58

Had another fantastic chuncky piece of grilled barramundi for lunch today. It can taste muddy from time to time, but when I get a piece like today that doesn't have that earthy flavour, it's so hard to beat. Had it on top of a bowl of "fried" vegetables, basically chopped shrooms, tomatoes, asparagus, onions, peppers fried without oil, just with a lid on the pan and and occasional top up of water. A few herbs, pepper and the usual helping of chopped chilli... very filling and good! Yesterday we bought a veritable smorgasbord of different kinds off fish fillets, so the next week of lunches is going to be fabulous.

One day to go before taking a good solid long week off work. Not going anywhere - not much point as I won't be allowed to demolish any breakfast buffets, so going to be taking it easy at home & spending some time in the garden....and probably quite a lot more on the trails or in the gym. Counting the minutes in the office & trying to fill in the time by doing stomach crunches at the desk. Basically lean back in your chair, press down with your hands on the desk top, lift your feet up and hold. Have to be careful not to grimace or your colleagues might think you have are attempting to fill your trousers, but it helps pass the time in a PCP friendly way.

56

We are getting dangerously close to being only one month to go. So here's a bit a of a boring progress update. The good news is that after plateauing for a bit, I finally cracked my second milestone of 120kg and came in at 119kg yesterday. I am now the same weight I was when I got married:  Six years have been repaired! I am gradually shrinking and down to the last notch on my belt, so it is happening, but...

This decelleration in weight loss over the last month has left me with a load to do to make my 110kg target. It's still achievable, but hopefully any muscle growth will slow and and the fat burn can accelerate from here. Just got to lose the gut somehow!

To kickstart the progress again, I have ramped up the aerobic stuff a bit recently and have been doing the sets and then 1hr at a time on the cross country machine (it helps that there have been some cracking rugby games on the telly over the last few days). Not sure if I can sustain this much, as often I can end up spending the best part of 2 hours in the gym at a time. But will do my best to keep at it and hopefully if I can spend a bit less time rolling around on the floor making noises like a mortally wounded gnu then I should be getting out a bit sooner. I'm also still mixing it up with squash and hiking, so its not quite as bad as all that. I haven't touched the rope since week three and (fingers crossed) the joints are holding together nicely for now.

Aside from all that, am sleeping a bit better, feeling good and enjoying the beautiful weather. I do however have a couple of PCP pitfalls ahead of me - my brother is coming to town for the first time next weekend and I have another good friend in town the week after...I need to come up with a damage limitation plan as the resolve will certainly be tested!

Some Thought for Food.

Brekkie looked good this morning: toast, mushrooms, asparagus topped off with scrambled egg with a little chopped chili! Tasted good too - no need for butter or salt! Thanks to darling wife for making eating simple food a pleasure!

Took a nice pic of my Salmon sando the other day too....I could have spent a bit more time making it look pretty but its definitely times like this that PCP seems a lot more approachable.

For me the food has to look right - a mush of brown pasta and brown meat and potato and...well lets just say I can see another reason why Patrick bangs on about different colours in vegetables. It just somehow looks healthy and tasty and with food, presentation is often 50% of the flavour!

Where I have the extra time, I'll definitely spend more of it on food artistry!

Happy Easter!

There's always something a little bit special about working on Hong Kong Holidays. The drive into a deserted Central is a real pleasure, a leisurely stroll into the office a little bit late, no noisy colleagues around and its great to sit and get stuff done. If I can really focus, I can be done and out by around 4pm and head off to the gym or play squash and then....

.....go to Mortons Steak House for happy hour (cheap cocktails and free steak sandwiches between 5pm and 7pm on weekdays).....

The dream sequence is now over. Sadly all that will have to wait. I'll be off instead to the supermarket for some more asparagus, mushrooms, low fat yoghurt, and Chocolate Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns dripping with warm melting butter...and...

...is this a dream within a dream?

Its a bit of a slow day. The motivation is still there and I'm managing to be a good boy, but I can't help missing the real joys of Easter and sadly I have to admit my brain hasn't yet become completely "PCP adjusted". I'm just glad I'm not doing this over Christmas as I'd be going completely insane by now!!

