Totally addicted to yo.

Hail,
I'm madly writing this in between cat-feeding, furniture-shifting, chook-house-building and novel-writing-avoiding, so this may not be a perfectly balanced post.

Firstly, exercise. What I'm doing is doing interval training in the morning, five or six mornings a week, and gym stuff three times a week. The interval stuff in my case is one of those stepper machines, something we bought for Sarah back when she could use things like that. Basically, interval training means short periods of maximal effort (sprinting) alternating with short periods of lower intensity exercise (jogging or something). The gym stuff is to make sure I don't starve my muscles away, it's compound, mass-building exercises--

Christ, this is boring, isn't it? One problem I have, and one reason I am talking about this here rather than with most people I know face to face, is a lot of the talk that goes on around physical fitness/weight loss/muscle building stuff irritates the living daylights out of me. I find it difficult to read a lot of the stuff about exercise. Some of it - the medicine - the physiology, the anatomy, the right way to do stuff, the less value-laden stuff - I find that very interesting.

But if there was a "fitness magazine world" or something, I wouldn't want to live there. It's an unforgiving place, all blinding white-toothed grins, an almost manic joi de vivre, commandments adn prohibitions and judgements, ideas about the world as hard and flat and unyielding as the washboard abs you see on every page. It's difficult to articulate, but I feel that it's not that far from ginseng extract in the morning and preacher curls and three thousand kilojoules a day to something much less attractive - a horrible tight-lipped puritanism, an almost palpable self-loathing (the front of the magazines say "blast your shoulders! burn your thighs! shred your chest! thrust your genitals into the meatgrinder!"). And all of this on top of a weapons-grade narcissism that you'd worry about if you saw it in a psychiatric ward.

Anyway. I remember reading something once, the writer said it was a proverb. I can't remember if it was meant to be an African proverb or an Indian one or a Chinese one, but you can bet it was one of those places we say things come from when we want people to believe what we say is true and wise and unchallengeable.

The proverb said "Tell me what you boast of and I will tell you what you lack". So maybe I'll stop boasting about how unshallow and not-at-all-narcissistic I am and get on with the fat stuff.

So. The best way for me to exercise is that early morning interval training stuff I wrote about above, because for me that's the most enjoyable way of doing it. From what I understand, interval training gets better results per minute than any other type of exercise. I am a morning person, so it makes sense for me to exercise first thing. And I like the gym, I enjoy the solitude and the feel of the cold steel and the way the weights descend through an arc, the basic, functional look to them, and the gym is close, on my way to work, so that works for me too.

With the diet part, which is basically a fairly mild degree of caloric restriction, what works for me is one of those fundamentalist diets where they set out in fairly clinical detail what you are allowed to eat and what you must not. Again, from what I understand, having something concrete like this works better for most people than those "eat when you feel hungry" ad libitum diets, so that's what I'm trying.

It's an Australian one called the CSIRO diet, you can get the books. Ten cents from the sale of every book goes to buy some decent midfielders for my football team. That or a kilo of lithium for me.

And it is working. The other thing I did was get a checkup, get a decent idea of what my starting point was so I could work out how far I would have to go in what direction to get where I wanted to be - all that stuff others have mentioned. Initially I am looking to lose one or two kilos a week, get the waist:hip ratio down below ninety and knock the early stage blood sugar stuff on the head. And it is working.

Anyway - this is something I am uncomfortable discussing. I feel ridiculously greatful to my friends who have not brought this up when I am with them in the flesh. Eating, sex, prayer - things I like doing and do when I can, but feel deeply uncomfortable discussing. I should call my next entry "let's (not) talk about sex".

As an aside, I just got a blood test back and apparently there is a blood test for"Yo antibodies". Theoretically, this is what your immune system would produce after being exposed to even miniscule amounts of "yo".

Will write again soon. Thanks for listening,
John