Daily weight variation on the diet - part II

I've been trying to weigh myself first thing on a Saturday morning. As soon as I get up and have my first pee of the day, it's time to get on the scales. That's the routine, and I keep that consistent from week to week.

I always weigh myself first thing on a Saturday and that is the gold standard weight.

If you look at the graph though, you may notice a few more points on there recently. Well, those were just motivational; something to help me stay focussed and get back on track after the various dieting holiday binges.

However, the fact remains, it's Saturday first thing that counts.

Okay, so, you get the picture, the Saturday first thing weight is the one I care about, but why? Simply because I need to have a fixed point of reference that tells me how much weight I've lost in a week. This diet is all about the long-term, but without short-term goals and progress updates, how will I know how I'm doing? There needs to be some short-term monitoring to make the long-term bit happen.

A week seemed like a good compromise. It's a long enough period of time to have a binge eating/drinking day (or two), but leave sufficient days to make up for that, but not so long that things can really get away from me and leave me with little chance of recovery (diet holidays excluded of course!).

Daily, or even every couple of days seemed just too frequent for me, the weight could end up just popping up after a binge, then down, and I'd end up obsessing over the little details.

So, that covers the whole weekly thing, but why is the time of day so important?

How much does your weight change during the day?

Yours? I don't know, but I can find out how much my weight changes during the day. And I did. Every day for seven days, I weighed myself four times a day: waking, just before leaving for work, when I got home from work, and just before bed. On Saturday and Sunday, the just before leaving for work and getting home from work times were substituted for after breakfast and after dinner.

I recorded the results, and plotted this graph:

Wow, looks like there's quite a lot of variation there, doesn't it? On Saturday, certainly, that's a rise of a good few pounds. No doubt the result of drinking many, many cups of coffee, possibly after being dehydrated following wine the night before?

A good diet day on Friday though, if somewhat unsatisfying.

With the exception of those two days, while there are some changes let's put them in perspective. For starters, look at the y axis. It doesn't start at 0. Whenever you see a graph, always check the axes first, having a y axis that doesn't start at 0 is one of the easiest ways to mislead your audience and make changes look more striking than they may actually be.

Let's look again after starting that axis at 0:

Not quite as striking now, is it? That Saturday was a 3900 calorie day, so you might expect my weight to increase throughout the day. Thursday was a 4050 calorie day, so that covers that big rise.

The Friday was a 300 calorie day: 50 calories of milk with my morning coffee, and 250 calories of wine in the evening, so you'd expect my weight to come down during the day.

Generally, then, if I eat a 'normal' amount, I weigh one or two pounds more at the end of the day than I do when I first get up. When you consider the amount of food and liquid that goes into me over the course of a day, that's not really much of a change in percentage terms. However, when you're talking about trying to lose a pound or two a week, that variation becomes a significant source of noise.

Hence the common point of reference: the Saturday morning weigh-in.

Day 84 - 750 calories

Breakfast
Cereal bar (150)

Lunch
Chorizo slices (250)

Dinner
Ham sandwich (150)
Beer (200)

Exercise
90m walking
2x 2.25m planks

Day 85 - 4950 calories

Breakfast
3x ham sandwich (400)

Lunch
Mixed grill (1400)
3 pints beer (750)
Brownie and ice cream (1000)
Almond croissant (350)

Dinner
Chicken and bacon pasta (350)
Sticky toffee pudding and cream (700)

Exercise
90m walking
2.25m plank

Day 86 - 2300 calories

Breakfast
Leftover toast (100)

Lunch
Triple chicken sandwich (650)

Dinner
Wine (850)
Venison burger (150)
Mushrooms (50)
Pasta (500)

Exercise
2x 2.25m planks
90m walking

Day 87 - 3000 calories

Breakfast
Toast (200)
Leftover Weetabix (50)

Lunch
Curry (1250)
3x pints beer (750)

Dinner
Toast (100)
Leftover pizza (100)
Ice cream (250)
Beer (300)

