I don’t think it will be a huge shock to anyone who is still reading this, but the whole Year of Health has run entirely out of steam, and the experiment is over. The time has come to admit defeat. Sad but true.

Over the weekend Ellen and I finally admitted the truth to each other. What started as a blip turned into a break. The break turned into a collapse. But the good news is that it’s not a total collapse, it’s just that the boundaries of what we were trying to achieve were just a little bit too ambitious. The sheer effort of keeping up these changes over a year when you also have to move house and live off an insanely small budget just don’t make it feasible. But now, nine months into the year, and with the last three months being essentially a write off, I still think we can look back and still be somewhat proud of what we’ve achieved, even if we didn’t fully realise what we intended to do.

Firstly, we’ve both quit smoking. If nothing else we can both be pretty proud of that. I have never given up for this long before and I can say with all honesty that it’s not something that I think about with any regularity. Unlike previous attempts this really feels like its taken hold, which is odd, considering that I thought it would be the hardest part of what we were trying to do.

Secondly, we have both lost weight. In the last few months I’ve put just over half a stone back on, but that seems to have stabilised and means that I am still one and a half stone down from where I was on January first. While I’m not in shape by any stretch of the imagination, it’s a drastic improvement on where I was. Ellen has actually done better than me and lost over two stone and she too seems to have stabilised, and she looks great and it seems to have done her the world of good.

So these are the main points, but there are other positives as well. We have made some real improvements to the way that we eat. While we now allow ourselves treats and are not particularly strict, there are quite a few things that we’ve taken out of our diets that make it a far healthier overall. Our main meals are much healthier overall, we use all fresh ingredients, and have moved to things like oil spray, low fat milk, healthy snacks and other low fat alternatives. The difference is that where we cannot abide the ultra-low versions (such as Flora Extra Light, which is just horrible) we have settled on the regular low fat range, which in comparison often tastes a lot better. Having made these changes permanent, it means that while we’re not being particularly strict, we have as many good days as bad days, and that seems to be the trick to not putting the weight back on.

It’s not all good news though. We have already said that after Christmas we’re going to try for another big push, and try and keep a cycle of six months on, six months off. When we do this the second time round, one thing we’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better is exercise. Neither one of us managed to commit to any particular regime for more than a week, and we didn’t have the funds to invest in something like a rowing or running machine to make it easier. I did try the sit up/push up regime that I mentioned before, and it was definitely starting to work, but in the end it was much easier not to do than to do. That for me was the real death of the whole experiment. Well, that and the fact that I work in a chocolate factory.

I had never dieted before, not in any serious way, and I always presumed that you needed to have a massive relapse for a diet to fail. But that’s not how it works at all. Instead it’s a thousand tiny failed battles, from taking one chocolate bar, or having one nice meal and slowly but surely you move the boundary of what is acceptable that little bit further back for yourself, until eventually you’re nowhere near strict enough with yourself and the effort has failed and you are sat munching on a big bag of chips and a battered sausage and you also have a cake in the freezer. It has been such an effort to cling on that in the end the prospect of starting all over again is just too damn tiring, too exhausting to contemplate.

And so we retire the Year of Health. From a logistical standpoint this website never really worked in the way I thought it would. It’s a very difficult topic to write about, very hard to make interesting. I had hoped it would serve as an introduction to blogging for Ellen, but I realised that it’s not really her cup of tea. But since she stopped it’s been difficult to find a reason for me to update it any more, and certainly I’ve not done anywhere hear enough to promote it, or try to monetise it, which was the original idea. I also really wish I’d gotten around to putting my Akismet anti-spam filter up, as not a day goes by without this place being besieged by spammers. So I don’t know what to do with this place now. I think I’ll leave this last post up for a little while, then import all my posts into the other blog for posterity. In future if I have anything more to say on this matter, then I’ll be saying it there and not here.

Truth be told I do feel a bit sad that it’s ended this way, with a whimper at the start of September, rather that with a bang and fireworks at the end of the year. As I write this a part of me thinks that maybe I should give it another go, make one last push over the last four months of the year to get into gear. But equally there’s another part of me that knows that when I finish writing this paragraph, I’m going to go down to the canteen to get a bar of chocolate, and it’s that utter lack of willpower that is preventing me from completing what I set out to do. I think that willpower is not something I have a great deal of, and like any finite resource I ran the risk of using it all too quickly. Perhaps my energy would be better spent recharging it, and seeing what I can do with it next year.

