If you've followed Warming Up for the last 7 years and 51 weeks you will know a prevailing theme is my weight gain and loss. I have dieted and then gorged, gone on the wagon and fallen off the wagon time after time. Every diet can only be a triumph of hope over experience, because even at my most successful, three years ago, although I lost over two stone, I only kept the weight off for a year and another year after that was back to the same weight I had been.
But once again I am trying to slim down, having shed over a stone in the first couple of months of not drinking and then hitting a plateau since the end of Edinburgh (with a slight increase in weight as I attached a pipe gushing liquid chocolate to my mouth to get me through the stresses of AIOTM and Celebrity Mastermind). In the last week or so though I have returned to the system that Andrew Collings, the butter eating twit, scoffs at - attempting to burn off more calories than I consume and by some wizardry it once again turns out to be very effective. I have dropped two kilos in a week and a half simply by doing some exercise and some walking every day and keeping my overall calorie consumption down to around 2000 a day. It's so stunningly easy that I wonder why I so regularly struggle with my weight. I am lucky that it comes off pretty quickly when I make the effort, but conversely it does pile back on when I take my eye off the ball. This time though. This time, it is for keeps.
I was focused enough to get to the gym in the morning, before a lunchtime meeting in town, but my exercise regime was further helped by someone who had fallen or jumped under a train at Bond Street, meaning I had to walk the length of Oxford St to get a tube back home to record this week's Collings and Herrin podcast. Their death was not in vain. It allowed me to eat a small Tangle Twister lolly (48 calories) later without any impact on my waistline. I hope this fact is recorded on the gravestone of the unfortunate person who ended their life on the Central Line. Perhaps they took some perverse thrill from the fact that their death would mildly inconvenience others, or perhaps they were beyond thinking (or perhaps they just slipped up), but all they did to me was make me 20 minutes late for an appointment with Collings and allowed me to eat a small ice cream treat with no fear for the consequences.
And I enjoyed the podcast. The weight lifted from my shoulders of not having deadlines flying in my face along with the weight lifted from my midriff has made me a lot more light-hearted and it's a silly and puerile and rude podcast, in which Collings vents his annoyance at me for not working during the records on our 6Music show (though I don't know what he wants me to do) and I point out to him that he has made several thousand pounds more than me this year because his pay is higher - which is what he gets for the difficult task of thinking about which knobs he will have to push at the end of the song. But there's some funny stuff too, like what it would take to get me on to "I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here". And I think it would be good if more people were less keen to get money for stuff and thought of other ways in which they could be recompensed. I have laid down the gauntlet to the producers of that show and if they make my wish come true I will go into the jungle for as long as they like and allow them to bully me as much as they desire.
To discover the things that I demand (which can not be printed in a family blog) click on the link. We're rapidly approaching our 200th podcast recording together (including the 6Music ones and the stuff we have done for Go Faster Stripe). It's a bit incredible that we can think of anything left to talk about (even if much of what we do is variations on a theme), but whatever the podcast Richard Herring says I am still enjoying our chats. And it's all Collings has in his life. So I suspect we will be carrying on for a little while yet.
And I really like the photo for this week's podcast, in which we recreate the Wills and Kate engagement picture, but only because in it Andrew looks exactly like I imagine Tiny Andrew Collings would look.
