Protruding
Weighing 18.5 stone (260lbs / 118kgs) and looking like a kilted whale in my wedding photos, and with 40 years old being just around the corner, in the last couple of years I’ve taken a liking to exercise. This page will be dedicated to the recording of statistics and related information to my current regime.
I would like you to feast your eyes on the photograph on the right – taken just days after my wedding. Here I am standing majestically next to a broken castle on Loch Ness. As you can plainly see, my stomach bone is enormous. This was my Scottish self, built on a diet of television, frozen pizzas, drink and booze. One isn’t able to attend to one’s fitness as much during a Scottish winter, or indeed a Scottish summer – both of which are dotted with intermittent downpours of a snowy nature. Ice on footpaths is also an excuse that needs to be inserted at this point. Many a time you would be wandering carefully through the streets of Edinburgh of a winters day to see many an elderly Caledonian walker have their supporting cane slid out from under them by an unforgiving and icy footpath.
So, there was always an excuse not to go out and remove the large, blubbery protuberance from my stomach area.
These days, however, my thinking on the issue is much different. I now live in the city of Auckland, New Zealand. This is a very lovely city with many beachy areas and lots of old volcanoes which one can walk up and down. So all these hills, coupled with the very mild climate means many days in this fine city are worthy of “getting out amongst it” to coin a local phrase.
The current regime commenced at the beginning of 2007. It began with a weekly game of netball for my staff team. The first game was a complete nightmare… Not so much the game, but the following week. Joints creaked with violent subtlety. Rising from a chair, or the couch, was coupled with a groan akin to a dying alpha walrus in the last throws of his final passionate encounter. As we came to the end of that first season, and with the looming Christmas holidays and their accompanying ingestion of all things food-like and alcoholic, I thought it a good idea to perhaps keep the current level of fitness I had attained over the course of said season. The last thing I wanted was for Mrs. Boon to have the creaking walrus as her companion after the first game of 2008..
So here we go!! The evidence that begins to tell the story… it is a small jpeg of a graph showing the pounds just dropping off the above belly. As you can see there was a small plateau at the 240lb (108.8kg) mark, but in the last couple of weeks things have started to drop away again. Let’s hope the trend featured in the statistics continues and we don’t have an accidental increase – the last of which happened over the Christmas period when I was in… you guessed it… Scotland.
June, 2009: I’m now down below 230lbs (104.3kgs). I’m hoping to crack the 100kg mark by my birthday in August. Will keep you posted!
August 2009: I had hoped to get down to 100kgs by August 12 this year. Alas, and I put it down the the twin birthdays of my wife and I over the past month or so, I have remained static – around the 225 pound mark. The good news is my doctors think I’m incredibly fit. My resting heart rate is in the mid-50s per minute. This is quite good apparently. I can also run nearly 2 miles without stopping. When I started this process I could barely get up from the couch without increasing my resting heart rate to over 200 beats per minute. It felt like there was a dance party in my chest and the only people invited were Brian Cholesterol and his Italian mate Trevor Angina. Although the updated graph below shows a kind of flatline, I must keep reminding myself that since my return from Scotland this year I’ve lost nearly 30 pounds (15kgs). It’s all good news!
October 2009: Finally, last week, after a fair few months hovering around 225 pounds I have struck 220. This means with any slight weight loss from this point on will result in me breaking the 100kg mark for the first time in a number of years. I put the fact that I’ve hovered for so many months because of the booze. Not only does it add to your wasteline but it has the same remarkable properties as butter, lard and those wonderful butterlard biscuits my mother used to make – it reacts with the body’s capacity to remove weight. So there I was, setting myself a goal of cracking 220 pounds by my birthday. It is now October and I’m still not there yet. The only cracking I’ve been doing is out the top of my trousers when I bend over. Well, hopefully things work out and the guts continue their current shrinkage over the coming weeks and months.