Exercise
2.25m plank
60m walking

Day 88 - 2650 calories

Breakfast
Leftover toast and Weetabix (100)
Ham sandwich (150)
Slice of Rocky Road (500)

Lunch
Venison burger and mushrooms (200)
Cheese sandwich (150)
2x Jaffa Cake bars (200)

Dinner
Beer (300)
Venison burger and mushrooms (200) 
2x Jaffa Cake bars (200)
Wine (650)

Exercise
60m walking

Day 89 - 3900 calories

Breakfast
3x slices toast (300)
Milk (50)
2x slices toast and jam (400)
2x hot cross buns (500)

Lunch
Chicken and vegetable stir fry (250)
Slice of cake (200)
9x Jaffa Cake bars (900)

Dinner
2x beers (600)
Chicken curry, rice and naan (500)
Toast and jam (200)

Exercise
2x 2.25m plank
45m walking

The recovery continues, but how...?

This week has been a bit of a mixed bag so far. I was really pleased with Saturday. Getting through a Saturday on under 3000 calories was massive for me. Saturdays are usually my highest calorie day thanks to huge amounts of snacking and lots of wine and beer, so I should have been set up well for the week.

The curse of the macaroon

 

Sunday, well, it really wouldn't have been that bad; but then came mum's baking.

We went 'round to say hello and have a quick afternoon tea, and she'd been baking. In particular, she'd been baking her amazingly fantastic macaroons, spectacularly light and tasty; half-dipped in chocolate. Superb.

Now, my brother was there and, currently dieting himself, had been through the ingredients and worked out that there were only about 90 calories in each one. Amazing. Unfortunately, if you eat more than a dozen, all those 90s add up. Throw in a few wee bite-size muffins, and you're up to a real number.

Other than that, the rest of the day was okay and, even including the baking binge, the weekend's total left the daily budget for the rest of the week looking quite achievable to hit a daily average of 2300 calories.

All to play for.

Where has the weight gone?

 

A good question.

If you look at the graph, you can see that I've lost about the same amount of weight in a week and a bit or so, as I did in the first two months of the diet. How can that have happened?

Well, the first thing is that the night before that fateful 'weigh-in of huge weight-gain', I had three very large bottles of Corona, so I was probably very nicely hydrated for the next morning, so that first weight was perhaps not a fair representation of what I actually weighed.

Add to that the fact that I was probably more stuffed with glycogen than I had been for a while and you might get another pound or two. Hell, maybe even three if you're feeling generous. Still, I wouldn't have expected to lose that much weight.

Homeostasis and marginal gains

 

The body is pretty good and maintaining equilibrium; certainly, it has processes that work hard to try to maintain equilibrium. This is a fairly large topic by itself, and one that will get its own post at some point, but let's just say "adaptive thermogenesis". Basically, the body tries to regulate its energy reserves by altering that whole ATP Synthase efficiency thing and changing the amount of heat you produce.

In an overly-simplified nutshell, if you eat lots and lots and lots, your body becomes less efficient and you burn more calories as heat, if you eat less and less and your fat stores get depleted, you get more efficient and fewer of those protons are wasted spinning those enzymes without making ATP and you don't generate as much heat, saving those calories you ate for chemical energy.

Could my binging have increased my levels of uncoupling proteins and made me highly inefficient, making it easier to get through those calories when I went back to restricting them again?

Without having done any gene or protein expression analysis, I don't know. What I do know, is that I ate lots of calories and I put on weight, I ate fewer calories - fewer than I should have used in the day - and I started to lose it again.

And that's good enough for me.

There have been a couple of other little changes as well. For one, I stopped having milk in my morning coffees. Switching to Nescafe Azera, which is quite a tasty brew for an instant coffee, has meant I can have my morning instant black. Not something I've been able to do with instant coffees before.

Yes, I should just get the cafetiere out, but I just can't be bothered on a school day. Sure, that saves maybe 100-150 calories a day, but scale that up to ten days, that's getting up for 1500 calories saved - not far off half a pound's worth.