In the meantime, if you’ve stuck with me throughout this whole experiment then I’m sorry I don’t have a happy ending for you, and I thank you for all the good wishes and advice you gave over the course of the year. And keep your eyes peeled for next year, when I try and do it all again

Thanks

Paul

As of today, I am turning over a new leaf. Or more correctly, I’m dusting off the old leaf that I turned over at the start of the year, and turning it over again. I actually feel quite strong of willpower again, for the first time in ages, and today will be a no chocolate day. I think that writing yesterday’s post was exactly what I needed, which I suppose was the whole point of the website in the first place. Also, and most importantly, this morning I cycled to work. Not having cycled any great distance for the last few years (and given that I was riding Ellen’s ladies bike) I was expecting it to be a lot harder work than it was. I covered a journey that usually takes the bus 45 minutes in half an hour, and according to NutraCheck, by cycling to and from work today I will have burned an additional 656 calories. Which is not too shabby.

The only thing that worries me is the hillyness of the journey. On the way in this morning it was very up and down, but it was far more down than up. This is all weel and good of course, until you go in the other direction. I imagine that the ride back will be much much harder, but then the only way to look at that is that it will be a lot more calories burnt. I really want to shift the extra weight I have put back on as quickly as possible, and experience has shown that that shouldn’t be too hard, but I now have a stone and a half to go overall, rather than the single stone that was my target only a month back. But I feel like I have turned a corner again. May was a write off, but as long as I stop the decline, it’s not a wasted month. If nothing else, I can take from it a reminder that I do have the willpower to continue. Or at least that’s the theory. One day does not a turnaround make. But it’s a start.

I’m not going to sugar coat it. It’s all gone a bit wrong. Since moving into the new house my seemingly temporary blip has turned into a full blown collapse. In the last month I have put back on 6 pounds, and have spent most of my days eating ridiculous amounts of chocolate at work and not keeping any track of my calorie intake. Every day I resolve to start again, but then as the day wears on I think that maybe I’ll start again the next day. On top of this my exercise has gone down to zero, given that I no longer walk to work. All in all, the only thing I can really say is still going is the Smoking. Somehow the one aspect of this radical life change that I thought would be impossible is now the one thing that I no longer even have to think about. I could just walk away now and call it a victory, but it doesn’t feel that way.

The worst part about this is that it really shows how hard it is to keep up with this. I had hoped that after five months of healthy eating that the changes would automatically become a permanent fixture, that I would no longer crave the takeaway pizza or the Kit Kat chunky. But I do, and I don’t know if that will ever change. Even if I can kickstart this whole thing, how can I make sure that come the end of the year I don’t just fall back into old habits. I suspect that that will have to wait for further examination, at the moment I just really need to get back on the wagon. The first part of dealing with a problem is to admit to it, as the alcoholics are so fond of telling us, and I think I just did. Whether or not I can move forward from this and get back on track is another matter.

It’s been hard to get enthused over the last few weeks and so apologies for the lack of recent updating action, but for the first time this year my weight has gone up. Since my miraculous and illness influenced drop to 13 stone my weight went straight back up to 13.3, and for the last two weeks it has hovered around this area. On Saturday for my weigh in I had gone back down to 13, but then by the next day I was back up again.

As for the reasons for this, well firstly I think that when I got that far down it was at the end of a pretty nasty illness, but when my body adjusted to me eating food again it just went straight back up again. On top of that I have to admit that I’ve been pretty rubbish on both the food and exercise front. I haven’t been sticking to my calorie counts particularly rigidly, but this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if I had been doing my exercises as well. But aside from a couple of evenings last week I’ve been failing to do them as well.

There is another thing that I think is having a bit of a random effect as well. My weekly weight in is on a Saturday morning, and most weeks Ellen and I will celebrate the impending weekend with a drink on a Friday night. Obviously with the diet we tend to stick to spirits and a bit of wine rather than beer, but although these drinks are still quite calorific, I’ve noticed that on the morning after a hefty few drinks, my weight is always artificially lower than it should be. I suppose this is to do with the dehydrating effects of the drinking, but it means that often I think I am doing better than I am. For instance this Saturday morning I was back down (just) to 13.0 stone, but by the following morning I was back up to 13.2. I think that from now on I am going to change my weigh in morning to the day of the weekend which doesn’t start with a hangover, and stop kidding myself as to how well I am doing.

