Contracting in Warrington

I have spent the last few months working in Warrington, and it looks like my contract is going to be extended for quite a bit more. I have had a difficult decision, to carry on working so far from home with one hell of a drive each Monday and Friday, or to hunt for something much more local. The advantage of working where I am is that it is a big customer, guaranteed to pay their bills on time. The only disadvantage is location. That said, quite a number of my colleagues are long distance commuters. One does the journey from London daily. Now the darker, colder (I almost said wetter, but the summer wasn’t great either) weather is here, then getting up on that Monday morning for a four-five hour drive is less and less attractive.

Back to Gym and swimming

Good eating at the B&B has led to a gradual increase in my belt length, and I am starting to see the yo-yo weight loss/gain cycle swing back. So, refusing to give in, I have joined a local gym (in Warrington) and for the last few weeks have managed to get there 4 times per week. A couple of gym sessions and a couple of long swims each week should stave off the creeping waistline. In fact, I have already noticed a small decline.

Cycling at the weekends is on the backburner too, I’m afraid, as Alison has been unable to ride due to her running injury. So, the new cycle roof rack has hardly been used. Oh well, not long till spring.

Drupal odds and sods

I am still enjoying the Drupal CMS, and keep toying with moving this blog back. I have been experimenting with a site with more static pages and less timeline orientated, but still retaining some blog-like features and think that Drupal will give the best of both. I have also managed to do some freelancing on Drupal, so not diluting my skills with yet another system seems a good idea.

iPod Classic

I am saddened to keep hearing rumours that Apple may be dropping the iPod classic as the flash based storage devices have a lot of advantages. I see this, but the 160Gb Classic has enabled me to ditch an external brick I was using for camcorder footage and backups while away from home, so please, please don’t ditch it Apple, until you have at least a couple of hundred gigs of flash on a device.

Four months ago I wrote:

My goal is to lose at least another 33lb, but my trainer says that I might have to reconsider my plans if I keep building muscle. It is not unreasonable with the work that I’m doing to be the same weight in 3 months time and yet have a body fat percentage of 17.5% and a waist of 34”.

So, how does my prediction compare with was has really happened? Well, I have lost another 26lb and my body fat has gone down from 26% to 16%. My waist? 38” to 33”. So, the body shape predictions were pretty close. Cool.

I am still dithering about whether to go into a maintenance diet at the end of March, or to carry on losing weight. I feel fitter than ever in my whole adult life, I can run about 4 miles, my swimming speed is about 15% quicker than ever before and the 5km Swimathon in 2 weeks time is looking easy (famous last words). My strength in the gym is seriously better than it was, lifting about 3 times the weights of 6 months ago. My body fat is slap bang in the middle of the healthy range and I am getting fed up of having to buy smaller and smaller clothes. This week I am going through my wardrobe to get rid of clothes that I have had for less than 4 months because they are way too big. The big “but” is my BMI, this statistic is the one that is bugging me, every time I say I am happy to stop at 12st7lb this little gremlin says “That is a BMI of 27.5 you know, overweight“.

Another half a stone would leave me at a BMI of 26.4, still overweight, with a BF% of 11% and a waist measurement of around 31”. Now, notice how this impressive body fat percentage and waist measurement would STILL leave me with a BMI which would be considered overweight. So would I still have that niggle if I pushed myself that far?

I’m sure I’ll make up my mind soon.

Ok, how’s it going? Well, the contract is quite straight-forward – I have to design and lead the team developing a web service broker collecting information from external systems. There is the usual stuff of concurrency, request queuing, XSLT transformations, etc. This isn’t dissimilar to some of the integration and communications work that I’ve been involved with recently, so I’m quite buoyant about being able to do a good job.

Living in a house has been a bit strange, since I have to do the washing up!!!

Eating within my calorie budget hasn’t been a challenge, so the diet is still on track – it helps that the cupboards are almost empty so I only have what I bought with me to eat.

Exercise has been more awkward – I have managed one run, one weight lifting session and one swim in four days, tomorrow I will manage another swim making it a better hit rate, but it is still under what I have been doing lately.

