Day 14
Then: 15 stone 5 pounds (215 lbs)
Now: 14 stone 10 pounds (206 lbs)
By this time tomorrow (8am) my diet will be two weeks old. 9 pounds lost so far.
The photographer came to see the house yesterday. She thought the garden looked wonderful and asked why we weren’t ready to take the pictures immediately. Jo loyally told her it was something to do with my schedule. So far she hasn’t disclosed the real reason for the delay. To save new readers (welcome to you, by the way) the effort of skipping to the front of this blog to find out why I’m subjecting myself to this ordeal, I should explain that my wife has given me a father’s day present of a family portrait and I’m determined that this lasting image of me with my one-year-old child will be something she can look at with pride. It’s all to do with my relationship with my own father, something I’ve written about, with no small shame, in my Blog From The North.
It’s sad we don’t have a professionally photographed record of the garden right now. Every single rose has about a dozen blooms, there are climbers all over the walls, and the big herbaceous borders have come alive quite spectacularly. In a few weeks’ time all this late spring exuberance will have died down into mellow summer maturity. Everything goes a bit floppy. Like me.
I’ve set myself a target of 195 pounds for the photo – that’s a 20-pound loss in all, which would bring me under 14 stone for the first time in 10 years. Dr Pierre Dukan, who invented the diet I’m vaguely trying to follow, reckons I should really aim for a further 14 pounds beyond that. But I calculate that should be sufficient for the photograph, particularly if I wear black and keep my head up.
To put the pressure on, today Jo and the photographer set a date for the shoot: August 21st. That’s six weeks from now, and, thankfully, just a few days before our first wedding anniversary. The diet definitely ends by that weekend: if I can’t have a decent meal and a really good bottle of wine to celebrate, then our first will surely be our last. Tonight, Jo and I spend the whole evening on Google, ogling luxury gourmet hotels in Ireland and France. We’re rating them solely by menu.
Well done Tom, keep up the good work!
ReplyDeleteI think you might be coming round to the idea that exercise is less bad than dieting. E.g. if you did more (aerobic) exercise, you could probably eat what you pretty much like. How good is that? ;-)
Maybe some photos from the top of Shaftoe Crags would embellish the blog? :-)