#oneaday Day 903: Running Review

I’ve been running through the Couch to 5K programme again, no pun intended. If you’re unfamiliar with this well-paced running programme, check out the image at the end of this post for more information. Also, play through Emi’s path on Katawa Shoujo and you’ll really want to do it.

Ahem. Anyway. Tonight was the first day of my fourth week on the programme. I’ve done it through to completion once previously, but that was quite a while ago now and my fitness has lapsed somewhat, so I decided to start again. Week 4 is where the pace starts to step up a bit and the jumps in difficulty begin to become more noticeable. For example, tonight I did two three-minute runs and two five-minute runs; on the previous trip out, I did two minute-and-a-half runs and two three-minute runs.

I got on pretty well. I didn’t have to stop at all, and I paced myself well. Said pace is still fairly glacial compared to people who aren’t carrying around as much weight as I am, but I’m satisfied so far.

One thing I remember noticing last time I did all this and am noticing again now is the fact that running is good stress relief. It’s actually probably exercise in general, but I’m finding it particularly apparent while running.

When I say “stress relief” I don’t necessarily mean “making the stress go away”. If it was possible to just make stress dissipate… well, then the world would be a much nicer place. (I also don’t mean “stress relief” in the same way that J-List refers to “stress relief toys”. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry.)

No, what I mean, in fact, is that running seems to “shake things loose” in my head. Stressful thoughts which have been clogging up my head all day come to the fore, particularly when reaching the end of a session. This isn’t always a massively pleasant experience, but it can be helpful and cathartic in the long run. It’s easy for stressful thoughts to get “backed up” and simply cause you to “feel stressed” all day for no specific reason — releasing these thoughts helps dissipate that vague “meh” feeling, though naturally you still have the specific thoughts themselves to deal with.

The human brain is weird.

Anyway, I’m happy with my progress on Couch to 5K so far. I remember being impressed with myself when I made it through the last time I did so, and being even more impressed when I successfully made it through an entire 10K race in London. (Okay, again I wasn’t especially quick, but at least I didn’t come in last place!) I’m contemplating setting myself some sort of target such as another race somewhere so I have something to aim for — the end of the programme is all very well and good, but where do you go from there?

Well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now I shall enjoy the small victory of successfully running for 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes and 5 minutes without stopping.

#oneaday Day 861: Cycle of Life

Today I took ownership of a shiny new bicycle. It is red.

Technically I took ownership of a shiny new bicycle (that was red) yesterday, but said shiny new bicycle was far too big for me, meaning that my testicles suffered considerable (and uncomfortable) compression when attempting to stand astride it, and making actually getting on to the saddle without looking like some sort of Special Person an impossible task. It didn’t do wonders for my confidence, so I took it back and exchanged it for a smaller one. Now I can ride it without feeling like I’m going to fall off. At least, not quite as much.

I haven’t ridden a bike for at least five years, I think. I used to do it a fair bit and have always enjoyed it, despite not being very good at it. I’m fairly clumsy and cack-handed and balance has never been a particularly strong point, meaning that I’m not very good at doing things like signalling, or riding without my hands clamped firmly to the handlebars. (Any tips for getting over that particular phobia are most welcome.) I’m also not particularly good at going uphill, changing gear (with either hand) or bumping up onto a pavement. But I can, at least, pedal, move forwards and stay upright without falling off into heavy traffic and dying, which is a start.

Cycling is good exercise. I’ve been doing a lot on the exercise bike at the gym recently — up to an hour at a time — and it got me thinking I should get back on the “real cycling” at some point, particularly as the weather is so nice at the moment. Observations so far are that real cycling is significantly more challenging than gym cycling (at least on the resistance level I’ve had it set at, it seems) but you get to be outside and have the nice feeling of the wind rushing past you, which is most pleasant and one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed getting on a bike as a means of transportation and recreation.

That “transportation” part is a good thing about real cycling. At the gym, you pedal and pedal and pedal for hours and don’t go anywhere, you just make the little numbers on the screen go up. On a real bike, you can actually go somewhere that is too far away to walk. Granted, the speed at which I cycle probably isn’t significantly faster than walking (unless I’m going downhill) but at least it makes some places that were previously inaccessible without jumping in the car a little more, well, accessible. This is nice. I could probably even cycle to the gym if I tried hard enough, though I then have to consider the fact that I also have to cycle back after exerting myself lifting heavy things and/or all the other stuff I decide to torture myself with.

I would very much like to get fit and lose weight, as has probably been made clear numerous times on these very pages. The more alternative activities I have to help achieve that goal, the less likely (hopefully) I am to get demoralised or bored with the whole thing. I’m doing pretty well with watching what I eat and trying to get more exercise on a regular basis — this is just another means to that end. We’ll have to wait and see if it helps. Hopefully it will.

