HEALTH Neill O’Neill’s weight-loss diary – Week 4

Tightening the belt


Weight loss
Neill O'Neill

My weight-loss diary – Week 4
Four weeks into my Motivation challenge and I’m continuing to ease my burden on gravity, though the scales was less troubled by my visit last Wednesday than in the previous three weeks.
There’s now 16lbs less of me being dragged around with every step, though it is becoming harder to notice any difference from week to week. I got to wear a vest on week one that had 20lbs of replica fat attached to it, and remember thinking how heavy it was and how I’d be delighted to shift all that in body fat. For my next visit to The Motivation Clinic in Market Lane in Westport, I am aiming to have hit the 20lb mark, but to do so I will actually have to exercise more this week and stop missing meals.
I’m not sure if the Motivation consultants think or expect I can lose that amount, they didn’t challenge me to, that targets is my own, but they did correctly predict this week that my loss would be down on previous visits. Time will tell! Consistent weight loss is difficult to achieve, I went from losing 6lbs on week one to three on week two, five on week three and two on week four.
I have been sticking to the plan and if anything, owing to schedule issues, missing some of the meals/snacks. However, on average, I am losing 4lbs a week, which is right in line with male trends, so that is very pleasing.
Imelda, my friendly consultant, has reiterated to me again that not eating to schedule, in or around every three hours, means I am not giving myself a good chance of getting the best results, but a month in and I know that my exercise levels need to be increased, there is no reason that they haven’t been.
Losing weight is primarily down to diet, but I am also trying (relatively successfully) to live healthily at present, so I have no excuses for not exercising enough.
Last week I got the biggest indication yet that things are going in the right direction, when I ran out of notches on the belt I usually wear on my work pants.
That is definitely something new, and when things like that are happening, you do feel compelled to keep up the good work, not that it is too much of an effort.
As each week passes it feels just like normality. I now realise just how unhealthily I was living, my schedule and eating habits were, to be quite honest, shocking. I think it is something that could have haunted my in years to come, but hopefully I’ll be able to balance my life better going forward, in terms of diet and regular eating.
Nobody has told me that I have to be a hermit, in fact they were saying last week that I need to get out to learn how to handle socialising as part of an overall enhanced routine, but I was always a full-duck-or-no-dinner man, so I’ve been avoiding going out, as much for my healthy-living buzz as Motivation.
I have a rather hectic December coming up, I’ll be primed and ready for that if I continue a while longer.
My friends sending me pictures of their bank holiday weekend antics aside, I don’t feel I’m missing too much, and my Motivation levels have not diminished.
Oh, and I’m still on the homemade soup…