Day 19

Had a killer week with 14-16 hour days and mega stress. I managed to stick with the food quite well and only missed one meal. I really see the sense in the eating program now. I'm now very keen to eat something fatty in the morning to give me energy, protein at night to help me build muscle and now i never even need to check the clock when to take my fruit snack. I can somehow just seem to detect my blood sugar dropping and I have to pop some strawberries - if I'm late by even a few minutes, I start to get manically desperate.

Exercise went out of the window on wed and thurs and friday I got home earlyish around 9pm, but was just too knackered to contemplate it. I managed to squeeze in a couple of games of squash in gaps during the week, but I'm three days behind. I did a double session today to catch up and will do another double session tomorrow. Its quite nice that the exercises vary muscle groups from day to day so if I do have to do double, its actually not too bad. I bought a dumbell set last week and have been doing the upper body stuff with those and really noticed a step change improvement - maybe we couldn't find strong enough bands, but much happier with progress here now. The rest from skipping may have also been a blessing in disguise as I have a dodgey knee (had ACL op a few years ago) and since starting PCP its swelled up like a grapefruit. Three days off the pounding of skipping has made a big difference. That and the new bionic knee brace thingy I've found...1700 skips today went like a breeze!

Its been a tough week for a lot of people, and I'm sure at least one has dropped out. I've certainly had a lot of bad thoughts, but I think there are a couple of important things to bare in mind.
1. PCP is three months. In dieting terms that's a lifetime. If something really important comes along that's going to screw with your PCP plan for a few days, that shouldn't be a big deal....as long as you don't do really stupid stuff for any great lenght of time. A week long drinking bender will take a lot of time to correct, but missing a day or two of exercise or accidentally necking a couple of glasses of wine and a steak isn't going to ruin three months work.
2. Even if you're missing your grams and exercise is not going quite as well as you hope, you're still not eating even half the fat, sugar and salt you used to eat and are probably still doing a lot more exercise. I often remind myself that even if I'm doing 30% of what I set out to do, I'm still doing two or three times more than what I would have been doing anyway. Its ok to let it slide a bit from time to time even if it annoys Patrick - its his job to get you super ripped, but I think most of us would be pretty chuffed with even half the results he's setting out for us.

To cut a long story short, I'm doing my best to stick with the program and catch up where I'm falling short, but I'm not going to get fired just because I have run off and do some skipping. Hopefully back to some sort of normality next week!