The truth is that the enthusiasm has gone a little over the last few weeks. One thing that was really lovely was a couple of weeks back when I went out with my friends and they all seemed genuinely surprised by how much weight I had lost, and were very ego boosting about the whole thing. But I knew in my heart of hearts that I had just finished a bad week, and instead of kicking me up the arse I think it actually made me a bit more complacent.

This is the really tough thing about this sort of challenge. It’s a full year of trying to keep a mental discipline towards your entire life, and the longer it goes on, the harder it gets. There are so many times when I just want to cave in. But so far, as much as I’m not doing great, I haven’t buckled and entirely given in. But I must be stronger. I need to regain the mental discipline that I had in the first few months, not just for the whole of this endeavour, but for all the other challenges I have set myself for this year. I’ve been falling back on all of them and if this year is going to be as life changing as I hope, then I am going to need to pick myself out of this temporary rut.  And so tonight I have stuck to the diet (and had a lovely mushroom and bacon stroganoff in the process) and now I am going to do some long overdue exercise.

Back when we first started this in January, my starting weight was just over 15 stone, and rather arbitrarily I decided that my target weight loss for the full year would be 3 stone, taking me to a far more svelte 12 stone.  This would put my BMI into the area of the chart that doesn’t scream ‘fattie’ at you.

Now, as we enter the fourth month of the challenge, I am pleased to report that I have lost my second full stone, as my weekly weigh in put me at 12.13 and a half.  Needless to say, I am rather chuffed with this, even if I do know that a large chunk of that came as a result of being ill recently, but I’ll take it gladly.  So now the focus moves onto the final stone.

By all accounts, this is where it starts to get hard, although the fact that I still have a full nine months to lose that fianl stone does take the pressure a little bit.  But this was never about a specific weight goal for me, the final aim for me is to be able to look in the mirror and be happy and proud.  I may be two stone down but I am still a long way away from being the person I want to be.  Case in point being that yesterday I trimmed my beard back a little more than normal yesterday, thinking that perhaps I had lost enough weight that my double chin had utterly disappeared.  It hasn’t, and it’s little things like that which mean that I know I still have a very long way to go.

One thing that is not going so well, however, is the exercise regime.  The whole of the last week has been a write off, I was just far too ill to do anything.  I had hoped to get back into it over this long easter weekend, but today I woke up having apparantly done something wrong in my sleep (how does that happen?), and my back is screaming at me like a small and terrified monkey, so it doesn’t seem all that likely.  The truth is though that I really am going to need to start soon, as I’m not going to get in shape otherwise.

Hello there! Yes, that’s right, Ellen and I are back from Amsterdam.  And yes, thank you, we did have a lovely time, and we ate our body weight at least twice a day for the duration of the whole trip.  I’m not going to dwell too much on the trip itself, as I’ll be doing a pretty exhaustive review of the whole shebang over on my other blog.  But in terms of the food, any attempts that we made to try and be sensible went out of the window around the time we sat down for our first meal on the Monday night.  After that it was hearty meal followed by beer followed by hearty meal and rinse repeat until we came back.

In fact, despite all our protestations that we would be back on the diet as soon as we boarded the plane, we couldn’t help it when we got to Leeds train station and ended up binging on a Burger King meal, which despite tasting at the time like the last meals of the condemned, were actually deeply unsatisfying and bland.  So after all that you can understand that we were both a bit reticent to step back onto the scales after six days of mass consumption.  We needn’t have been though, it turned out that all of that abuse had led to me putting on a pound and a half, and Ellen remaining the same (she was a little less gung ho than I, and also had the benefit of her magic pills) but for both of us it couldn’t really have been any better.  And we both agreed that after eating so much, it would almost be a relief to go back onto the diet.

So this weekend we’ve been going back onto the regime, and as well as this I have decided to step up the exercise regime.  I mentioned before that I may be deciding to do yet another stupid challenge, and while I still have not decided 100% whether or not to do it, I may as well tell you that the challenge in question would be the York 10k Run For All, which is (as you can probably discern) a 10k run through York.  This would represent a huge challenge for me, seeing as I haven’t run any further than for a bus since I left school, and could well be described as chronically unfit.  The exercises I have been doing so far have started to turn the tide a little, but not enough to enable me to do anything on this scale.

So yesterday, I headed into town and loaded up on chavtastic running bottoms and running shoes, and also got some weights and one of those bizarre Abdotrim things that make sit-ups look easier but don’t actually make the act of doing them any easier, mainly for Ellen.  I had intended to start the running yesterday, but after carrying all that stuff home (including 54kg of weights) I was positively knackered.