I've also been counting my steps recently - another post in itself to follow later. Now, I'm not expecting this to make a huge difference to things, but - combined with my self-competitive nature, it will have made some.

Yesterday, I found myself running on the spot while I made my breakfast, just to get the steps up. I did it properly as well, I could feel the heart rate go up. When I got to the bus stop, I looked at the next bus due display and saw I had five minutes before my bus was due. Rather than stand there I walked on to the next stop. Then past it and on to the next again one.

By the time I sat down on the bus to go to work, I was already at 4000 steps. Not too bad. I did the same in the evening as well.

Hopefully over the course of the scale of weeks, all these little details will start to make a difference. The issue with this week is that, as it is going so well, there's always that temptation to say you've achieved what you wanted to for the week and write off a couple of days.

Let's try not to to that this time, I'll just enjoy myself properly on Saturday.

Day 80 - 2600 calories

Breakfast
Toast (100)
Bacon sandwich (300)
Mr Kipling Almond Slices (900)

Lunch
3x ham sandwich (400)
Chorizo (250)

Dinner
Salmon (450)
Wine (200)

Exercise
50m walking

Day 81 - 5150 calories

You know what I said above about achieving a goal so writing days off? Well, just yeah...

Breakfast
Toast (100)
5x cookies (1100)

Lunch
3x ham sandwiches (400)
Little cupcake (200)

Dinner
Toast (300)
Bottle of wine (700)
Bacon sandwich (250)
2x Bounty sandwiches (750)
4x cereal bars (600)
3 portions of Weetabix with milk and raisins (750)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 82 - 7200 calories
(It's okay, this is part of an experiment for a future post...)

Breakfast
Diluted fruit juice (50)
Almond croissant (350)
2x Jaffa cake bar (200)

Lunch
Scrambled eggs on toast (300)
Black pudding and lorne sausage (800)
2x Almond croissant (700)

Dinner
4x fruit scone (1100)
Turkey tacos (800)
Ice cream (400)
Cheesecake (400)
Toblerone triangle (100)
Wine (200)
Peanuts (300)
5x 710ml bottles Corona (1500)

Exercise
60m walking

Day 83 - 2900 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Toblerone Alp (100)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (150)
Peanuts (800)
Toast (250)
Cheese (50)
Cake (300)

Dinner
Chicken pie (550)
Wine (300)
Jaffa cake bar (300)

Exercise
45m walking

Back to auld claes and cold porritch

If you were to look at the graph, you might think that my diet has gone completely to hell for the last couple of weeks. You couldn't be more wring, it's done exactly what is was supposed to. I have been able to indulge - fairly significantly - and enjoy myself for a good couple of weeks, and end up weighing less than when I started this whole thing off.

In another few weeks, I'll have lost another few pounds and will be able to indulge all over again.

I'm not trying to win any prizes for losing the most weight in the shortest period of time, nor do I want to see just how light I can be. I just want to be in a position where I can drink wine and eat huge portions of curry and cakes when I want to and not have to worry about it.

Okay, I'll admit, after a good couple of days in the middle of the week, closing it out on back to back >3000 calorie days wasn't in my original script. Thursday got away from me with an event that we put on at work - with beer and pizza - and Friday I was just in that sort of mood. Still, it's the start of a new dieting week and I intend to make it a good one!

Truth be told, it probably looks quite good that the weight went up at yesterday's weigh in. My whole point about this diet is that if you take in more energy than you use, you'll put weight on. What with a couple of mid-week weigh-ins this week, if you'd seen I'd had consecutive 3000 calorie days and not put weight on, you'd probably think this whole thing was a sham.

Well, there you go. If I eat too much and don't exercise it off, I put on weight.

So where do we go from here? Down in weight hopefully. I've made it through the first challenge - Saturday (day 75 below) -  under 3000 calories. It's been a while since I've done that. If I can have a sub 2500 calorie Sunday, then I should hopefully be set up nicely for the working week, which is always a bit easier to manage in terms of snacking.