I must order broadband for this house, quickly checking email and a couple of websites that I like to keep an eye on via dial-up in a right pain (and it isn’t a quick check by the time the pages crawl in – gmail is amazingly unusable on dial-up)

I’ll be working away for quite a while, and have been getting a bit worried of how this will effect my fitness regime. I have worked quite hard to lose 38lb in weight and to get to my fittest cardio levels ever. I don’t want to go down the same road as every other time. For me, working away has been the trigger to massive weight gain several times before. So, based on that, here is my list of things to avoid….

• Hotel food
• Takeaway food
• Various food wagons
• Working late in the evenings
• Skipping exercise

Food is the biggest challenge. I’m staying in a house this time, not at a hotel, so I’ll take my weeks food with me, all planned out and healthily chosen. Even lunches will be taken with me, so those dreaded food wagons will be avoided at all costs.

I’m working on a contract which is for a fixed number of hours per week. I have been told that it is easy to be strict on working hours under these conditions, so I hope that’s right.

Exercise. I can now run outside, so I’m taking running shoes and that’ll be scheduled – as well as being a fall-back should other options not be forthcoming. There are quite a few leisure centres around, but previous experience has shown that public lane swimming times can be hard to work around. If I had joined a brand chain gym, finding a local branch would have been an easy option – but I prefer a real gym. So, I have to find a local gym that caters for my needs and allows short-term membership or pay-as-you-go sessions. Fortunately, I was told about The Real Gym which is a directory of such places. I have rung a couple up around where I’ll be staying and look forward to giving them a try.

Yesterday I had a really great workout down at the gym. My program gives me a free choice for the warm up, and I decided to go for a run on the treadmill. I managed the full 5 minutes without even breaking into a sweat, and my heart rate at the end was only 143. It was a fantastic kick-off to the session. I then increased the weights on the seated low-row, preacher biceps curl and the cable biceps curl. Also, I coped much better with the newly increased levels on the stepper and elliptical cross trainer.

Here’s hoping the next few workouts are as good!

What makes a successful diet? For me, losing weight is as hard as it was to give up smoking.

A significant difference is that when you give up smoking there is one very simple fact – you smoke no more cigarettes at all. Whereas you do have to eat, so when you get to the weight you want you have to carry on eating without letting the amount drift upward again. So eating well is something you have to keep an eye on for ever.

So we’ve got two aspects of dieting; losing the weight and maintenance. This post is about the weight loss aspect, I will do another post if I am successful as following a maintenance plan.

So, what is the difference about the two times in my life where I have been able to lose the weight versus the many, many other times where I fell off the wagon after a few weeks?

This post explores several key factors in my recent diet. As it is a very long post (for me), I have split a part of it away from the front page…

Motivation

Fairly obviously it’s not going to work unless the motivation is there. To try and kick an addiction just because someone else is telling you to, your partner, doctor, the news, the government, is not enough. You truly need to want to do it for your own reasons. For me it was getting fed up with growing out of another set of clothes that finally pushed me over the edge and made me decide that enough was enough. Another trigger was seeing a photo of myself from holiday that I was disgusted by. Other people may have a health scare, or catch sight of themselves in a mirror.

Calorie Intake

I firmly believe that you can only lose weight by using more calories than you consume. It’s as simple as that. Other diet techniques are either attempting to cheat this simple fact, such as Atkins where eating low-carb is supposed to force the body to burn fat, or they are variations on the theme. Weight watchers is calorie counting in disguise.

Limiting intake of fats, as a diet technique, only works because fats are high calorie foods. But, get the fat intake too low and it isn’t good for medium term health.

What I am trying to do is keep a healthy mix of the main nutrients, while keeping the total calorie intake low enough to lose weight. How much is low enough? Well, there are several ways to estimate your daily requirement and if you eat less than that amount by between 500 and 1000 calories then you will lose weight.

Don’t be tempted to cut back too much, as an extremely low calorie diet can be damaging – most recommendations say don’t go below 1000 calories less than your daily requirement, which would lead to a 2lb per week loss.

