Health & Fitness

The Devil's food

Following last week’s BBQ and a delayed reaction to my New Year’s Resolution (yes, 6 months ago now), I’ve managed to visit the gym twice last week, and in fact the same the preceding three weeks. Once you start a fitness regime and it gets into your head that it’s one of life’s small requirements to keep healthy and reasonably fit, it becomes very hard to find the balance. I’m talking about my unbalanced obsession with junk food on a Friday night, not my obsession with the gym. Some people just aren’t concerned about their state of fitness , but I really would like to be.

As you get older, time has an effect on the body as your metabolism slows down and turns everything you eat into fat. When I was at university, I actually did quite the opposite to most and instead of spending lazy afternoons drinking beer in the pubs, I spent most free afternoons at the gym. Large steaks were consumed for lunch and a sensible diet was followed. Couple this with practising martial arts twice a week and I was considerably fitter than I am now – a result of time and youth. Now I have a problem. Wifey loves sweet things and unrelentingly makes extremely good desserts (such as the banoffee pie we had last weekend) and my will just isn’t strong enough to resist. My point is – how do you find that balance between losing a little flab and still enjoying your food. My colleague at work nibbles on carrots at his desk, and generally skips lunch. Is this the answer? I hope not.

Some interesting and quite demoralising facts.

1. 10 minutes on the running machine equates to roughly 100 calories burned.
2. The body needs at least 30 minutes to start burning fat – and it starts with the fat around the heart and works outwards. This means it takes a long time before it reaches anything visible from the outside.
3. 1 Jaffa cake = 56 calories. Yesterday in a business meeting, I had 6. And I wasn’t even under stress.
4. The body needs an average of 2500 calories a day to function, but most of that is taken up in daily meals.
5. To lose 1lb a week you need a negative calorie balance of 500 calories per day.
6. Sitting at a desk all day moving your fingers on a keyboard just makes you lethargic.

Does any of this make sense to you? It all seems black and white, but try sticking to a diet and finding enough time in the week to do enough exercise to make these calculations beneficial for the body. It’s bloody hard work! Am I making excuses?

Right, the family’s away, so I’m off to the gym.