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Beloved Wife has been a member of Fitness First for aeons, and has for a similar period been trying to goad her spouse into the gym. It has all been to no avail because the Goat is allergic to being ridiculed by the Fitness Gestapo (and the Cholesterol Stasi, and the BMI Inquisition) because he's let himself go over the past half century.
Previous attempts at keeping fit, or more specifically keeping weight off, have of course been doomed to failure. The two most obvious reasons for this are ale and pies, but there are others. The Goat does not lack willpower, but having tried Atkins for a month and not lost one ounce; having been furiously cycling around Mirdif every day for a couple of weeks and achieved nothing but a sore arse; having fasted throughout a previous Ramadan (because a work colleague said he couldn't, and that's a thrown gauntlet) and not partied at night, again not to lose an ounce, is demoralising.
Last week, Beloved Wife went to renew her gym membership, and noticed that the ridiculous joining and admin fees had been temporarily waived. Following a further "I want a gym buddy" discussion, the Goat finally agreed to join for six months. That's the commitment, and it remains to be seen how successful it will be. The Goat is not expecting to lose 30% of his body mass in six months (it took 17 years to pile it on) but he'll be extremely disappointed if the effort has similar effects to his previous efforts.
The Goat was obliged to go and buy some gym shoes and exercise shorts. It will come as no surprise to learn that he didn't already own any of these and, apart from when using the pool, it's not allowed to exercise barefoot. This is a bit of a problem; the Goat hates wearing shoes and only ever does so under duress.
New membership includes an orientation and a couple of sessions with a personal trainer. The Goat's personal trainer didn't actually say that he was horrified that such a fat slacker had joined a gym. He did set some "ambitious but realistic" targets for weight loss. The method is the usual unsurprising combination of diet and exercise. The super-tech bathroom scales produced estimates of body fat along with body mass, plus where the Goat carries it, and then came up with a recommendation of a starvation diet of 1970 calories a day. That'll surely make the weight fall off: the Goat burns an estimated 2500 calories per day while resting.
As for the
The Goat dragged Beloved Wife over to the gym yesterday, and while she swam, he spent 25 minutes each on the treadmill and the bicycle. All he has to show for his efforts are two massive blisters on his heels.
Bloody shoes.
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2 comments:
Excercise is the key. Having lost three stones by doing Atkins and, at the same time, two laps of the rugby fields every day, imagine my disappointment to find, having moved house and not having easy access to the rugby fields anymore, that Atkins on its own was completely ineffective. I now use an "app" called myfitnesspal to keep a track of diet (in calories consumed) and exercise (in calories expended) and just make sure that the former is smaller than the latter. This seems to work and produces weight loss with only 30 to 40 minutes of exercise a day. Good luck with the Gym. I am looking forward to making proper use of one of the the ones at our new compound in August. I like to refer to the chaps only gym as "the gym" and the ladies only gym as "the gymima" :-)
I too discovered myfitnesspal. It's particularly useful when eating in chain restaurants, because (o horror) a Big Mac has the same number of calories wherever it's served.
Zero calories in my case.
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