Day 20

Day 20

So feeling the benefits of dramatically changing diet/exercise regime for the past 20 days.. Feel better and weighed in a few kilos lighter so happy with that.. but am slightly concerned  that the first band of flab and excess kilos were the easy ones and Im not even a quarter of a way through this.. So encouraged with the improvement but had just begun telling myself not to start celebrating at day 20 and getting lazy when Patrick sent this mornings note saying just that.. So need to press on! With work, working out, buying groceries, cooking, eating and sleeping I have really found I have no time left in the day. Im sure plenty of the PCPers out there have equally long days at work with no time to work out in the middle but I am surprised at just how little time I have to myself even having paused the social life. Before I started  this project I envisaged myself sat around the flat scratching my head for things to do and desperately resisting the temptation to take up a friends offer to meet up for a few beers.. I wrote out a list of stuff that I wanted to do that didn't involve eating or drinking that I wanted to fit in these 3 months, so far I don't think I've got beyond "play a bit more Playstation" so the other cultural extravaganzas may have to wait it would seem. I think being occupied mostly with shopping and preparing meals has been a blessing in disguise as its very much a distraction to the fact Im not socialising but also in the process I learnt that actually I can cook healthy tasty meals at a fraction of the cost and I actually quite enjoy it. On the social side I havent had the temptation I feared either.. Mostly due to friends knowing people on the PCP and being supportive and willing you to do well.. "Oh youre doing the same thing as Arnie.. He's trimmed up a ton".. "You should see what Eddie Jones missus makes him for lunch, this diet thing you guys are doing doesn't seem so bad".. "I cant believe how well Big Al's doing.. He's looking loads better" So Hong Kong is definitely talking PCP ironically quite a lot of that talk is in the bars.

Exercise - Im getting the skipping done, breaking it into sets of 100 and 200 a time, and after studying countless youtube videos of Floyd Mayweather have got the side to side technique sorted.. The issue is that my concentration and counting go wandering off (reassuring for anyone working in Finance) as I start daydreaming about Steak and Spag Bol while Im doing it.. I would find it a lot easier if we just had a set time to skip for and set an alarm so could just focus on the technique but I suppose the better we get the easier it comes.. Pull-ups are definitely the incline version and the thought of doing 2 successive real pullups is a way off.. The number of pressups I can do has gone up nicely so that remains my bellwether for general PCP progress.. I couldn't do 3 sets of 7 on day 1 and now squeezing out 4 sets of 10 which gives me something to grasp to when Im searching for signs that this is working!

Big Al has given me a few excellent ideas on the cooking front.. I have been eating a lot of soba and bagels as my carbs of choice with the odd helping of brown rice, with a lot of steamed fish and salad or steamed veg. I found the  Livestrong website as a good source of recipe ideas as well as finding nutritional information on food especially as you can find low sodium recipes.. Few things have crossed my mind.. Low fat cottage cheese has  similar nutritional info to that of yoghurt/protein.. Can this fit into the diet? And if so where? Also yoghurt as Allan pointed out on his blog can seriously vary on the sugar despite all being labelled as "NO FAT" this seems very dishonest and I wondered given most yoghurt has some sugar in except the really sour Greek version if there was  a tolerable level of sugar we could have in the low fat yoghurt we buy?

One last thing.. Watched Food Inc. whilst eating my PCP dinner last night.. Felt all noble.. If you havent seen it its not a bad one to watch for a bit of inspiration, it's a pretty interesting movie and one of the contributors is Michael Pollan who wrote that Unhappy Meals piece Patrick had us read the first week.