Progress
A couple of weeks ago, on the 1st of July to be precise, I wrote that I was going to shed my beer gut in time for the end of august.
I’ve stuck by almost everything I penned that day. I’ve been to the gym all but three weekdays (I had guests up for graduation) and I’ve had spells of healthy eating. Unfortunately, when you graduate all this stuff goes to the back of your mind and you fit in as much student living as possible to make up for the fact that, after you don your robe, you will no longer be entitled to the student lifestyle. So that weekend was particularly messy in terms of what I ate, what I drank and the little exercise I did. But that was always going to happen and I’m glad it did.
This is now the the third week of my seven week scheme, and I’m happy to say that I’ve dropped almost 3kg - which is just over 5lbs - which is almost half a stone. That’s not bad at all. The difference in appearance is hardly staggering, but to me its noticeable. And that is motivation enough to continue with round-the-clock healthy eating and gym visits 5 days a week (reading that sentence back makes it sound like bloody hard work).
Looking at my past few attempts to hammer the gym throughout uni, the lightest I’ve been since I was 18 was just over 80kg (or 12 and a half stone). I’m only a few kg from being there again, and I’m within touching distance of being ‘a healthy weight’ according to what your BMI should be for someone of my age and height. Infact, I think with a couple more visits to the gym I’ll banish the label of ‘overweight’! Which is exactly what I was hoping for.
I’ve seen some pretty bizarre and strange people in the time I’ve been gyming it up - mostly in the swimming pool.
There was one guy who had the thickest, darkest hair I’ve ever seen all down one side of his back, and then a hairless left side, so he kind of looked like a walking ying/yang sign - but I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of medical/surgical result, or if it is just natural. Then, only the other day, in a packed pool where everybody was sticking to their lanes, some asian dude got in and swam directly at me - only to stop seconds before we would collide - and swim back to where he just came from. He did this over and over. After a while I had to get out of the pool because it was becoming impossible to do lengths. I’m not sure if the dude had ever been swimming before or what, but that was pretty bizarre, and rather annoying. Then today there were 6 or 7 ’special’ kids - I’m not sure if they were disabled, ‘bad’ or underpriveleged kids or whatever (they all had community supervisors watching poolside), but they basically stood bang in the middle of the swimming pool across 3 lanes. Which meant the other 10 or so people had to swim around them, often crashing into each other, while these kids just stood around splashing each other. Wouldn’t have been so bad at one end of the pool, but in the centre of the pool across so many lanes that became pretty annoying. And when I say kids they were 15 or 16. Old enough to swim rather than play.
And then there’s the old guy who talks to all the young girls (and no one else)… or the rather overweight gentleman who wears a shiny grey jumpsuit like in the “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems” video (i’m guessing its supposed to help him lose a lot of weight, but that didn’t work for Biggie)… or the two girls who have been in matching track suits every time i’ve seen them… there’s a lot of weird gym-goers.
It makes me wonder what my ‘weird’ gym-goer trait is?