The aim is to get to the end of the week average 2200 calories a day. If I Sunday is a 2500 calorie day, that gives me a Monday to Friday energy budget of 2010 calories, which shouldn't be too challenging, particularly if I can start with a strong Monday.

One thing's for sure though, with 2000 calories a day allowed, there will be plenty of space for cookies and doughnuts. Good stuff.

Day 75 - 2850 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Poached eggs and ham on toast (350)
Toast (150)

Lunch
Venison grillsteak and carrots (300)
2x Jaffa cake bar (200)

Dinner
Beef stew (500)
Wine (350)
Beer (200)
Sticky toffee pudding (400)
Cream (300)

Exercise
60m walking

Day 76 - 4000 calories (so much for the 2500 calorie day...)

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Hot cross bun (400)

Lunch
Stew (400)
Ham sandwich (250)
Bread (100)

Afternoon tea
Mum's home baking - Damn you!!! - (1700)

Dinner
Wine (350)
Stew (400)
Toast (300)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 77 - 1900 calories

Breakfast
Weetabix (250)

Lunch
5x ham sandwiches (900)

Dinner
Venison grillsteak and carrots (250)
Doughnut balls (300)
Wine (200)

Exercise
(40m walking)

Day 78 - 1500 calories

Breakfast
Toast (100)
Jaffa cake bar (100)

Lunch
5x ham sandwiches (650)

Dinner
Stew (400)
Beer (250)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 79 - 2200 calories

Breakfast
Poached egg on toast (200)
Jaffa cake bar (100)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)
2x ham sandwiches (300)
  
Dinner
Yum yum (350)
Sausages (100)

Exercise
45m walking
1x 2m plank
1x 2.25m plank

The wake up call and keeping the weight off

If you read my previous post - in which I went to France and ate and drank a lot - you will know that the diet took a bit of a holiday. I may then have said that I would have a great week and get back to below where I was at the previous weigh-in.

That was a foolish thing to say. I thought I'd get on the scales yesterday: I have put on pretty much 10 pounds in 10 days.

How do I feel about this? Well, not great at first, until I thought about it for a little while and a few things dawned on me.

The first is that I haven't really put on 10 pounds. For one, the difference in my weights from the last Saturday weigh-in to yesterday was actually only 9.75 pounds. Also, as I'd stepped onto the scales only a few hours after finishing binge eating, I still had a good amount of food in me, and I was likely also quite hydrated from the 3 giant-sized Coronas I'd had the previous night.

The flip side of the thermodynamic diet

Maybe things weren't all that bad. Of course, I had put on weight, and a good few pounds at that but, in some ways, it's reassuring. It's good to be brought down to Earth occasionally of course, but it also adds additional evidence to the central hypothesis of this diet - what causes your weight to change is a difference between the amount of calories you eat, and the ones you get rid of through work and heat.

Since the 3rd of January, the difference has been in favour of losing weight, with my net intake of energy being less than my output of energy net, leading to the consumption of my body's internal stores of energy and a concomitant loss of weight.

In the last 10 days, I have eaten significantly more - and have drunk even more significantly more - and spent the majority of my time parked on my arse in meetings, at airports or on buses, trains and planes.

There was no way the net energy output would be greater than the net energy input over this period. So, extra calories stored internally and weight goes up. As the current graph shows all too clearly:

And the laws of the thermodynamic diet are conserved!

The big realisation though, is that it doesn't really matter. I'd had a couple of weeks where two times of indulgence had run together: the work trip to France followed by a weekend away at a music festival and a day off where the holiday spirit had continued and I got a bit carried away - not great when you started the day with a ridiculous hotel buffet breakfast.

It's the mini Danish pastries that get me every time. I imagine that's what crack must be like.

Keeping the weight off

How often is this juxtaposition of circumstances likely to arise? Not very. And, as I've said before, the whole point of this diet is to put me in a position where I can have indulgent binges and not really worry about it. If I put on weight, as I've done here, then I have the tools and the confidence to know I can lose it again.

