12 October 2011 (Wednesday) - Thar She Blows!!

The diet continues apace – and yesterday MyFitnessPal told me off. “Based on your total calories consumed for today, you are eating too few calories. Not only is it difficult to receive adequate nutrition at these calorie levels, but you could also be putting your body into starvation mode. Starvation mode lowers your metabolism and makes weight loss more difficult. We suggest increasing your calorie consumption to 1,200 calories per day minimum.”

Perhaps I should eat more cakes?

Today I enhanced the diet somewhat by doing half an hour’s swimming. In half an hour I swam half a kilometre, which isn’t bad really. Even if I was the second slowest swimmer in the slow lane. I was also (at one point) the only bloke in the swimming pool. At one point I thought I saw another bloke, but Captain Ahab chasing Moby hardly counts….

Mind you, I shouldn’t be too disrespectful of the lardy ones among us, being slightly over my ideal weight myself. Talking of which I had something of a revelation this evening. Why is it that the majority of people who go swimming are porkers? As a child I would regularly swim, and it never shifted any weight. I’ve found the answer. As a child, after swimming I’d get a portion of sausage and chips from the chippie for my tea. And now with my dietary wisdom, I can look back and realise that whilst the swimming burned off five hundred calories; the sausage and chips added five hundred and fifty calories. If I’d stayed at home and watched telly I would have lost more weight.

Last weekend I was feeling my artistic urges, and so I bought some canvases with a view to doing some paintings. The urge has now passed, and this evening when I came to put the canvases away with my paints (for when the urge comes again), I found I already had a load of canvases ready for my next dabblings.

That was fifteen quid down the drain.

And, on hearing the radio this evening, down the drain is where the nation’s literary future is going. Among the one hundred best-selling books of last year were the autobiography of a meerkat, and the Beano annual. When I think how well that drivel has sold, and that one of the best books I’ve ever read has been turned down by some of the country’s most prominent publishers, my urine vapourises….