Half marathon madness

Three key messages in this post:

1. I've been inspired to do a half marathon


2. I want your sponsorship money


3. I'll give you advertising in return

The Half Marathon

I was watching coverage this morning of last weekend's Great North Run - a half marathon in the north of England which this year had 54,000 registered entrants, making it the world's biggest half marathon.

Whenever I've watched one of these mass participation events, I have found the people who do it to be truly inspiring. Both the people at the front who are supreme athletes, but perhaps even more so the people in the midfield and at the back who have had to fit their running training around busy work and family schedules, and who most of the time don't have the expert coaching that the elite runners get.

Historically, I have rationalised the fact that I don't enter by telling myself that I'm not built for running distances. Well this excuse is starting to feel a bit thin. I'm The Fat RUNNER after all - not The Fat COUCH-POTATO!! And my recent 5k personal bests, strength training and weight loss all points to the fact that it's time for me to do something a bit more challenging than a 5k.

A quick chat with a marathon-running friend confirmed my suspicions that it would take at least 4 months of training led me to look into 2010 for a suitable event, and I am now registered to run the 2010 Adidas Half Marathon at the world-famous Silverstone racing circuit. I've got to admit that my childhood dreams involve me racing around Silverstone, but not without a car!! But I'll take what I can get...

Sponsorship

I'd like you to sponsor me. I've set up a sponsorship page at JustGiving which administers the payments and allows you to pay with a credit card or even a paypal account, meaning that it accepts payments from all over the world. And if you're a UK tax payer, then they can even claim the tax back on your donation.

The charity I've chosen is Save the Children. Save the Children is the world's independent children's charity. They are devoted to helping the millions of children are still denied proper healthcare, food, education and protection and are working flat out to get every child their rights.

Furthermore, as a large and professionally-managed charity, more of your money goes directly to helping children. In fact, 83% of all donations is spent on charitable expenditure directly benefitting children.

Finally, although the charity is headquartered in the UK, it acts on a global basis, so wherever you are in the world there is a reason for you to sponsor me.

Advertise your product or blog or whatever

And when YOU sponsor ME, then this is what I will do for YOU.

If you have a blog or a product you want to promote, I'll do it for you in the box on the right.

You can promote anything within reason - as a guide, look at what Google excludes from their advertising network here. If they're happy with it, then generally I'll be happy with it.

So how do you do it?

Firstly, go to the Fat Runner sponsorship page and follow the instructions to sponsor me - even the smallest amount is very gratefully appreciated.

Secondly, come back to this blog, and go to the Contact Me form and let me know the text you want and any links (if you know html, then just send me that). I'm happy with up to 100 characters in your blog mention or product advert. You should also include your email address on the contact form - that is my way of matching your donation against your promotion request.

Finally, hopefully within 24 hours your text will be up on this blog. The adverts/mentions will be ordered according to the size of the donation (biggest donation at the top, obviously), giving you the incentive to dig deep and support something truly worthwhile.

So, I think that's it. The donation page is already live, and as soon as I get some sponsorship (even if it is only 1 cent!) I'll start putting adverts up.

Let me know if you have any questions, but in the meantime, please give generously.

Three week weight loss challenge success!

I weighed in this morning at 99.9kg, 20 days after starting my three week weight loss challenge. Therefore, I've lost 3kg! Not quite the 6kg I was hoping for when I first started, but it became clear that that target was neither sensible nor achievable in a sustainable way.

My belt is looser, my 5k time is a bit quicker, I feel better when I see myself in the mirror in the morning - all good!

I think the eating rules which I set out in my Three week weight loss challenge post have a lot to do with it. In fact, those eating rules seem to have generated quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere.

One of the things I liked about them was that it was very easy to remember them, and therefore live by them. Any book you read on the subject is 150 pages or more of "eat that, don't eat that" with long "do/don't" lists at the back - impossible to memorise! But my handy five rules are so simple that anyone can remember them.

Within the discussion that my eating rules (note that I call them eating rules, not diet rules!) a few good thoughts came out - so I'm going to amend my eating rules (and add a sixth).

