, how we want to feel and how we're going to do it, that little refocus is helpful. Taking a minute to think about your day and focus on how you want it to go seems to help. We've also been given our nutrition guidelines, the basics are that we should attempt to have protein with every meal as well as green vegetables, and avoid gluten and cut down on coffee so it's been green tea, kale shakes for breakfast, kale and eggs at the weekend, pumpkin mash with braised cabbage and quorn sausages, jacket sweet potato with steak (yeah I eat both quorn and steak, wanna make something of it, hippy?!), fish, chilli, brocolli, mountains of salad, plenty of fresh fruit, and dried figs and dates (without added sugar) for my sweet tooth. Already I'm feeling better than I have in ages.
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| Might look like wallpaper paste but tastes a lot better. |
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| Yes, I know what wallpaper paste tastes like, don't judge me. |
We've now got a Facebook group for our 12 Week Transformation group so we've all been sharing what we've been eating and I'm keeping a food diary too, keep me accountable eh? Damn, I've been eating a lot of kale. The fear is that I'll start with all this enthusiasm but will I be able to keep it up for 12 weeks?
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| Delicious - needed bacon |
You'll be able to tell in a while. Diana took my 'before' photos for me last week, urgh. I do my best not to even look in the mirror so to have to have shirtless pictures taken from every side was not fun for me. Also this week I weighed myself and took measurements, none of it pleasant but this is the starting point so it was never going to be, my discomfort is at least offset by the fact that I'm looking forward to having some much better looking 'after' pictures to go next to them at the end of this. This is telling from a mindset perspective too, if you read last week's entry you'll know I was miserable and basically hiding from myself and this week I've faced up to it, "OK, I'm a fat piece of shit, time to actually do something about it". It feels good I must admit.
One other thing this week is that I've been doing yoga, just a little but it feels good to get stretched out, concentrate on breathing and just take a little quiet time for yourself, it's a free online course and I'd recommend having a look, especially if you've never done any yoga before. None of your pretentious pseudo-spiritualist bollocks either, but be aware that this is likely to happen.
Thanks for reading, any comments are appreciated and as your reward for getting this far, here's a video of a rabbit bathing in a sink.
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