It is after all Good Friday, so BE GOOD!

Day Fiddy

Tired and sore today after some solid workouts over the last two days. Knee hurts after all those squats and I decided in my wisdom to use a new machine thingy they have that the gym to do those shoulder flys and its really got to a couple of muscles in my shoulders.

Glad to have something that is "eat as much as you can" on the menu as historically I've responded pretty well to that kind of encouragement! (although it used to be pizza rather than veggies).

Mentally things a bit better again - at the half way stage it was pretty depressing:

"man after all that, we're still only half way, f..."

....but now its swiftly becoming,

"Jeez, only 40 days to go, I'd better get this stuff done as I'm running out of time"

The fact that I've seen relatively little progress in my weight or my gut over the last 2-3 weeks is the worst. The only thing that's been keeping me going is the basic certainty that by doing my exercises its definitely better from than not doing my exercises. And the argument that muscle weighs more than fat is starting to wear a bit thin as I'd have to be some sort of Charles Atlas by now. The gut is proving to be remarkably stubborn at this moment, but as with my previous experience, these dieting things rarely end up being completely linear and there is often a tendency to plateau.

One thing I am going to change is that I have been going to the gym after work to make sure I get my exercises done early, but it means I tend to eat late, around 10pm (literally just before going to bed), which is really no good. So I think I'm going to try and get the food in somehow before the exercise and hopefully I can burn some of those calories before going to bed rather than while I'm sleeping.

Day 49

Have been a little wayward recently. Over the last week, I continued to do good sessions in the gym and "nail my grams", but on friday I played squash twice and didn't do my sets, on saturday I had another marathon 1 1/2 hour intensive squash session and also didn't do my sets. The good news is I played a bunch of guys that six months ago I couldn't get close to: the improvement in my power to weight ratio over the last month has been so much that I'm getting around really a lot more quickly, reaching things that were previously impossible and I find I have stamina to spare. I whipped them all! Its a good feeling, but I also know while i had a couple of excellent aerobic workouts, its really the strength training that makes this all possible, so I'll be very much back on the case this week.

The real naughtiness was that on Saturday night we had a dinner party at home. One of my very best friends is leaving Hong Kong this week after fifteen years and it was important for me to see him off in some kind of style. I knew we were due for an indulgence today, so I took it a couple of days early and did a barbeque with burgers, steaks, some decent wine. And a cheesecake from the Mandarin Cake Shop. Did I bust my calories? ..er..I think so. Did I feel sick afterwards? Yup. Do I regret it? Not this time. 

So some good news and bad, but we still have roughly six weeks to go and now that I have satisfied any cravings, cleared my schedule and done the things I need to do, you have my promise that I'll be back, glued to the program with no excuses for at least the next two weeks!

Day 44, Nearly Half Way

Have done some of pretty solid sessions over the last couple of days and last night managed 1 1/2 hours on a cross country machine which is up there for the longest continuous amount of exercise I've done - I've done longer and hard sports training sessions, but for non-stop fat burn this could be it!

I did actually set out just to do 30mins before doing the strength training, but then a really good TV show came on and I thought I'd watch the first five minutes and then a bit more and some more and then it turned out the show was an hour and not half an hour and then, well that was that. It was a highlights show of All Black victories against the Wallabies....I could quite happily watch the All Blacks play all day long and for that matter I could quite happily watch the Aussies get stuffed all day long (apologies to Aussies in the audience), so at least I know now what DVD's to add to my Christmas list...

I have been cheekily checking the scales again (I know i shouldn't), but am getting dangerously close to the second 120kg milestone: am off somewhere between 13-15kg (depending on where I stand on my scales - they are a bit crap). But the good news is that with six weeks to go, I'm well on target. The skin is definitely getting tighter around my face and complexion a lot better and if it wasn't for the massive bags under my eyes from lack of sleep, am sure I'd be looking a bit younger too!

Our PCP cousins who are about to leave us must be feeling some mixed emotions right now. I would imagine one side of the brain is focussed on a future of discipline, training, devotion, health and a strong sense of purpose.....and the other side is all sofa, beer and pizza. Either way, Good Luck!!!