Firstly, I wasn't clear when I mentioned no carbs after breakfast. The carbs I was talking about were those calorie-rich carbs (processed and non-processed) like pasta, rice, cereal, potato, cous cous etc. I wasn't referring to other vegetables that also contain carbohydrate.

Secondly, I should have included a rule to always grill, bake, steam or stir fry whenever possible, and don't saute or deep fry.

So, my six golden eating rules for weight loss success are:

1) Lots of water - your cells need it, and your liver needs it (and as your liver controls insulin, sugar metabolism and fat storage, it's a good idea to keep him happy)
2) Not too much alcohol - lots of calories, dehydrates your liver (and makes him unhappy) and makes doner kebabs too appealing to resist
3) Lots of vegetables - generally low calories, and packed with minerals and vitamins and stuff
4) Restrict high-calorie carbs (pasta, rice, cereal, potato, cous cous) other than for breakfast - not for any special reason other than (i) they are packed with calories which you probably don't need at any time other than breakfast, and (ii) when I eat carbs at lunchtime, I feel sleepy in the afternoon
5) Restrict chemicals, additives and 'unnatural foods' (processed foods, any drink which isn't water, tea, or fresh fruit juice) - I'm not saying here that it's impossible for our bodies to deal with chemicals (as some diets try to say) but that they need to be filtered out someway, which puts more pressure on the liver
6) Always grill, bake, steam or stir fry whenever possible, and don't saute or deep fry

I'm now setting myself the next target - another 3kg in 3 weeks - which means I need to weigh 97kg by 12 June - which also happens to be the day before my birthday! I'm also going to be upping my exercise levels over the next few weeks (especially now that the weather is becoming so much better) and have found a couple of great websites/guides which focus on using compound exercises and 'functional' exercises for increasing fitness and strength and burning fat. I'll tell you more next time. Wish me luck!

Three week weight loss challenge - update

Just a quick update - not going so well at the moment.

After my last post which said that my weight loss was on track, I somehow managed to get all the way back up to 103kg, and now have come all the way back down to 101.3kg.

To meet my challenge, I need to lose 4.3kg in 9 days. Now even I know that would be impossible/reckless.

But I'm taking some comfort out of the fact that I've managed to drop some weight, and aim now to lose another 1.3kg in the next 9 days (which sounds sensible) and will at last get me back into double figures for the first time in probably a year.

Also, I went out for a bike ride around Richmond Park on Sunday. Despite having been held up by cars on three of the fastest stretches, I was able to complete the loop in the third fastest time since I started recording them a few years ago - which was nice.

If the weight loss continues, hopefully I'll be able to beat my best!

Here's something else to throw into this post - I'd very much appreciate your thoughts on it.

As anyone who has read any diet book from the last ten years knows, the experts say that it's not the amount of calories you eat, but what proportion of fat/carbs/protein you eat, or when you eat, or when you starve, or whether you're eating right for your body type, or blood type, or your ancestral hunter/gatherer type, or whether you chew or not, or whether you eat carbs after lunchtime, or whether you eat many small meals throughout the day etc. etc. etc.

The thing I've come to realise is that for every theory, there is a completely counter theory. There are, however, a few things which I think do make sense:
1) Lots of water - your cells need it, and your liver needs it (and as your liver controls insulin, sugar metabolism and fat storage, it's a good idea to keep him happy)
2) Not too much alcohol - lots of calories, dehydrates your liver (and makes him unhappy) and makes doner kebabs too appealing to resist
3) Lots of vegetables - generally low calories, and packed with minerals and vitamins and stuff
4) Restrict carbs other than for breakfast - not for any special reason other than (i) they are packed with calories which you probably don't need at any time other than breakfast, and (ii) when I eat carbs at lunchtime, I feel sleepy in the afternoon
5) Restrict chemicals (processed foods, any drink which isn't water, tea, or fresh fruit juice) - I'm not saying here that it's impossible for our bodies to deal with chemicals (as some diets try to say) but that they need to be filtered out someway, which puts more pressure on the liver.

