An End to Calorie Serfdom

I am abandoning the calorie counting! For the blog, at least. I’ve become increasingly busy at the moment and itemizing a roast dinner takes longer than eating it, which seems neither right nor fair. I’ll be keeping a count for myself, myfitnesspal not having failed me yet, but it’s not always possible to record everything while I’m on the go and I forget to do it later on.

More bad news; I am having some difficulty shifting weight. I know exactly why this is – going to Charlie Choys World Buffet once a week for three weeks certainly didn’t help, for example, and a couple of friends’ birthdays have meant I went back to beer for whole nights. These are easy enough problems to solve and I will be endeavouring to do so – less nights out in general seems to be the way forward. Here.

On the upside my weight is fairly stable at around 236lbs – 22lbs less than I was ten weeks ago – and it’s starting to really pay off. I’ve got back to the gym a couple of times a week and found I can do more for longer, which is a relief as I’m not sure how much longer my ego could hold up as I sweated to death while only manage a mildly-powerful walk on the treadmill. I’ve started rowing (on machines) as it works the stomach a lot more than running and is a change of activity which is always welcome. The rowing machines also point away from the televisions, which invariably display the horribly misnamed Britain’s Got Talent or some variety of soul-crushing soap-‘opera’. The characters featured are so selfish, stupid, short-sighted and/or horribly one-dimensional my brain hurts as they try to ‘entertain us’, and the soaps are pretty God-awful too. How can anyone find solace or amusement in them? It makes me lose faith in people. Emotional sadism must be rife in the general populace, or British humour has taken a turn for the worse. Either way, I will never be interested in a plot line which excuses inconsistencies in characters/behaviour so glaring wide that if a sheet was pulled across the gulf between them a small city of refugees could shelter under its voluminous expanse.

I’ve found getting more sleep actually does help me lower my food intake, although that could well be for psychological reasons rather than scientific ones. Eating out is a very bad idea, especially if its any sort of good food that you could eat and eat and eat and not care until you realise when you move it is not with the word ‘walk’ but with the word ‘roll’. Unfortunately, these are my very favourite places to eat out. I also need to buy more squash – while I am only drinking diet sodas I’m pretty sure it’s still not optimal for the diet and definitely not for my teeth. Unfortunately my brother is planning an Xbox game day and I can see that being a full-fat six to eight hour session of gluing my face to a screen and forgetting that I actually have legs or that there is a world outside the window. Maybe I could play while using the treadmill…

And Lo, Did The Calories Lay Siege

So from last week’s entry you might assume my diet has been going badly and I’m losing focus. Well, wait until you see what happened in the rest of last week.

Wednesday: -422 calories remaining

Thursday: 412 calories remaining

Friday: -1445 calories remaining

Saturday: -280 calories remaining

Sunday: 757 calories remaining

Total: -978 calories remaining

Weight: 232lbs

So fudge you, Liam, for having a birthday celebration that I enjoyed, and fudge you, Mod, for being a generous person and buying everyone pizza at about 3am. If you weren’t my friends my diet would be intact. However, I’d rather you were my friends and wouldn’t really blame anyone apart from myself for my calorie overdose.

Saturday was another birthday party but I left that early to prevent myself from gorging on the scrummy barbeque food and drinking even more. I still enjoyed it a little too much – 280 calories too much, the one burger I had while there or the two cans of Carlsberg – but the walk home helped.

Early on I knew I had to acknowledge that in only a very small number of circumstances could I accurately cite other people as being the reason I broke my diet; horses to water and all that. So, accepting that fact, I have to acknowledge the only way my diet will fail is if I let it. Which could, understandably, lead to a depressive stage wherein one thinks that any failure means a total one and there is no way to continue.

But thanks to a youth spent playing computer games I believe in extra lives! All through my formative years I would fail at something only to be given another chance at it and I would go back, stronger than before and armed with more knowledge, to conquer whatever level was ahead and achieve whatever goal I’d been set – and they were many and diverse. So it’s quite easy for me to pick myself up after a bad week like this one (for the diet) and go back to doing it properly. And to be fair, I’d rather enjoy these events when they come around than miss out because I feel I have to limit myself.

I like to think of myself as unlimited, and try to live that way. I even have card to prove it. And yes, my calorie intake is unlimited – but only if I accept my exercise limit is as well.

Some people may have noticed that my gym visits have dropped off recently. This is sad and I am looking to rectify it as soon as possible so I can eat more and be less hungry.