I've taken my eye off the ball with my weight post Edinburgh and put on an impressive five kilos. I am not too worried. I think most of this will come off pretty quickly, but after eight months of maintaining my loss it's slightly unsettling to see how quickly it can all go back on. And I haven't gone crazy, just been eating too many sweets, drinking too much beer and not doing quite as much exercise. It's partly cos of the cracked rib (which only occasionally aches when I lie on it now) and suddenly having loads of work to do, meaning it's harder to get to the gym and easier to sit around stuffing my face. But I don't want to end the year as heavy as I started it, so I am back to writing down my calorific intake and keeping a tally of how much I've burned up. Today I did 45 minutes in the gym and cycled around West London for over 30 minutes on a fairly flat back tyre (which really helped add to exertion). This wasn't a deliberate policy, of course, and I only realised that the tyre was deflated when I was a long way from home and another cyclist told me about it. Which was quite a relief as I thought I was just incredibly unfit. Maybe I should give up drinking for the last hundred days of the year as well - alas it is too late. I can't believe it's mid-October.
Hopefully I will have lost a few pounds anyway, as I had my first haircut for a year today - not that the stylish blue-haired hairdresser took too much off. I think she was quite impressed with my hair and didn't want to spoil it too much, though she was less impressed with the fact that I generally never brush it. She asked me if I'd got highlights in my hair, but I had to admit that this effect was purely natural and due to the ever increasing streaks of grey in amongst the brown. "It looks good," she told me, "People would pay a lot of money to get this look." Indeed from a distance there is the illusion of some blond in there, but all too soon I will be a proper silver fox. Which I'm cool with. If it's good enough for Jeff Bridges... And that bloke off the car advert playing a bit of a car like it's a cello.... I am in good company.
I didn't really notice too much difference in the length of my hair after twenty-five minutes in the chair, though it was good to see what it looks like when it has been brushed. That's worth forty quid of anyone's money!
My cracked rib was somewhat put in the shade tonight when I met up with a friend who had smashed both her arms in a quad bike accident last year. Which apparently hurt quite badly. She's healed up now, as much as she's going to, but it put my own injury into some kind of perspective. Losing the use of your arms for a period of months is pretty severe and yeah I asked her the questions that you're thinking about how she managed certain things.... you'll have to ask her yourself. However she's taken lots of positives from it, not only because of the way her friends and family rallied round her (though I did nothing to help shamefully!), but also because it was a bad crash and she realises she's lucky to be alive.
And there's me moaning cos my rib aches a bit when I do sit ups (though not as much as my stomach muscles).
Seize the day, my young friends.
