mikejharrison

‘Amelia go swimming today Daddy?’

“Err, its a bit cold Chock, lets go to the park instead.”

‘Aww.’

“We’ll take your scooter, it’ll be fun.”

It’s lovely when your two year old starts telling you what they want to do, it makes it even harder to refuse when they refer to themselves in the third person, it’s cute.

“Right that’s it”, I thought to myself whilst pushing my Daughter on the swing. “Either get over your own self image, or do something about losing a few pounds. In a few years time, you’ll kick yourself for making excuses and missing these things.”

Now I’ve always been of the opinion that diets are useless, they’re generally just a marketing ploy to extract money out of people that don’t feel too good about themselves. So I started the research and analysis (I can’t help it, it’s the Engineer in me).

• Read some biology websites, get the facts – Check
• Couple the facts with a bit of Business & Self Development logic – Check
• Create my own plan of attack – Check

Plan of attack

Pre-start procedure

1. Decide why I’m doing it – To be fit and healthy, whilst playing/swimming with my Daughter.
2. Pick my target – 14 stone (about right for my height & age).
3. Pick a visual stimulus – A particularly bad photo, this’ll help when I feel like eating a load of cr*p.
4. Make a public statement to make it real – 28th July Facebook status: ‘Mike Harrison is 102kg, 16 stone in old money, or would be 225 pounds if he was American.  Right, enough’s enough fat boy, man up, and get in shape….’
5. Don’t diet, change eating habit for the foreseeable future – This is the biggie, and involves wanting to be continually trim more than wanting to continually eat a pile of doughnuts.

It starts

Well let’s get this straight, I like food so there’s gotta be plenty of it, and it’s gotta taste good. Starving myself or having cr*p tasting diet food is going to get me nowhere.

1. Eat breakfast first thing every day, Monday to Sunday no exceptions. I settled on a big bowl of bran flakes with plenty of dried fruit, or a nice hot bowl of porridge.
2. Lunch, one sandwich with one or two pieces of fruit.
3. For dinner there’s no point seeing, smelling or cooking what the rest of the family are having and resenting not having it too. So, one or two decent serving spoons of whatever that is, with a big bowl of salad.  Not a naff salad, a proper salad. (I’d write a list of ingredients, but this guy is much better at doing that).
4. No desert.  ”No desert? Awww….”  Well alright, sometimes, but don’t go crazy.
5. Water all day, tea and coffee when fancied.

The first few evenings were a bit of a nightmare, I just wanted to eat rubbish after dinner, but a big glass of squash sorts that out.

Then it starts getting easier, I guess your stomach must shrink a bit and you start feeling loaded with salad.

Every Friday evening I treat myself and the family to a box of doughnuts or something similar, but when they’re gone, they’re gone.

Exercise

Ugh, surely not.

Here’s where the engineering bit comes in:

• A consequence of the conservation of energy law is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
• The large calorie approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree C.

From this I concluded that I could either:

1. Do a few press ups & sits ups every evening to transfer the calorific energy into kinetic energy.
2. Sit in a freezing cold bath and eat ice cream.

I went with the press ups.

I started off small and built up the reps over time. I figured there’s no need to try and break any records, a target of a dozen or so press ups an evening has got to be plenty right?

Now all I needed to do was keep this routine up.

In all honesty, going on a business trip to China and getting the sh*ts for a few weeks helps you loose quite a few pounds. However, its not the best experience in the world and the flight and accommodation costs can be quite expensive.

January comes round, and I’m thinking to myself; “What can I do to make 2011 my year of preparation for becoming an overnight success in 2012?”

“You were going to become a millionaire at 20, on your 30th Birthday you allowed yourself another 5 years.”

“It’s really time you stepped up a gear and made something happen.”

“That’s the trouble with you, you come up with these bright idea’s, do all the ground work and then move onto something else. You just cant see anything through.”

“You’ve got quite a few different ideas now, you really need some way of organising your thoughts.”

“I know….”

‘Daddy’

“I’ll start a blog.”

‘Daaaaaddy’

“Huh?”

‘Amelia get out now Daddy, it’s cold.’

“OK Chock, let’s both get dried off and head home for some lunch.”