So today I dressed up in all of my finery (as shown above, and don’t I look lovely!), and embarked upon a short run.  I had done a bit of research into starting to run, and the general consensus was to start off with a five minute walk, then jog for either a minute or two, then walk for two minutes, and repeat that cycle for half an hour.  So off I set, feeling like a complete pillock in my get up, staring at the CardioTrainer App every 30 seconds, until I had walked for five minutes, and then I proceeded to run.

For the first 30 seconds I was fine, then the whole of my body seemed to start screaming at me to stop.  Anyway, the first run lasted for 1.15.  Then I managed a 1.30, and a 1.45, but then it was a struggle to do over a minute.  But still, I managed to keep it going for a full half hour, running every third minute.  According to the CardioTrainer I went a total of 3.4km in 33 minutes, travelling an average of 6kph and burning a total of 198 calories.  So not too bad.  But I have a long way to go before I am ready to decide whether I can do this run.  Certainly I will be doing something before the end of the year, but I am going to keep up with the running for a few weeks and see how it goes before I make any concrete decisions.

First things first.  Today I measured my weight (Saturday morning is my official weekly weigh-in time) and I have now achieved a total weight loss of a stone and a half!  So the momentum is back with me again.  I must admit that there was a while there when I was starting to lose faith in this whole process, with nearly a month with no weight loss.  But the movement is back with me again.

As for what has caused the turnaround, it could be the fact that I’ve signed up with Nutracheck, and as a result I am watching what I eat a lot closer than I was, amd on their recommendation I also have a much lower calorie target.  It could be that I have now really started to get into the exercise regime that I mentioned.  I am really starting to notice a difference too.

And now for the bad news.  I am sad to say that Ellen has decided not to carry on with the website side of things.  She is still carrying on with the whole idea, but she was never really all that sold on the idea of the website itself.  And so now you’re stuck with me.  I now appear to have two blogs all to myself.  Oh well.  I’m going to keep this place going as a journal of the year, but I’m sure you’ll understand if it doesn’t get updated as much as I’d like.

Also, I am formulating a way at the moment to make the whole thing  bit more interesting.  Don’t want to give too much away but stay tuned for an announcement soon.

-Paul (gonna dispense with these tags after this, it’s always gonna be me now)

Well I’ve been exercising for nearly a week now, and I think it’s starting to have an effect. I’ve started off slowly. On the first day I did 25 sit ups and 10 push ups (proper ones mind, not silly little ones that involve your knees) and I’ve been slowly increasing it so now I am up to 35 sit ups and 13 push ups. Not an earth shattering increase granted, but still going in the right direction. Also, on Saturday we all went swimming at the local water park, and we both made an effort to do some proper swimming while we were there as well. I managed to do 16 lengths of the (small) pool before feeling as though my entire body was going to shut down and I was going to sink to the bottom like a paperweight.

But while some things are going in the right direction, others aren’t. At the weekend we invested in some new scales, seeing as the other ones we had were varying dramatically over the course of minutes. At one point I put on three pounds in the course of a minute. So we got some more, and they are a lot better, but they are just confirming what I pretty much already knew. I haven’t lost any weight in about a month. I have been really really strict, and as far as I’m aware I have only gone over my calorie count once this year. At first I lost a stone on two weeks, but since then, nada.

But while this is certainly dispiriting, I’m not going to let it stop me. My aim was not about weight, it was about getting in shape, so the key for me now is to keep up the good work with my diet, but to start taking the exercise more seriously. I’ve made a start, but in the next few weeks I need to think of some ways to step it up a gear. I really feel as though I’ve got the smoking beat now (I’ve been off the patches for four days now, and I’ve not killed a single person!) so this has to be my focus now.

-Paul

This weekend marked a pretty big moment for us in that it was our first big meal out.  All day we had eaten barely nothing in order that we could indulge a bit, but we both agreed that we would take it easy nonetheless. At least, until we saw the menu and decided that basically, we were gonna let ourselves off the leash.  We ate like a king and queen, and drank merry amounts of wine.  It was glorious, and we haven’t really suffered any attending weight gain or ill effects (save for the sledgehammer hangover the next day, but you can’t have everything.)

Other than that though, nice as the food was, the rest of the meal was an absolute shambles. A birthday party with ten people in attendance, the service we received was so comically bad that we all moved through denial, onto anger, and eventually into fits of giggles every time one of the ten or so different waiters who served us came over.  My personal highlight was when Ellen and my starter came out, already after everyone else had finished theirs. We had ordered Dim Sum, and opened the pot to find three large white balls. Confused we served them up and cut into them, only to find that what we had actually been served was three very large balls of dough.

