One of the first ever diet plans was written by William Banting in 1863. There’s a downloadable version of it here. The first hint of what lay ahead with my diet plan was in a comment to this journal entry. It’s flocked so here’s a few extracts:
…one of my new year’s resolutions [is] to lose a load of weight and improve my fitness to enter a Thai boxing match in December. I know I’m massively overweight and I’m going to do everything I can to get my weight down to 95kg by then. It means I’ve got to lose around 35 – 40 kg, but I think I need to.
That was written on the 6th of Jan 2007. On the 10th of Jan was my first entry about training:
First trip to the gym of the year, and I decided to hop on the scales to see what Christmas did for me. I’m not sure how it happened, but since I last weighed myself on the 13th of December I’ve lost 1.2 kg. Now I’ve got Christmas out of the way I’m planning on trying to lose a stone for the end of February and then another stone by about Easter. My target is to get my weight down from tonight’s 131.5 kg to 95 kg by December, and then take it from there. Looks like one thing that seems to work is to have a cuppa rather than a snack. Instant coffee, semi skimmed milk and boiling water contains less than 30 calories and virtually no fat, so it looks like one to try.
I also signed up to take part in the gym’s interclub competition in February. I just hope I’m not expected to be the first person on.
Nearly 3 years on a lot has happened. My plans had a few revisions as time went on, and not everything went according to plan. I’ve written more than enough here about the details so I’m not going to go into them again. Over the last few weeks the main points are that my weight started to creep up a bit and I decided to not just stop it but also work on getting down to my final target. This was originally 80 kg but I decided to revise it up to 84 kg to take into account building muscle rather than just losing fat. I’m very pleased to say that at my final weight check of the year on Wednesday I was near enough that to be happy. Starting weight: 133 kg or 21 stone. Final weight: 84.8 kg or 13 stone 4. Total weight loss: 49 kg or 7 stone 10. Inches lost off the waist: 15 (from 48″ to 33″). In other words, that’s it. My close to 3 years of hard dieting is over with the final target reached. Going by the system of milestones I came up with a while back, this is the 7th and final milestone.
It hasn’t just been a physical thing but also quite an emotional one as well. Just losing weight is one thing, but this has been a serious lifestyle change going from a bit of exercise occasionally to training for combat sports at competition level. Underpinning this is the idea of making hay while the sun shines. There will be a time when I can’t do this for one reason or another, but that time isn’t here yet so I’m going to keep doing this for as long as I can. Keeping fit and looking after my health also gives me a bit of an insurance policy for when bad things happen. I know a few physios socially and they’re impressed that I got full range of movement back in my right arm so quickly after last year’s bike accident.
What happens next? I’m going to concentrate on keeping my walk around weight in the range 84 – 86 kg. Maintaining should be easier than losing, and if I’m fighting I might temporarily drop a bit more if need be. I’ve still got a bit more flab to lose and I’ve started doing bits of weight training which means I’ll be muscling up. I’ve always had relatively weak upper body strength, which is one of the symptoms of Dyspraxia, but running around with sand bags, playing around with kettle bells and climbing ropes should help with that. As far as training goes, there’s a few things coming up early in the year that sound interesting. My MMA gym is running a show on the 6th of March. I’ve said I’d like to do it but I know I haven’t training there very long and I’ll let them decide if I’m ready. If that doesn’t go ahead they do have plenty of others later in the year, and there will be Thai boxing shows going on as well.
One more training session to go this year (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu on Monday) and then that’s it. I’ll be having a break from training over xmas to let the minor aches and pains to sort themselves out, and then back into it in the new year.
There’s a few lines from a Chimaira track called Try To Survive which I think are appropriate:
“Been through just about everything/But we’re still here/We still have much to prove/To ourselves… This journey’s taught me to stand strong/Never again will I/Surrender my fears/Surrender my dreams/Surrender my soul/To the infection”