Weight Goes Down

About a month ago, I noticed that whenever my sister got a Chinese takeaway, which is fairly regularly, not only did she get a starter and a main, but also a portion of chips as well. She claims that the chips are 'instead of rice'. This is generally in line with the vast quantities of food that she consumes. I also noticed that despite this giant intake of food, she wasn't fat. This could be put down to her young age (23), but I noticed also, that every day after work she either went on an exercise machine for 50 minutes, or went on a four mile jog around the country lanes. Could exercise possibly be the key to this mystery? I had my suspicions.
With this in mind, I decided to conduct a highly scientific experiment where I would go on the exercise machine every day (it is in the kitchen, for some strange reason, and has wonky legs) and see what happened. I would continue to eat a lot of food, especially cakes, because I like them a lot.
Being a geeky kind of a person, I would of course have to plot all this exercise and my weight on a graph, so I could mark crosses on it, and draw a line, and make me feel like I really WAS doing an experiment.

The first thing to mention is the bathroom scales that I used. In a word - totally crap (one word was not enough.) They were difficult to read, and gave different readings depending on which part of the floor you put them on, and whether you stepped on them quickly or slowly. My mum told me that she weighed five pounds less if she took the scales upstairs and used them there. My Dad said that this was because gravity was weaker up there. This is his idea of a joke. Having all these features to contend with I developed a strict scientific routine where I would place the scales on exactly the same tile each time, and mount them at a pre-designated speed.
The other thing I should mention is that no matter how little I felt like getting on the exercise machine, once I had actually been on it, I always felt much better. In fact, it seems that doing regular exercise actually makes you feel good! Everyone knows this already, but sneakily pretends that it doesn't make that much difference.

And so to the results. 30 days ago I weighed 13 stone and eight pounds, and now I weigh 13 stone and one pound. So it officially works. Half a stone in a month. I went on the machine for 30 minutes to an hour almost every day, and the days I didn't go on it, I was doing some other kind of exercise, like digging the garden. Therein lies the problem. At the moment I have plenty of time to do anything I want, and using up an hour every single day is pretty easy. If I was working long hours, and there didn't happen to be an exercise machine sitting in the kitchen, I imagine that I might have failed at this task.
Still, it does make you feel better, so maybe it's worth making that extra time somewhere. That's got to be a better option than not eating lots of cakes...

THE GRAPH

The circled numbers are the minutes of exercise done.

Posted by paul at September 3, 2004 11:36 AM