The reason for being on this diet is not about seeing how much weight I can lose just for the sake of it. I love eating and drinking. They are a big psychological release for me. A big wine and steamed pudding binge can be just what my mind and body needs some times and I have no intention of sacrificing that; it's too important.

This diet isn't about getting myself to a point where I'm lighter than I've been since I was a child. I'd look terrible for a start. Yes, I like having a defined set of abdominal muscles and being relatively toned, but I don't want to turn into a wee thin shadow of a person who would be unstable in a stiff breeze. That's just not my scene.

I think my initial down-heartedness about the weight gain was more about this blog. I wanted to show how losing weight could be easy. How you didn't have to follow any fad diet, or spend money on esoteric foods or weight-loss consultants. You just needed to be able to count and apply a bit of common sense.

I thought that having a data-point on the graph that was higher than the previous one would make people think that the diet didn't work and that there was no merit in this simple scheme. However, I think, what I've actually done, is actually confirm that it does work.

Hopefully you'll see that when the graph heads down again, which, as of this morning, it's already starting to do...

For now though, it's possibly time to close out the month of March without any additional binge days, get the graph heading down again, and be ready for the next round of Sauvignon blanc and sticky toffee puddings!

Day 72 - 1800 calories

Breakfast
2x scrambled eggs (200)

Lunch
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Dinner
2x Weetabix with milk (250)
Wine (250)

Exercise
2m plank
75m walking

Day 73 - 3000 calories
Okay, not in the plan, but it's been a long day: up at 0530, home from work at 2245.

Breakfast
Sausages (200)
Protein bar (200)

Snack
Jaffa Cakes (600)

Lunch
Chicken curry with rice (500)

Snack
Chicken curry with rice (500)

Dinner
Beer (200)
Pizza (800)

Exercise
80m walking

Day 74 - 3050 calories

Breakfast
5x chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Chicken breast (400)

Dinner
Beer (300)
Egg on toast (300)
Yum yum (500)
Weetabix (300
2x biscuits (150)

The work trip diet holiday

I did start the week with the best of intentions. Well, obviously that's not quite true given the amount I ate on Saturday and Sunday, but I had planned for last week to be a diet week. However, that turned out not to be the case. Much as when I was sitting in Bella Italia with my family a couple of weeks ago, I realised that I could make the most of this one and not worry about the weight - I was away in France for work for a few days.

To go to France - where I haven't been in over ten years - and not maximise the food and wine opportunities would have been a waste. Time for another diet holiday.

The trip started quite respectably, a couple of protein bars on the train down to Stevenage, and I'd made it to Luton airport (I refuse to call it London Luton, it's just not. It's Luton) on 600 or so calories by 2.30 pm. And then the inevitable: the (most recent) French air traffic control strike meant a delay of nearly two hours.

What do you do in an airport for a couple of hours when you meet a few new people who are heading out on the same trip as you? You have a few beers.

In some ways, that made things easier, when that happened I realised that there was really no point in trying to hit a target that week, and eating out always makes it a bit harder to try and keep track of what the calorie numbers are anyway, so the decision was swiftly made to take another break.

After the weigh-in success of the previous Saturday and the taking stock of where I was after being on this diet for two months, I didn't really mind. Again, the whole point of the diet is to give me a sensible baseline weight so that I can go wild and eat and drink myself silly every so often.

And if you're going to do it, doing it in France is a pretty good place for it.

As of Friday (ish), I was back to counting the calories again, and as far as Saturday's go, yesterday wasn't great, but with some effort it's all to play for this week, let's see if we can be a pound or two down on the last weigh-in, not just back to where I was after a few days' indulgence.

As for today, it's probably back to Bella Italia again as I'll be away in Glasgow enjoying Jennifer Nettles and Brad Paisley at the C2C festival!

