10 seconds

10 seconds shaved off my best time.

I thought i was doing well....

because I have got my up-the-stairs time down to 3 minutes exactly. Then one of my colleagues did it in 1 minute 6 seconds. Ok he's hyper fit and pretty much ran up the stairs but really! There shouldn't be 2 minutes difference between us.

More work needed I think.

Still no chocolate, am eating less thanks to Paul McKenna and I have a Max&Paddy session this evening. Onwards and upwards!

4.5 minutes

that's my lunchtime up-the-stairs benchmark. I expect to improve significantly

You Fat Ba*tard

Evrey year after Christmas I start to get myself fit for the new cricket season. This means I have 4.5 months in which to shake off my excess bulk and gain the ability hit a ball and run backwards and forwards along a 22 yard cricket pitch.

I don't so much go on a diet as cut out the crap. That means no crisps, chocolate or sugary fizzy drinks. In previous years that has been enough for me to lose as much as 1 stone.

This year I need to lose more. I weighed myself the other day out of interest and found that I am heavier than I have ever been. The weight doesn't bother me so much as the lack of fitness. We had a fire alarm last week at work, which involved walkiing down 12 floors. That was no problem. When we went back into the building I did what i usually do and walked back up rather than wait for a lift. For the first time in a long while I struggled.

So this year I have more work to do in order to lose more weight than before and to get fitter.

Here is the plan:

1, Cut out the crap as usual
2, Eat according to Paul McKenna's plan.
3, Walk upstairs to my office every lunchtime
4, Exercise more often - at least 3 times a week for 1 hour minimum at a time.

To help with point 1 I have gone back to an old favourite - popcorn. Popcorn has virtually no calories and if you microwave it there is no fat in it. It is an ideal food to fill you up without fattening you. Perfect for those mid-morning munchies.

Paul Mckenna's plan is interesting. It is currently on tv and really it is just about sensible eating. I eat very quickly. McKenna says that people who eat quickly do not give their stomach enough time to send the 'full' signal back to the brain and therefore overeat and end up feeling bloated. These extra calories become fat if not burnt off. By eating more slowly I have found that I am eating less because I am stopping when my brain gets the 'Full' message.

The walking upstairs thing starts today. It is the part of the process that I am least looking forward to.

Exercise. Well i have cricket nets on Sundays, but added to that I have bought "Max and Paddy's Power of Two" dvd. I did my first session yesterday and found it to be a good workout. I get bored with plain exercises so the fact that they combine comedy with exercise meant that the process was more bearable. How I'll find it when I've seen the dvd a dozen times - God only knows.

So there we are. I have the ambition of losing 18 pounds. Thats roughly a pound a week and I know it's a tall order. I will be pleased if I lose less but feel my fitness is up to scratch.

I will keep you updated.

Nothing much to say...

...I'm in a post Christmas slump :(

So I thought I'd post a couple of photo montages taken from my office. They were attempts to capture a beautiful sunset using my phone.

Click on th eimages to make them larger.







By way of explanation, the sunset is just slightly to the left of the Houses of Parliament. At the join between photo 1 and 2 you can just make out the London Eye. In the right hand frame you can see St Paul's Cathedral

9 Days that shook London

I watched the above titled documentary last night and it made my blood boil. It purported to examine Live 8, The Olympic Bid, The Bombings, the G8 and the VE Day celebrations. Instead it was a snide, snipey piece of character assassination.

The Live 8 segment concentrated on trying to demonstrate how Make Poverty History was betrayed by Bob Geldoff. Looking as if it were put together by a 1st year media studies student, all it did was to make the anti-poverty movement look petty and childish. Yes it was an achievement to get all those people to Edinburgh, but to then bleat about the fact that Live 8 got all the headlines misses the point. Demonstrations do not make attractive news stories. Whereas Live 8 got an anti-poverty message across to millions if not billions on tv, and then again through acres of press coverage. Organisations like WDM moande that Geldoff was too close to the Government and thus he was more welcoming of the outcome than the main Make Poverty History activists.

Well I think that perhaps getting an intimate dialogue with Government might be a more effective means of changing policy than dressing as clowns in camouflage gear and painting lipstick smiles on police riot shields. No the Government and the G8 did not completely cancel 3rd world debt but they did move in the right direction. Without Live 8 would they have gone further? I seriously doubt it. These campaigners seemed like people who were almost happier to stay untainted by association with the Government and thus fail, than to engage with the reality of the political process. I bet at University these people stuck stickers on lamposts.

The bombings were handled sensitively, and the Olympic segment was perilously close to being interesting, although the snide suggestion that Live8 only got the go-ahead in order to boost the Olympic Bid was tittle tattle worthy of the Daily Star. Of course the bid team used it, they would be fools not to - but really! You just got the feeling that throughout the documentary axes were being ground and to criticise the VE celebrations for stage managing the visuals just seemed pathetic.

The 9 days featured in the documentary included a number of triumphs and one tragedy that was dealt with fantastically. If I hadn't lived through it all, based on last night's programme I would think that the only people in London are bumbling buffoons, out of touch remnants of the 60s, egotists and terrorists.

I'm sorry, but good as the MPH campaign was, it was never going to fully achieve its aims in 2005. Prior to the advent of Live 8 it was only really achieving public awareness in the liberal/left, people already susceptible to such arguements. To really pressurise the G8 there needed to be something big, something crossing boundaries of age, class, race, religion, politics, and nationality. Live 8 provided that platform. People will survive hunger, and fight Aids now because of what happened at the G8. If even one extra life was saved then it was worth the effort.

The question is how to keep exerting the pressure. There can't be another Live 8, so what next for MPH? Wrist bands are so 2005!