The Cure

Yes I know it's not completely PCP friendly, but after eating almost entirely white meat for six weeks, I had to have some: today's lunch was a super lean, but super good grilled fillet steak sandwich. Complemented by a small mountain of grilled onions and spot of chopped chilli, it hit the nail squarely and firmly on the head. And the first time I've felt full in days. I'm not going to be doing it every day, but I think a bit of lean red meat once a week wouldn't be remiss from now on...it's sorted me out big time. Now ready to take on the world again!

Sunday

It's been another fabulous weekend with a perfect temperature, humidity that's under control and glorious sunshine. Really hoped to go hiking, but today I'm just completely wiped out. Have done some great sessions all week and have pushed it as far as I can go. The hunger has however been getting worse and today I really have just simply run out of juice. The motivation is still all there, but after doing only a bit of work in the garden this morning, I am glued to the sofa, no energy, half awake, can't nap, staring into space, muscles only feeling tired. Actually reminds me a little of accounting lectures at university, but at least then I had the energy to run out the door. Need a bit of an energy boost here as I know this middle section of the PCP is key.....

Oh one thing before I go, we have some absolutely awesome fillets of barramundi yesterday and cod today, cooked simply in foil with some peppercorns, asparagus and mushrooms. This is one thing I have to thank the PCP for - I've been really enjoying getting back into quality pieces of fish!

The Hunger

Well from looking at James Y's progress over the last couple of months it was around now that he went through big changes between weeks four and six and I now am beginning to understand why. The hunger is really kicking in. Last night I actually had to stop half way through playing a squash match and go and drink some water - just because my stomach was so empty it was making me feel ill! Getting up this morning was a real problem again - running on empty. Need more protein! Or something.

But at least I feel thinner every day. And the trousers are getting pretty baggy now. And some old shirts that I haven't worn for two or three years are wearable again. The trouble is that if I look in the mirror I don't really see it. This is a special feature of dieting: because everything gets smaller at the same time, my gut still sticks out as much as it did relative to everything else and it leaves me wondering what it is I have to do?? I am fully aware of this from my last dieting effort so nothing to worry about as it will go eventually. And the only thing one can do is shut up, keep the eyes closed and carry on with the program. Don't worry about it and only check the progress when its all done! Trust in the PCP and it will happen!!!

The Good Gerbil

After bleating quite a lot about the horrors of the gym/gerbil cage, I've done my last couple of PCP sessions there and I will go back again tonight. And I'm actually quite enjoying it (sharp intake of breath from the audience!). I quite like the range of resistance levels and proper machines to do some of this stuff where the edge of the table or the back of a chair would be normally trying to split my hand in two.

The other major advantage is that, well, lets face it PCP isn't very friendly to the knees and being a bit of a cripple myself, the gym presents a whole world of alternatives to pistol squats and skipping. I went through a couple of weeks of not quite knowing what to do to keep up and have developed a mountainous guilt complex. But since then even just a couple of hard sessions in the gym have left me feeling a lot better about my current progress and I've been able to do a lot of extra stuff on low impact cross country machines, squat machines etc. which give me more control over what my knee is doing (but doesn't give me the full range of movement I might get the PCP way). I know this isn't quite in the spirit of the PCP, just as Rocky trained down at the abattoir while his Russian foe trained on all the latest hi-tech equipment, but at least I'm working mostly the right muscle groups and walking out of the place completely drained and that's good enough for me.

Have found it very hard to get up the last few mornings and slept through the alarm yesterday which is very dangerous - absolutely can't be late for work. More protein??

The Gym...

Was super bleary eyed this morning. Still getting the exercises done too late in the day which is not helping sleep much. The key is to exercise straight after work, which for us means going to the gym. However after years of gym dodging, it's become second nature to say "fck it!" and go home, which is what we did again last night. We did all the stuff when we got home, but it was easily 10pm by the time we finished, which for early birds is bed time already...

Why do I hate the gym so much? I suppose I've built up an impression in my mind that the gym is the saddest place on earth where human gerbils, trapped by an oppressive society, too lacking in imagination to go outside and do something worthwhile miserably grind away on machines in some sort of Orwellian effort to conform with the suffocating values of that society. On the adverts for Pure Fitnesss, they don't paint quite such a grey picture, but I'm sure five minutes in the hands of Terry Gilliam, and that's what we'd get.