‘Excuse me,’ Ellen asked of the waiter, ‘What’s this?’

‘Nothing.’ came the response, which may have been pretty factually accurate, but not particularly helpful.  Eventually we got the dim sum, which was lovely, but it didn’t quite shake the shock of being served a big ball of dough.

Obviously we’ve not been doing the best job of keeping this site up to date, so apologies for that, but I have been working on a new site which is now launched, so things should get a bit more regular again.  As for the time I’ve miseed, if I am going to be brutally honest, the last few weeks have been a bit demoralising. Having lost a stone in a little over two weeks, I then put on two pounds and then my weight just sat there, not shifting at all, but instead mocking me. At the same time, I find myself losing just a little bit of the zeal that I had going into this whole thing. I am bored of a lot of the food that I have now, and the smoking has been made harder by the fact that I ran out of nicotine patches and couldn’t get any more for two (very hard) days.

It was enivitable that it would get harder, but for those first two glorious weeks I was convinced that the whole year was going to be an absolute breeze. But it’s not, that much is clear. The choice now is how you move forward. Either you give in, or you redouble your efforts. So I think it’s about time that I start to tackle the issue of exercise.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that both Ellen and I lead quite a sedentary lifestyle. We do do exercise, for instance I walk to work, but as for ‘proper’ exercise, I haven’t really done anything since school, and I wasn’t exactly the athletic type back then either.

My main aim in this whole thing was never about getting to a certain weight. My aim is to get into shape. And by that, I mean to change my whole shape. I want to get rid of the moobs and the gut, yes, but I also want to make my spindly arms into something a little more impressive too. I have never been in shape before, and perhaps in the last few weeks I have let that goal slip from my mind.

So, starting tonight, I am going to endevour to do some light exercise. Thanks to Macca’s comment, I’ve found onehundredpushups and twohundredsitups, both of which have some nice gentle breaking in before the hard work starts,so starting tonight I’m going to start on these and see how they go.  Thankfully the smoking side of things has started to get a bit easier now, so we will see how it goes.

-Paul

I’ve been on the nicotine patches now for 20 days and the good news is that they are really working. Day 20 and I’ve not been tempted once. Not a singe cigarette. Tomorrow will mark three whole weeks, and from that point on I know it’s going to get much much easier.

There is one downside to the nicotine patches, however, woe betide the poor fool who goes to sleep without taking it off first. My particular patches are the 24 hour kind, so the idea is that you leave them overnight so you don’t get a craving in the morning, but to my mind it must only be masochists and the deeply insane who would think that this is a good idea. For leaving a patch on overnight can only lead to one thing, nicotine dreams.

Over the last three weeks I’ve been stupid enough to fall into this trap, and what I’ve experienced has been the most lucid and horrible dreams.  For instance, the first one involved me walking outside of York University when I came across a very distressed Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States. He told me that someone was trying to kill him, and suddenly we were attacked, but I got the upper hand. After the kerfuffle out popped from behind a hedge Ros and Lucas from Spooks, who congratulated me, but not before I realised they were in on the plot, and off went me and Joe Biden, running for our lives as shots rang out from all around us.

Now ordinarily this sort of dream would be a laugh, something you giggle about the next morning before promptly forgetting, but not if you have a nicotine patch on.  Then, you experience every nerve shredding moment. When I woke (and I did wake up, several times throughout the night, not aware that it was the patch responsible) I was genuinely as scared as if I had lived it, and then when it came time to get up I felt as though I hadn’t slept a wink.

So the moral of the story is quite simple, if you’re going to quit smoking by all means use the patch, they are excellent. But make sure you take them off at night.  After each instance I feel like I’ve been attacked by mind bullets, like my medulla oblongata has been used as an exercise bag for Mike Tyson. I don’t recommend it.

Other than that the diet side of things has been going really well. This week was when everything starts to slow down considerably and the weight has stopped falling off, but we knew this would happen.  Having conquered the smoking more or less, the next thing that I want to get started on is the exercise regime. So far I’ve not been doing much more than walking to and from work, but starting next week I am going to start doing a few push ups and sit ups every night, as well as the occasional ab-crunch that I saw in a magazine article. Obviously I’m not going to start too full on, I don’t think my body could take it, as unaccustomed to exercise as it is, but it’s more about starting to get into a routine with it.

But three weeks in, more or less, I think we can both be really proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but now the hard work really starts!