Day 67 (Friday 10th March) - 2300 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
2x Protein Bar (500)

Lunch
Triple chicken sandwich (650)
Snickers (250)

Dinner
Pasta, chorizo and peppers (350)
Shortbread (450)

Exercise
35m walking

Day 68 - 5450 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
Leftover toast (50)

Lunch
Beef olives (400)
Egg on toast (300)
Ham sandwich (200)
Shortbread (450)

Dinner
Curry and rice (500)
3x naan bread (1350)
2x beers (600)
Wine (1000)
Chocolate (400)

Exercise
100 press ups
30m walking
2 1/4m plank

Day 69 - 2500 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Beef olives (400)

Lunch
Garlic bread (600)
Pizza (600)
Wine (200)

Dinner
Leftover pizza (600)

Exercise
45m walking
2m plank

Day 70 - 7000 calories

Breakfast
Ridiculous hotel buffet breakfast - I forget the details but the fry up portion included 3x black pudding, fried egg, 3x bacon, 1x hash brown, tomato and mushrooms. On top of that there were Danish pastries and a croissant with jam. There may have been more... (3500)

Dinner
Chicken tacos (800)
3x large Coronas (900)
Bottle of wine (700)
2x Tesco bread and butter puddings (800)
Single cream (300)

Exercise
45m walking
2m plank

Day 71 - 1250 calories

Lunch
5x chocolate cookies (1100)

Dinner
1x Weetabix with milk (150)

Exercise
80m walking

The thermodynamic diet - two month progress report

Let's just start with a quick weight loss progress report: this thermodynamic dieting really seems to be working. That's me now about two months into this diet and I'm 12 1/4 pounds lighter than when I started. Here's the graph as of this morning, Saturday 4th March:

Yes, the internet is full of lots of things saying that the laws of thermodynamics have nothing to do with dieting and a calorie isn't just a calorie, but it's all a matter of interpretation: don't forget about that second law and remember that your body doesn't do things with anything close to 100% efficiency and all is good.

The food diary of my diet

My food diary for the last couple of months certainly doesn't look like the food diary of a dieter. It's full of beer, pizza, doughnuts, cookies, wine, chocolate, and the occasional can of Dr. Pepper or glass of fruit juice just to prove a point.

It really doesn't matter what you eat: just don't eat more than you burn.

Again, that efficiency thing comes back into play. If you eat 2000 calories of simple carbohydrate and burn 2500 calories that day, you'll have a 500 calorie deficit on paper, the same as if you ate 2000 calories of protein.

However, the protein may take a bit more energy to process, so the actual calorie deficit from the high protein diet may end up being more than the carbohydrate deficit.

What I'm going to say though, is "who cares"? Do you really need to micromanage things like that? Do those extra few calories really matter enough to make you change how you eat?

Keeping things easy

For me, and I'm sure for a lot of people, the easier something is, the more likely you are to do it. I'm writing this at 6.30 am on a Saturday morning. It's cold and raining outside and really doesn't sound very appealing at all.

If I were a member of a gym, I don't think I could summon the effort to go to the gym on a morning like this (even if I were a member). However, if I had a rowing machine in the house, I'd probably get half an hour in before breakfast. I've got my dumbbells here, so I'll try and get some weights in: maybe a set each time I go upstairs. It's easy.

And I like easy.

The last thing I would want to do when wanting to lose  weight is have an overly prescriptive eating plan that breaks down what I need to eat into various components and forces me to come up with a daily diet plan that needs its macronutrients assembling like a game of Tetris. I don't have time for that.

I'm also limited in what I can eat during the day. I don't really have access to a kitchen at work, there's a kettle and a microwave, so I can reheat my leftover curry in a Tupperware, but not much more than that.

I also don't particularly want to spend any more time than I currently do preparing food. Don't get me wring, I really enjoy cooking, I find it a very nice way to spend a Saturday evening: glass of wine in hand - Keith Floyd style - deftly plopping a poached egg on top of a nice piece of smoked haddock; but I don't want to have to spend precious time each evening or morning preparing a scientifically-constructed meal plan.

And I don't want to spend any more on food.

