I'm officially a fat B@st@rd - Time to celebrate!

My first Saturday list of the year was a list of my aspirations for 2025. Two of these concerned weight and fitness

6. Sort out my weight. Until now, all of the plans have been for music and business. Now we are on to personal goals and objectives. My weight is the biggest problem in my life right now. I weighed myself yesterday and following the Xmas and New Year excesses, I am 17 stone and 2 pounds. This is too heavy. I was also showing as pre-diabetic in a blood test in November. I rather stupidly decided to  put off the surgeries request to go to the diabetic clinic. In November I was actually 17st 13lbs. I started doing a 20+4 diet three days a week and it dropped a stone. Sadly Xmas derailed it, but I am back on track now. I will go in the second week of January and we'll see what happens then,. My target is 14st 7lbs in April. I believe this is achievable

7. Meet my gym targets. My weight has caused problems with my ankles and knees. I believe that if I can get down to 14st 7lbs, I'll be able to run again without pain. If this works, I might even start playing five a side football again. A pipedream maybe, but I am pretty convinced that I can at least get back to running. Last year, I set a gym target of doing more than 1,000km in the gym. I beat this by 80km, with a mixture of exercise bike and rowing. This was almost derailed when I damaged my shoulder in July last year, I couldn't row for nearly two months. This year my target is 1,500km. That will be 400km rowing, 1000km cycling and 100km running. The running will most likely start in April or May. I hope to start doing 5km  a week then.

So first the bad news. I think I'll miss my target of hitting 14st 7lbs in April. I've got down to 16st 2lbs so far. I've lost well over a stone and half, but by the end of April, if I maintain my current progress, I'll be around 15st 7lbs, so still a stone off. Losing a stone and a half is solid progress. Friday is the day I weigh myself. Yesterday, I hit a major milestone! I am now officially FAT! MY BMI has slid under obese!

This is great news. I was obese last week! Of course, in this day and age, the term is overweight. Doing the 20+4 diet is really horrible, but it does work. I did it for three days this week, which is the target and dropped nearly 1kg. A kilogram is 2.2lbs. I expect Easter to be a difficult week to keep up, but I think 15st 7 is achieveable. One thing I've learned is to set realistic goals. 

Which brings us on to the exercise goals. It is clear that I won't be running in April. This week, I had a setback on the exercise front. I hurt my knee and had to scale back the intensity of my workouts. I am actually smashing my targets, I am up to 581km, with 157km rowing and 431 on the bike. I am regularly rowing 10km a session. If I keep this up, I'll blow 1500km in September and do over 2,000km by year end. I am not sure that running as actually a reasonable or sensible aspiration, given the state of me knee and ankle, but I didn't actually think I'd be rowing 10km in under 48 minutes by now. 

So how am I feeling, other than delighted to be a reborn fat git? Well I think the fact that I can do a 10km row at moderate intensity and feel like still doing a bike ride after is great. I had a bug this week, so I have actually been feeling under the weather. Before it struck on Monday, was feeling pretty good.

One hidden benefit of the gym, is that I pass the time on the rowing machine memorising the songs of the False Dots. It is working really well. I've never been the main singer in the band until the post covid period. It took me a couple of years to properly mentally commit to the role. I've come to realise that being the singer in a band is a lot harder than I thought. I've also realised that most guitarists who sing in bands do a rotten job of it. They don't commit to singing. It was only when I started to enjoy singing that I realised that singing guitarists often hid behind the guitar, whilst dedicated vocalists lay themselves bear. I will explore this more, but what I will say is that spending time on the rower and practicing the lyrics has given me dedicated time to concentrate on my singing delivery.

People say to me "Don't you find it boring rowing for 50 minutes without a break". The answer is "No, it is perhaps the best time in the day, it lets me sort thngs out properly that I don't normally have the time or the commitment to do". Performing mental tasks whilst exercising is actually brilliant. Your blood is pumping hard, getting oxygen around the body. I think people who simply get engrossed in listening to a playlist or watching Catchphrase on the cycling machine are really missing something. 

You can see if it's worked at our next gig! 

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