Put bluntly I need to follow my own advice, advice that I gave in criticism of weight loss clubs in general. The participants sit there for an hour discussing food, leave the meeting utterly ravenous and then have excessive portions of the foodstuffs they’ve been told they can have in order to get the thoughts of those items that they can’t out of their heads. And there is never ANY mention of exercise, something that blew my mind when I first attended one of these meetings as an observer. Since my intention is to become a food writer for this publication and (hopefully) a few others I have discovered that I need to monitor how I live my life through food. In order to monitor how I am living within food I must look at the thing in my life which need a dramatic reduction. The first one being an overindulgence in alcohol in general but particularly in wine. I love wine, it’s complexity intrigues me, the stories involved in its creation and current reputation fascinate me. But the truth is it has a terrible effect on my ability to think properly and remember clearly and my body, although relaxed and entirely stress-free, will suddenly refuse to do anything more than carry me off to bed. Where I sleep the sleep of a thousand giants and wake up rested and refreshed but with a furred tongue and a dull and judgemental headache. Wine has to go, a dramatic reduction is a clear way to go here: half a bottle a week puts me on a sociable if far more sensible path but what about beer? Beer is a thing that I’ve been enjoying a lot of recently thanks to my discovery of the beer scene local to me with plenty of beer shops and breweries. These seem to have appeared out of nowhere or are hidden away on farmland quietly producing top quality beer at quantity and that is drinkable at a scale which is staggering to me. Beer is initially brewed at a lower ABV (alcohol by volume, the percentage you see on the bottles, cans and at the pumps in pubs). This allows the drinker to drink the beer in pints. What do pints make? Points! Or in this case units of alcohol per drink or strength of drink. Units are seen as the measure of the amount an adult body can manage in an hour. To give context an adult is only advised to take on 14.5 units a week. Adults in the UK drink on average around 18 units per week. (Source: https://alcoholchange.org.uk/alcohol-facts/fact-sheets/drinking-trends-in-the-uk) Is beer the problem? Absolutely not. That figure accounts for an average of the adults in the UK, some 40 million people, drinking all of the different types of alcohol that are available for the course of an average year. But it does show an increase in drinking that some may consider worrying. So what I am I going to do about it? I’m cutting down the volume of the beer I intake, I will be instantly cutting out seven of the beers that I would normally have and replacing these with alcohol free alternatives, de-caf coffee, Marmite drinks or simply water. I will also be cutting down on the volume that I drink. The standard pint in the Uk is equivalent to 568ml and I intend to cut down the volume of drink to 330ml each time I drink and will not regularly exceed having two of these a day. Drinking sprits is also a great part of my weekly drinking and I usually drink a 50ml pour of whisky a night. I could, of course cut this part of my drinking out but I want to reevaluate my relationship with food and drink, not overhaul it entirely. So I will be reducing my whisky intake to the weekend only (Friday night, Saturday and Sunday). However I intend to counter all of this drinking with a great deal more exercise. My fitness level when I was younger was far better than it is now and I moved around and exercised a lot more, obviously the role I am thinking of taking in food journalism requires me to do exactly what I am doing now: sitting in a chair, writing, moving nowhere, doing very little. So I’m going to borrow parts of my exercise course from when I was sixteen and preparing for the youth London mini marathon. The course went like this: 4 kilometres around a track on a Monday and 5 kilometres, on an incline in a gym on a Wednesday followed by vast amounts of protein and a greater intake of water. The days I did it on doesn’t really matter anymore. What does matter is the amount of distance, 5 kilometres in one sitting for instance and how long that took me, roughly 25mins.
I intend to do this five kilometres distance every weekday (e.g not Saturday or Sunday) with the only caveat being that in order for me to do this distance it must be dry outside because I will not be using a gym.
I’m challenging myself with all this, I could carry on as normal, become overweight and worry about my drinking or I can start to take care with what I’m doing whilst still doing what I love and bringing as much content to you as I can in the next few months and hopefully years. The one thing that remains is for me to ask something of you: wish me luck!!
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