My calorie budget comes to about 1100 calories per day to lose 2lb per week. That isn’t much, really. If all I was doing is controlling my calorie intake I would find it very, very hard to eat only 1100 calories every single day. I would probably have given up after the second week.

Body fat

What you really want to lose is body fat, not just weight. If you diet with controlling your food intake alone then you won’t just be losing body fat. Your body actually finds breaking down your muscle for nutrients easier. It is not unusual for someone dieting to lose a good amount of weight, but end up with a higher body fat percentage at the end of it – and be less healthy.

Body fat is what really matters, but it is impossible to measure directly. Your weight is much easier to find out, but it isn’t that good an indicator of how well a diet is going. Simply measuring your waist each week is a better indicator than weight, or if the budget stretches far enough some body fat scales, such as the Tanita range are worth getting.

Exercise

So, how do you lose fat and not muscle? Well, I’m not sure that relatively fast diet (around 2lb per week) can burn just fat. All that you can reasonably expect is to maximise the fat loss. To do that then an exercise program to go alongside the diet will help.

Now, most people would recommend a cardiovascular workout such as walking briskly, or even running as a way of burning calories quickly and helping with the weight loss. But, a typical 10 minute jog will only burn about 100 calories, less than a Mars bar. Worse, the body needs to find the energy, and if you are eating a low calorie diet it will just as likely burn muscle as fat – not what we really want. (There are some benefits here though, which I’ll cover later).

That leaves anaerobic exercise, typically weight-lifting. Now weight-lifting burns a reasonable number of calories too (which could come from some muscle breakdown, also), but it induces muscles to rebuild, and given sufficient nutrients (especially protein) this growth will counteract the muscle wastage of being on a low calorie diet.

Remember that I said that I would find it impossible to keep to a diet where I could only eat 1100 calories per day? Cardiovascular exercise is a way of improving overall fitness while making that low-calorie budget achievable. Every 100 calories burned is an extra 100 calories that you can eat. So, on a day with a heavy workout I might have 500 calories of exercise that I can add to my budget, giving 1600 calories — much more liveable with.

Put it together

If you combine the thoughts regarding calorie intake, body fat and exercise (both cardiovascular and anaerobic) together it can seem quite confusing, and that it can’t all work together, but it can.

To reiterate, what are our goals? Lose weight. Lose body fat. Maintain muscle. Improve fitness. And we want to be able to eat enough food not to feel hungry all the time.

Here is my way of losing body fat….

1. Work out your daily calorie budget. A deficit of 500 calories per day gives about 1lb per week. Don’t go over a 1000 calorie per day deficit. This is the engine behind the weight loss.
2. Do three purely cardiovascular workouts per week, aiming for around 400 calories of exercise, so on those days you can eat 400 calories more. This makes it possible to eat more, and feel more satisfied as well as contributing to your overall fitness level.
3. Do three mixed workouts, 50% cardiovascular and 50% weight lifting, in my case this gives around 500 calories that I can add to my daily budget. Again, this makes is possible to eat more, but also helps to ensure that the weight loss is more fat than muscle.
4. Eat extra protein on days with weight lifting, so that the muscle regeneration has something to work with. But, don’t forget to take it out of your calorie budget!

That’s it. To make it work, you need to be able to fit in 6 bouts of exercise per week. Not easy for everyone, but a sure-fire way of making weight loss work. It might not be as hard as you may think, a friend has started cycling to work, a 20 minute journey each way which is the cardiovascular exercise taken care of.

Tracking

A key factor for success is recording your calories, and your weight loss progress.

I weigh myself daily, and use a program (Diet Power) to analyse that and the food that I am eating. The program smooths out the daily fluctuations due to salt, water and waste content which enables me to see my progress over time.

Quite a few experts recommend against weighing daily, and suggest a weekly weigh-in. I disagree. Daily fluctuations can be as much as 2 lb, so take a worse case scenario. On the first week you are on a low fluctuation and read 139lb. The next week you are on a high fluctuation and read 140lb. Oh no, what am I doing wrong? I’m gaining weight and I’m hardly eating and working out. Nothing works, I have a weird metabolism, I’m quitting. You really lost 1lb, but the infrequency of weighing compared with the daily “noise” makes it look like you’d gained a pound.