Other questions I don't have much of an opinion on:
1) Red meat, white meat or fish? No idea. Fish is meant to be good for you but full of pollutants and/or unsustainable. White meat is lower in fat than red, but has less nutrients such as iron. Red tends to have a bit more fat. So I generally eat a mixture
2) Small meals throughout the day, or three standard meals? I always bought the 'small meals keeps your metabolism ramped up' argument, but I'm not so sure... And apparently new research suggests it's not true.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Currently it seems like I'm losing weight with them, it allows me to have evenings out with friends without feeling like an outcast, I have more energy, I'm getting good sleep, and I'm not feeling too hungry or irritable...

Would this work for you?

Weight loss story - day 7 of three week challenge

My three week challenge to lose 6kg in three weeks is going ok at the moment. If I lose another 0.3kg today, then I'll have done 2kg in 1 week which is right on track.

I know that I'm not doing this in a healthy sustainable way, and this is 'crash dieting', but I just feel I need to get at least some control back over what I'm eating.

So basically I'm not eating very much, but still continuing to exercise. On Monday I got my bike around Richmond Park again - in a reasonably respectable time too given the strength of the wind. And last night I hauled my lardy a*s around Kensington Gardens... Slowly, but at least I made it.

I was reflecting on the last time I lost a lot of weight. I probably lost about 12 to 15 kg six years ago when I was going through a nasty break up - she was cheating with someone I thought of as a friend (he was married). I even called him up when we broke up asking him for advice without knowing she might even have been there with him at the time...

Anyway, my appetite was shot, but it did let me lose a lot of weight - which also seemed to help the subsequent dating (!)

I know that I'm not going to get down to that very low level of eating. Certainly not for the couple of months I did it for that time. But what I am finding interesting is that after the first five or six days of feeling very hungry, the body seems to adjust and the severe hunger pains seem to go away, allowing me to control more carefully what I eat.

I'm sure people will think I'm crazy for not trying to lose weight in a more sensible way, but all I know right now is that it seems to be working (even if early days)...

Day 1 of three week weight loss challenge

So, after my horrible body fat percentage result, I promised to update you daily on progress towards losing 6kg in 3 weeks.

Day 1
Current weight - 102.7kg
Lost - 0.3kg
Weight to lose - 5.7kg

Plan for weekend (including Monday as it's a public holiday in the UK):

Saturday morning - 5k run, again the excellent Wimbledon Common Time Trial
Sunday morning - 40k bike ride in Richmond Park
Monday - gym session (intervals)

Will try to post my weight over the weekend...

Really fat runner - a call to action

A few weeks ago I was asked to try out the LA Fitness gym near where I work in London, and today I finally got around to the induction, which includes a "Health MOT".

While I was prepared for the normal discussion about BMI, I was very shocked by my body fat percentage.

My BMI just about puts me in the 'obese' range, now that I've let my weight creep up to 103kg. But I've always been able to justify that (to myself) by telling myself that I have a lot more muscle than other people (I used to spend a lot of time doing weights in the gym for when I used to play American football) so it's not such a good measure. I'm sure most sprinters, for instance, have much higher BMIs than the 20-25 range which is meant to be healthy.

However, the measurement of my body fat percentage was a huge wake up call. I'm still roughly the same weight was I was when I was in my early twenties, and back then I had my body fat percentage checked twice - and it was around 18-20%. On the high side, but far from terminal. Well, despite being roughly the same weight as I was back then, my body fat percentage is now around 30%. Another way of thinking about this is that I've lost around 10kg of muscle and gained around 10kg of fat in the last 10-15 years or so...

Jennifer, the trainer at the gym, was very diplomatic about it all, and has started me on a programme of mainly interval-based cardio for the next three weeks or so to get the routine back, and then we'll reassess.

In some ways, this is good news - it is motivating me to do something about it. If the measurements had come back with 20% body fat again, I could have decided that everything was ok and I had nothing to change...

So - the three week challenge I'm setting myself is to get down to 97kg. 2kg's per week from a lot more exercise than normal, and much more sensible eating. No more big bowls of pasta and pesto at night. Breakfasts every day. Grilled meat not fried. Regular (small) meals. More vegetables and fruit. More water. Less beer. Less diet coke. Take the stairs, walk to the shops, lose the car, use the bike, cut the fat off meat, less carbs, more protein, more gym, no slacking, no cracking...

