Couldn't resist. . .

. . .a cheeky step on the scales first thing Saturday morning.  15st and 6oz.  So close!  If I'm below that come this Friday I will be very pleased indeed, as we went out Saturday night and ate loads of food with plenty of beer and had the same again on Sunday.  I enjoyed every bit of it though.

Don't forget to enjoy life

I was pleased to see my weight drop by another lb since last week.  No mean feat considering I ate a large Domino pepperoni pizza and six hot wings last night, all washed down with five cans of the fizzy stuff as it was the wife's birthday.  We shall be out again tomorrow night for a Chinese meal.  Birthdays only come once a year, so make sure you celebrate them.

The Greatest Scam in the History of Medicine?

aka 'The Great Cholesterol Myth'

The statins market is worth over £20 billion per annum, a highly lucrative business. Why would the companies that manufacture statins not wish to perpetuate Lies* about cholesterol?  Read and decide for yourselves.

* I'm not pointing the finger at any particular statins manufacturer.  I'm pointing it at all of them!

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. . .

. . .and a little of what you like does you good.

"One last session on the beer" - "No more pig outs after this weekend" - "This cheesecake is too good to miss. I'll be good starting Monday".  Sound familiar?  So do you mean it or will you be saying exactly the same thing next weekend?

My advice is don't make rash promises.  Set realistic goals.  Everyone should allow themselves a 'cheat' day at least once a fortnight.  Top athletes and bodybuilders do it.  Make something taboo, be it food or drink, and you are setting yourself up to fail.  If you want a burger/pizza/ice cream or whatever, then have it.  Just don't have it all the time.

Get up off your backside

Here are some cheery little factoids to end the working week.  Enjoy!

I urge you to. . .

. . .use MyFitnessPal.  I've been using it, logging my food and exercise in a diary for just a few days and can already see I am a bit too fond of bacon and egg sandwiches for breakfast, and snack too often on peanut butter, cashews, digestive biscuits and chocolate in it's various forms and disguises (Snickers etc. are mostly salt, sugar and vegetable fat whereas Green and Blacks 85% is real chocolate).  Consuming these high calorie products mean my daily recommended calorie limit is being reached before my body's nutrient needs have been satisfied.  This increases the likelihood of late night snacking before bed.  Additionally, any weight loss from exercise is being cancelled out.  Now I'm not saying you should never eat these things - just have them occasionally as a treat and not every day as part of your staple diet.

Another spoon of peanut butter before bed anyone?

Every little helps

A couple of colleagues have been using MyFitnessPal since June 2013 with astonishing success, having shed almost 4 stones between them in 3 months (it's no magic bullet - they are exercising too), so if you need/prefer a helping hand, you could do worse than investigate.  Create a free account, logon, set your current and target weights, enter your daily food intake and exercise, and your calorific intake VS expenditure is logged to to give you a running total.  There's a forum where you can post to like-minded masochists.  There's even a MyFitnessPal app for Android and Apple devices which include a barcode scanner which will do all the work for you with certain food items.  I entered the stuff I could remember over just two days, and was surprised by the high numbers of calories my "healthy" snacks contained.  I'll be using it over the next couple of weeks and will report back my findings.  Suffice to say, what I have seen so far is very encouraging.

Beer is not your weight-loss friend. . .

. . .nothing like stating the bleeding obvious is there?  Someone asked "But surely, beer is just water, barley, malt and hops so there can't be any fat in it, can there?"  Well, no.  Beer does not generally contain fat (apparently 0.3gm of fat in a pint of draught Guinness), but it does contain 'empty' calories.  As you know, when you consume excess calories the body converts these to fat.  So when you consume excess calories as beer, why should this be any different?  Drinking lots of beer makes you eat more than usual too.  I have no idea why this is.

Anyway, since I stopped drinking beer on a school night the weight has started dropping off nicely with no real effort - 3lb shed this past week.