Daily weighing and the help of a program like Diet Power to “analyse away” the fluctuations makes it possible to see what your real weight loss is.

I also smooth out my body fat percentage readings from my Tanita scales to be able to see how much of my weight loss is fat.

Persistence

The final piece of the puzzle is persistence. Losing 50lb at a maximum safe rate of 2lb a week will take 6 months. This is a long time to be following a strict regime, and it is not possible for most people to do without the occasional wobble. In fact, how many meals out will you go on with friends? Or special events, such as Christmas or birthdays? Parties? Or even days where that Chinese takeaway is too irresistible to ignore?

My advice is based on damage limitation. The worst thing you can do is to give up entirely, so the main damage limitation is to restart the diet the next day. Simply get up, brush off the dust, and get back on that horse!

The next bit of damage limitation is to counteract the damage, if you can. If you can then restrict your calorie budget by a couple of hundred calories for a couple of days in advance and a couple of days after or have an extra workout. Don’t try too hard here, 2000 calories blown on a takeaway can’t be wiped out by an extra workout session after all, but it helps.

If you do wobble, don’t get too disheartened. Instead get focussed again and try and avoid wobbling again for at least a couple of weeks!

A very quick update. I have now lost 29lb of fat, gained 6lb of lean leading to a nett loss of 23lb. Only 26lb to go, so nearly half way.

My 38” trousers are now unwearable, my 36” trousers that I had outgrown but kept are now baggy. I hope I get some 34” trousers for Christmas, otherwise I will have nothing left to wear!

I am also running on the treadmill now, doing interval training. The progress here is slow, but rewarding. Once I manage the mile again I will be posting.

Swimming is becoming too easy, and I have started doing sprint lengths every couple of hundred meters to up the pressure.

It’s a long time since I’ve blogged here. I have a lot going on in my life at the moment and a fair bit of it I am not ready to talk about. Hence the silence.

But, something I do want to share is my latest (and greatest) attempt to get fit.

About 10 years ago, I lost about 7 stone to get down from a 44” waist trouser to a 32” inch trouser. I kept the weight off for some time, until I started working away from home a lot, staying in a hotel and then it climbed fast.

I made a few half-hearted efforts to lose that weight over the last couple of years with the Atkins diet and “I can make you thin”. These sort of worked, for a short time, and then when I got bored doing them the weight crept back – a little higher than the time before.

A couple of months ago I decided it was time to repeat the diet of 10 years ago. That time I used the Hacker Diet and joined a gym. I had a regular routine covering almost every day of swimming, weights and karate.

So, I searched for a program that could monitor my diet, the main requirements were that it smoothed daily weight readings, predicted the weight loss trend, recorded the daily intake and exercise and computed the overall effectiveness of the diet.

I found DietPower, an aged but very neat program. The best bit is the food input which uses a smart search function. This approach means that it takes only seconds to record your daily intake.

Also, I joined a gym. Now, I had tried this too a couple of years ago. I went to the local LA Fitness, and it was a disaster – after only a few sessions I stopped. I pushed myself too hard and made myself feel ill, and just stopped going. The gym didn’t offer any real guidance or motivation beyond the initial consultation and it was very expensive.

The gym that I joined is a much less glossy place, more down to earth and much more friendly than the faceless machine of the chain-gym. If you live in Colchester and want a practical gym that helps you meet your goals then Hamiltons Fitness is worth looking at.

LINK REMOVED – See Here to see why

Anyway, 7 weeks later of calorie counting, swimming and gym workouts I am 14lb lighter and have lost 6” off my waist. By involving body fat percentages the news is even better, I have lost 22lb of fat and gained 8lb of lean (possibly muscle). My one mile swim time has also improved from about 40 minutes to about 33 minutes.

My goal is to lose at least another 33lb, but my trainer says that I might have to reconsider my plans if I keep building muscle. It is not unreasonable with the work that I’m doing to be the same weight in 3 months time and yet have a body fat percentage of 17.5% and a waist of 34”.