I'll post my weight at the end of every post for three weeks.

Weight this morning - 103.0kg.
Weight to lost in 20 days - 6.0kg

Energy for life

At work a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend an 'energy for life' workshop, which talked about some of the things you can do to have a bit more energy at work - very useful for me given my normal working hours regularly exceeding 70 hours a week.

A cynical view of what the trainer said was "Eat better, exercise more, go to bed earlier", but I think that vastly over-simplifies what, for me, was a great session.

A couple of things which I found really useful:

What gives you energy? At this point we weren't talking about food, but more about what are the things which happen at work which make you more excited or energetic. We started off by remembering something in the last week or two which really got us buzzing. For me, it was making a plan to help us target a new market. The trainer then asked a very simple question - why don't you do more of that? I'd got so caught up in thinking about what I need to do to make other people happy that I'd never stopped to ask myself about what are the things in my day that make me happy, and how can I do more of them. Promise to myself - make sure I carve out a few hours each week to set a big plan in motion.

How do you feel when you eat? Very interesting question. Some people said "guilty", others said "calm". For me, the answer was "relieved" because I'm typically ravenous whenever I eat. Again, something I'd never thought of before. Promise to myself - try to have a little bit of fruit throughout the day, so that I'm less ravenous when I sit down to lunch and will hopefully make more sensible choices.

Why don't you exercise more? Again, lots of interestng answers, but mostly "I don't have the time to exercise". That was my answer too... Most of us were thinking that it's hard to carve out the 75-90 minutes we need to go to the gym or to go for a run, and that was our rationale for not doing more. That was when the trainer asked her follow-up question "Do you have 15 minutes a day to be able to do some exercise?". It's hard to say you can't find 15 minutes. She showed us a routine you can do with one of those exercise bands which you can do in 15 minutes in your office which works most of the major muscle groups. Okay, so it didn't feel like you were going to get a cover-page body by doing these things, but it's got to be better than doing nothing! We also discussed the things I was talking about in my last post on Combining exercise with daily activities, like walking to work (even just a bit of it) or using the stairs. Promise to myself - always use the stairs in the office. Unless rushing to get to a meeting, always get off the tube one stop early (morning and night).

She also covered nutrition - more on that in my next post.

Combining exercise into daily routine

A dull title, but a beautiful morning in London!!

On the way into work this morning, there was no tube service on the Piccadilly line, meaning I needed to take the Circle line to St James and then walk from there - something like a 20-25 minute walk.

I'm actually feeling rather virtuous - I could have taken a couple of different connections to avoid the walk, but it was such a nice day that I decided to walk - here's a picture (taken with my Blackberry phone, so not great quality...)



Anyway, it got me to thinking of all of the other ways I might be able to combine exercise into my daily routine (hence the title of this post).

There are the 'normal' tips of never taking a lift/elevator and always using the stairs, or getting off the bus/tube/train a stop earlier and walking the rest, or parking your car a little further away.

Well just because they've been talked about for years doesn't mean that they don't make sense or that they're not useful! I guess that I've never bothered with these kinds of things because I always tell myself that I don't have time. Logically, that has to be wrong, because it MUST be more time-efficient to get 15 minutes of exercise by getting off the tube a bit further away from work each morning (total time cost = 75 minutes) versus going to the gym for half an hour (total time cost, still around 75 minutes and that's if you're lucky enough to have the gym almost on your doorstep).

I've come across a website promoting a system called "Turbulence Training", and one of the key parts of the programme is building exercise into your daily routine. It must make sense, so I'm going to be doing more of this...

How do you build exercise into your daily routine?

Wimbledon Common - and a free Flip video camera and free ipod

Just a short post today. I found the following clip of the Wimbledon Common Time Trial on youtube today, and thought it would give people who are considering entering an event an appreciation of just how varied the people are who run in these events. Hopefully it'll spur you on to do some yourself!!



Now, for the competitions!!

Over the next couple of days, I'll be announcing a competition for a free ipod and related goodies. If that's not enough for you, I'll also be announcing a competiton for a free Flip video camera! How good is that?

Remember to check back (or even more easily, subscribe to this blog using the links on the right to make sure you don't miss out!