So, it is now exactly one week since I last ate bread. This is not all that interesting until I say that since I have been eating solid food this has never happened before. I have never gone as long as seven days without eating bread. So why am I doing this thing, which for me is very hard indeed? Well, I’ve been looking for an approach that will work for me to change my eating habits, and on reflection I decided that copying Stephen Fry might well be something that I could enjoy aspiring to… What do I mean? Well, it has become an open secret, due to the auspices of Twitter and Top Gear in the main, that Mr. Fry has recently lost a good deal of weight by taking two courses of action. Firstly he cut out all bread and potatoes from his diet. He did not adopt a “mad” zero carbohydrate diet, he just drastically reduced his daily carbohydrate intake by removing two of the largest contributor’s of the aforementioned food group from his diet, and I realised that not eating any bread or potatoes that I would generally halve the amount of carbohydrate I eat every day as well. His second choice was to start taking daily walks of at least an hour in duration, off-setting the boredom / loss of time by enjoying audiobooks as he walked. Well I have spent all week making the dietary adjustment, and let me tell you it has been hard, but at the same time I have felt a couple of benefits, one of which has been a real eye-opener. I have some sleep dysfunction (I know who doesn’t in these days of modern life), and I had always put my propensity to nod off in the afternoons on work days down to the fact that I don’t sleep as much as I probably should. Still this week it has not happened once; that’s right, not once. I have also found myself being a LOT more hungry than I am used to being in the run up to meal-times, and as such I have been really enjoying what I have eaten, even though I have often eaten less than I might have done previously and also eaten things that I would not normally choose all week long.
Today I have taken my first “long walk”. Since my injury at the beginning of the year I’ve not driven, and as I became more mobile into March and April I’ve been walking a LOT, but I haven’t walked without stopping for more than an hour since I was in the bush in Kruger, so it was with __some__ trepidation that I set out from my home this afternoon / evening to walk all the way across Reading to Tilehurst Station (in order to ride back on the train). You can see my route here:
In the mould of the lovely Mr. Stephen Fry I had prepared for this activity by subscribing to Audible, and I had sync’d my first audio book, “The Time Traveller’s Wife” up to my newly charged iPhone. I stepped out of my door as the male narrator read out the epigrams to me, noted the inauspicious looking sky and then set off to walk.
An hour and ten minutes later I had moved through the town where I live, and I was where I had meant to end up – it was easy… Well it wasn’t __easy__. I mean I had broken a sweat, even though the temperature had dropped and it had started to rain gently, and I was tired and looking forward to sitting down on the platform while I awaited the train to take me back to Reading Station, but it was no great sacrifice either. What do I mean by that? Well, my experience with exercise throughout most of my adult life is that I __actually__ enjoy it, but I procrastinate about it (a lot) partly based on the illusion about how much of a sacrifice of time and effort that doing it would represent. Shock horror it is actually was pleasant (even fun), and I enjoyed the walk.
Of course the light rain was a torrential downpour by the time I got back to Reading, so I got a __little__ wet…
Anyway, onwards and upwards with regard to staying on the Stephen Fry bandwagon on the diet front, and as regards walking, I am planning to start walking to the office in the morning. I mean I am still going to ride the train to Paddington, but the plan is to walk from there to the office on Blackfriars Road, and to do that every day if I can. The hope is that I can keep that up, and the money I save on the Travelcard aspect of the monthly ticket I buy can be what I spend on audiobooks… Well it’s a strategy at least.
Hope you all have a good week.
.
EOT
Good luck with it Ol. Stick with it because there will be times when you’ll find it very hard – that’s when I focus on the end goal and it will keep you going.
Cheers mon ami – positive reinforcement greatly appreciated 🙂