Just One biscuit

I have had a cake free, alcohol free, mostly chocolate coated anything free, one biscuit week. I have been rock climbing just the once, and I have been stressed to the point of insomnia (by my job, not by a lack of cake). Last week's experiment to see if weight loss is connected to exercise showed that four hours of heavy exercise made me gain 5 lb. This week's experiment to see if weight loss is connected to diet has caused a weight loss of exactly zero pounds. Yep, that's right: zero, zilch, nada. I weigh exactly the same as last week.

With all due respect, the phrase I'm looking for is probably "Oh, bugger". So what can I conclude? That four hours of exercise is not enough to dent the layers of flab and that cutting out the cake and alcohol is not enough either. I need to do both at once, and more of them, I assume. Again, I feel I should express this as: Oh, bugger!

I seriously despise those 'health' posters that suggest you could save your life by taking the stairs instead of the lift everyday. It really does insult the intelligence. If you are that unfit that a couple of flights of stairs will make the difference, then I suggest you have bigger things to worry about.

Did you watch 'Half Ton Son' the other weekend? This American teenager was getting on for 60 stone. He lay, beached and imprisoned in his bulk, in his bedroom, whilst his overly clingy mother fed him popsicles by hand a washed his ass for him; (not at the same time, at least I hope not). I actually had difficulty sitting down to watch the programme. Not because of the scenes of weight loss surgery, but because watching someone enormous watching TV made me want to get up and do something, almost on his behalf. I wanted to yell at the screen: Just get up! Get out of your bed and do something!

I was itching to move, just looking at him. It was a weird sensation. I ended up wrestling the dog for a slimy, half-chewed tennis ball, that he wanted an awful lot more than I did.

Bizarrely, the government has devised an advert designed to get us moving. We are turning into an obese nation, I should know. The advert is a cartoon, showing how active we were as cavemen, and how we should all go down the park and eat apples before we all die of cholesterol poisoning from our sedentary lifestyles. It has no emotional effect on me at all. I feel no desire to get up and leg it out the door with fruit in my hand. The only thing that bugs me is how anatomically incorrect the diagram is, which shows circulation of fat in the body.

So, after my week of enforced chocolatelessness, we went out for a meal with friends. Yes, I was pretty good. I had a yummy baked potato with salad and garlic mushrooms. The sauce was wonderful: garlic and cream. I am drooling at the memory. I did break my alcohol drought too, but I worked off the calories at the gym this morning, so I feel assuaged of any guilt.

I guess I have a choice here: I can give in to the creeping weight increase, until I become the Half Ton Mum, that actually would benefit from the fact that I take the stairs; or I will have to Up the Ante. Clearly the former choice is life-limiting, so I have to make some serious effort at the latter.

The question is: How? What do I do? and How do I sustain it?