Developing a plan

So there I was on the Ikea scales realising that I weighed 120 kilos which caused my little bubble of happiness to burst. "Gosh darn it" I said out loud (what I actually said would have made a sailor blush - but this is just in case my mother or my son reads this). How could this possibly happen? I haven't touched the vodka or whisky or gin or wine or beer or cider or frangelico for a month. No alcoholic intake so how could the weight have gone up so dramatically (I had been 116 kilos last time that I looked)? The answer of course was curry, tiramisu, cheesecake and a lifestyle so sedentary that I could make moss look like a party animal.

For the next couple of days I took it easy on the eating front but refused to get back on the scales. In the mean time I began to ponder the situation.

About five months ago, in the days when I was a slim and girlish 115 kilos, I started to play squash again. It's a game that I love and used to play regularly. The fitter I got the harder I tried. In the last game after 3 weeks of being back on court, I played flat out. When I woke up the following day my left knee had swollen to twice it's normal size. I went to see a doctor who asked me how it had happened. I told him. He then asked me how much I weighed and again I told him. Regarding me from beneath his bushy brow I realised that he was thinking "Is he really this stupid?" before coming out with the rather more diplomatic "Look Ben - it's really not a good idea to play squash when you weigh 18 stone". Which is fair really.

The long and the short of it is that I cannot do any high impact sports - so I have to do low impact sports which basically leaves swimming and cycling and the gym. At my current weight I'm feeling a little bit shy about taking my shirt off and going to the swimming pool - it's not pretty. I hate the gym - I have tried and failed on too many occasions and know that lifting weights is just not something that I will ever get into. So neither swimming nor gym which leaves cycling. I have cycled before for weight loss and whilst it does work it takes a long time - usually I lose interest before seeing the necessary results. So I need to do something in tandem (no pun intended) with cycling to strip away the fat fast until I get to a weight where I can re-start the high impact sports that I enjoy.

Back in 2009 I did Muay Thai (thai boxing) for six weeks and went from 118kilos down to 105 kilos. At the end of that I then decided to do a fast for two weeks and although the first three days were tough it was pretty easy after that. I felt good, alert and focussed at the end of it and my weight had dropped a futher 8 kilos so that I weighed in at 97 kilos.

So my plan is to do a fast. A long fast. There are endless videos on youtube of christians doing a 40 day fast for religious purposes. They're mostly fairly slender before they start. Well I'm not - I've got reserves... a lot of them. My plan is to do a 42 day fast - that means water, the occasional coconut water and some nutrition suplements and nothing else for 42 days. So six weeks of my body living off fat only. "Shocking" you say? "this could kill you", you tell me. Well I'll be talking to the doctor as I go but as my body seems to have been preparing for a famine by loading me with fat for the last twenty years - maybe it's time that I gave it one. When I come out of it I will do so by moving onto fruit juices, raw fruit and raw vegetables for a week before adding proteins and starches. My target weight is 13 stone (83 kilos) but once I am as low as 14 stone (90 kilos)then I will start on the high impact exercises again. Wish me luck.