Day 2 - Sceptics Rule OK
I weighed myself this morning - perhaps a little later than ideal given the extent to which I’d love to be able to show a great ‘before vs. after’ comparison, but to be honest I doubt I’ve started shedding any pounds yet…
I’m going to use a method of publicly discussing my weight adopted by Jeffrey Steingarten, who wrote the amazing ‘The Man Who Ate Everything.’ Let’s say that my ideal weight is 100 (notice no units, that is the point). I know this, because in my dim and distant past there have been periods of fantastic fitness. On that basis, this morning I weighed 114.7. As I well know, weight is just a number and that health and aesthetics can be measured in a number of ways, and to be honest, for me, it really boils down to fat %. This, on the same basis, is a much worse stat, in fact so bad it pains me to type it. If my ideal fat % is 100, I am currently 148. Ouch.
26/11 addendum: I had a relatively well-behaved weekend, with much reduced alcohol consumption and healthier eating, despite a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner cooked up by my friend Christina and her kitchen crew. I followed this with a health test today (usually performed before you begin a programme, my fault) with Guy Meadows. I won’t go into specifics, but it was pretty comprehensive - cholesterol, glucose, BMI, resting / active heart-rates, blood pressure, fat %, waist circumference and more. The upshot is that he has set me some pretty ambitious goals across each of the measurements, which I will try to get to in the next 4 weeks. This is not how Guy likes to do things, he’d rather work over a longer period in a more sustainable way, but we want this trial to show some results in 4 weeks, so that’s what we’re working to. I will still try to honour my bet below. It’s more ambitious than the target Guy set for me this morning, but it’s not ridiculous… End of addendum.
My goal, then, from a measurable point of view, is 120 on my fat scale, i.e. more than 1/2 way to the ideal level, in just 4 weeks.
I have been suffering the slings and arrows of, no wait a minute, that’s not the right literary reference. Perhaps I’ll just call it unabashed mockery. I suspect some of the sceptics here at Texpert Towers and among my friends are deliberately pouring scorn on my conviction that I’ll be able to carry this off in a not-very-well-concealed attempt to hit me with reverse psychology. I’m pretty competitive and hate being told I can’t do something. I suspect others of them are just mean and nasty. Either way, I will take a lot of pleasure if I can prove all these people wrong - so I have constructed a mechanism that I think ought to work.
All ye sceptics, hear ye, hear ye:
Whomsoever doubts that I will be able to achieve my goal, let me know, and you shall submit to this challenge. If I meet my target, each one of you will abstain from alcohol for a week of your choice in January, and wonder around humbly apologising for being nasty. If I fail to hit my target, I will humbly apologise to each one of you, and take another 8 weeks off alcohol.
I’ll let you know how the weekend goes, I suspect it will be quite a test.