I like the food I eat: it's tasty and it makes me feel happy. While I don't get my 5-a-day (although I never have, it's not simply a diet thing), I think I actually eat nutritionally better than a lot of people and, while I've stopped adding it to the daily food diary, I'm taking my multivitamin every day as well.

Summing up the first 2 months of the diet

I was about to say I just don't get why so many people try to make losing weight so complicated, but then I remembered they need to make it complicated so that you need to buy their book or sign up to their program.

Lots of people want to lose weight, and lots of them are prepared to pay for it. It's big business. I'll admit, that for a lot of people, cost is associated with value: if you pay for something, you value it more. Taking that into the diet world, if you pay for the plan, maybe you're more likely to stick to it, maybe you'll make more of an effort.

For the diet plans where you go and do your weekly weigh-in in public, I can see how paying for that can make a lot of motivational sense for a lot of people; I suppose it comes back to the public shame thing I mentioned before.

Maybe I wouldn't have lost over 12 pounds if I'd not been writing this and making my progress public. I feel I've made a public commitment to lose weight and, quite frankly, I probably would be a bit ashamed if I didn't. Perhaps not ashamed, that might be on over-reaction, but I'd certainly be disappointed with myself and perhaps a bit embarrassed.

From inductive reasoning, I knew that this diet would work. Since they were developed, no event has been shown to violate the laws of thermodynamics and my body is no different.

Sure, if I keep this up and get slimmer and slimmer and continue to drop my body fat percentage, my body might start to panic a bit. My metabolism will change, the levels of those mitochondrial uncoupling proteins may change, my proton leak may drop and I will lose less energy as heat. My leptin levels might fall and my ghrelin levels might rise making me much more hungry.

In short, if I keep going, it's going to get harder and harder to lose weight. But I have no intention of going that far. I don't want to be a rake. My BMI is currently 22.4. I have no intention of it falling below 21.5, and even that's probably too low.

In short, for two months in, I'm really happy with how things are going. I look a lot better in the mirror, and I can continue to have a 5-pack of doughnuts at work with my morning coffee, a bottle of wine on a Friday night, and enjoy pizza and ice-cream with the family.

Last week, my daily calorie intake average was 2514. I round up, so if we consider that that's a 5% overestimate (probably quite conservative), that falls to 2388 - quite a drop. Then consider the extra walking and the fact that I probably spend a lot more time awake than most people, and you can see how I lost nearly two pounds last week.

Away for three days for work next week though -eating out will likely be involved, so we'll see how we do next Saturday!

Day 60 - 2950 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)

Dinner
Pint of beer (250)
Steak, chili and pepper stir fry with rocket salad (300)
Bottle of wine (700)
Chocolate crepe (150)

Exercise
60 sit ups
100 press ups
6x sets dips
30m walking

Day 61 - 3200 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
Bit of cookie (100)
Fried egg roll (350)

Lunch
Steak stir fry on rocket salad (300)
Small croissant (250)
2x slices toast and butter (300)

Dinner
Beer (200)
Bread and butter (500)
Plaice with leek and broccoli (300)
Crepe (150)
Burger (250)
Wine (300)

Exercise
30 sit ups
6x sets bicep curls
45m walking

Day 62 -3700 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
2x poached eggs on toast (300)

Lunch
Fry up (2x black pudding, 2x Lorne sausage, 4x link sausage, 2x scrambled eggs (1000)

Snack
Creme egg (200)
Beer (200)
Mini eggs (250)

Dinner
Wine (400)
Chicken and veg stir fry with wild rice (400)
4x chocolate crepes (500)
Snickers (250)
Whisky (100)

Exercise
30x sit ups
6x sets dips
2m plank
60m in pool with kids (can't really call it swimming)
30m walking

Day 63 - 1850 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Scrambled egg on toast (350)
Protein bar (250)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (200)
Chicken sandwich (350)

Dinner
Bacon sandwich (300)
Weetabix, raisins and milk (300)

Exercise
60m walking
2 1/4m plank