Competitive sport seems to me a much more acceptable activity, where in my case, a friend and I will chase a little ball around a small room attempting to hit it as hard as possible. It is utterly pointless as well, but at least it retains a social element and the all important competitiveness that's missing from individual training - you get no points or no recognition for doing that last extra rep, so why bother? I will quite happily run after a ball like a happy labrador until I fall over with exhaustion without thinking about the pain once...

Where am I going with this ramble? Well I suppose my point is really that I'm sitting at my desk glued to a computer and when I go home, I often spend more time glued to a computer (as I can't deal with any personal communication in the office much) and there is no physical component to what has become an otherwise entirely sedentary existence. So in order to the redress the balance, I have to visit the gerbil cage once a day which feels as if had properly organised my life in the first place, it should be completely unnecessary. Working out at the gym seems to expend vast amounts of human effort singularly for our own personal physical betterment...surely there is a yet higher purpose to which we can commit so much of our energies?

Or why not just get new occupation where exercise is at least included as part of the job description? Mountain guide? hod carrier? Fitness instructor? But if you work in a gym, are you the teacher, helping people achieve their personal goals or are you the evil master, exploiting a blinkered populous? Maybe Animal Farm was an allegory for the local yoga studio?? Patrick???

Ok, just kidding... he'll be cutting my bananas next....oh...he's done it already.....apparently I can keep the apple as long as I say that yoga studios have nothing whatever to do with totalitarianism...

Walking on Sunshine

HK has a summer "on" switch. It happened on friday and since then our miserable existences have been transformed into an orgy of fabulous weather. I'm sitting here with all the doors open out on the garden - its just an awesome day. Its also as far as PCP goes going to be the thing that supercharges all the exercises and thing I've been counting on. Those guys finishing the PCP shortly will have missed it, those about to start will learn to hate it, but we've had time to acclimatise in the cool and now we can get the full benefit of the heat and humidity. The exercised are already a lot harder than last month, but when the heat kicks in the benefit will be a truck load more! Keeping hydrated's going to be a lot harder from now on....

In keeping with my promise to replace the rope with other stuff, I hiked up Castle Peak yesterday. It took only about an hour and ten minutes to get up there which was a lot quicker than i expected (with stronger legs and reduced gut), but i reckon I could get the time down to around 55mins, so am going to give it another whirl today. Just trying to get psyched us for it as its a bit daunting. Its like being on an exceptionally mean stairmaster for an hour - and once you start you can't just hop off it...brilliant exercise in this weather though.

Weighed in at 125 yesterday. I was complaining I hadn't met my target of losing 10kg in the first month, but a late spurt and I made it two days after. I'm now in sight of the second milestone - get down to the same weight as I was when i got married, 120 and the next is the same weight I was when I met the missus - 110. My final target is 100 which is unlikely to happen during the PCP time, but I'll keep going till I get there. And then figure out a lifestyle to keep me there...with a social life!

PCP a-go-go

Well kinda. Trawled through the sets, snotty nose and all, but only managed 200 skips before I realised its just not going to happen. Knee and ankle flared up again. I think we're just going to have to figure out how get through this thing without the rope as its just sending me backwards phsically and not doing much to improve my sense of humour either.

We live on a very steep hill (basically one of the steeper continuous hikes in HK) and while I've been up it before, I've been dreading he day when I feel I need to do it again and I know now I've run out of excuses. It only takes 1-2 hours depending on the weather, so its something we can do in the morning and if i can go up and down that thing a couple of times a week, I'll have legs like tree trunks. Maybe swimming a couple of times a week and squash three times and I should be pretty well sorted. Anything that involves stepping or lunging is fine, but pounding seems to be a problem - so any ideas of other stuff i can do, then I'm all ears...ballroom dancing???

The best news is that this is the first friday I've finished work without being absolutely desperate to go out and get completely smashed - the cravings are gone! A relatively quiet week and being a bit under the weather helps, but is this the beginning of a new me?