#oneaday Day 813: Fitocrat

I last wrote about up-and-coming “fitness social game” Fitocracy back in… [checks] Ooh. October of last year. I thought it was more recently. I feel less guilty about writing about it tonight, in that case.

For the uninitiated, Fitocracy is a site which gamifies your exercise regime. Completing exercises rewards you with points. Points mean level ups. Level ups mean… well, nothing actually, but they provide you with bragging rights plus also give you a rough idea of how much cumulative exercise you’ve done since you started tracking it (and, in theory, “got serious” about it).

Tracking exercises can be done in two ways: manually logging them or linking to a Runkeeper account. The former is necessary for exercises which can’t be automatically tracked such as resistance machines, free weights and bodyweight exercises. The latter is the easiest way to track cardiovascular workouts — particularly those where you’ve actually, you know, gone outside — but you can also track CV stuff directly within Fitocracy if you don’t want to plaster your information over yet another site. (Runkeeper is a pretty cool app, though, so if you’re serious about your fitness, enjoy attempting to draw GPS penises via your exercise route and have a smartphone, it’s worth a download.)

If Fitocracy was just an exercise-tracking system with a levelling system, it’d be pretty decent. But the team behind it has gone the extra mile and included a bunch of other stuff, too. There are Achievements for a variety of things ranging from engaging with the site’s social features to performing challenging exercises. There is a Quest system that provides specific, one-off missions for you to undertake — a good means of setting yourself long-term goals if you can’t think of any of your own. You can save your favourite routines so you can easily recall and record them. There’s a solid Groups system whereby you and your friends can work together and even set up mini-challenges to see who can earn the most points in a set time period. And the whole thing is wrapped in a straightforward, conventional but effective and highly-polished social interface that encourages interaction and encouragement between “players”.

All in all, it’s an excellent motivational tool. Everything combined together forms a powerful system that makes you feel like you’re being “rewarded” for bettering yourself when, in fact, you’re simply making a variable go a bit higher each time or occasionally unlocking intangible shiny things. The thing is, though, you are actually rewarding yourself. You’re bettering yourself. You’re getting fit. You’re learning how to self-motivate. And, assuming you’ve managed to badger some friends into joining up too, you’re also being rewarded by positive encouragement and reinforcement from other people who are going through the same thing. It’s a social network for people who are serious about their fitness — or who want to get serious about their fitness. And it does its job extremely well.

Fitocracy was in closed beta for a pretty long time, and during that period it was only possible to use the service if you had an invite. Now, though, the whole thing is open to the public and is completely free to use — though power users have the option of shelling out $4.99 a month to become a “hero” and get early access to new features. The service has had a fresh new coat of purple paint, its site looks great and the new iPhone app is a pleasure to use with its simple, intuitive and attractive interface.

So why not give it a try? Here’s my profile. I’ll be your friend! NOW GET MOVING, MAGGOT!

#oneaday Day 768: Two Weeks

Two weeks of my second runthrough of the Couch to 5K running programme, that is, and it’s going reasonably well so far.

Much as I discovered last time, building up stamina is actually a somewhat easier process than you might expect. I’m not sure if this is just because I’ve been doing semi-regular exercise for a while, a hangover from the last time I ran through this programme or something else entirely, but in the space of two weeks I’ve found that each time out there gets slightly, marginally easier than the last.

Of course, at this point in the programme I’m still only running for a minute and a half at a time, then walking for two minutes, then repeating the process. But still, every great journey starts with a single step and all that.

Running has, for me, always been one of the most challenging exercises there is to do, partly because there’s nothing “helping you”. Even when you’re running downhill, your body still has to do stuff, whereas on a bike all you have to do on a downhill stretch is stay upright and occasionally steer. But when you’re running, you’re constantly active — moving your body, lifting your entire body weight off the ground, shifting your legs, pushing forwards, pumping your arms, working all those muscles. It’s a pretty intense workout all round, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it’s pretty challenging.

As I found the last time I tried all this, though, it’s infinitely more interesting than running/cycling/rowing/whatever it is you’re doing on a crosstrainer on the spot, staring at a digital readout, trying desperately to ignore the terrible, terrible music the gym is pumping into your ears and also trying desperately not to look at the visible panty line of the woman with the nice arse in the yoga pants on the machine in front of you.

Sorry, momentarily distracted there.

But no. It is infinitely more interesting than working out in a gym simply because you have freedom, and that’s important. Okay, it becomes harder to control your workout so precisely when you have to deal with the sometimes unpredictable undulations of the route you decide to take, and at times you find yourself dodging pedestrians, dogs, low-flying seagulls and various animals’ poo. But that makes it interesting and exciting, even if you’re running the same route every day. You can mix things up by running at different times — that loop round the estate and past Sainsbury’s looks quite different when the sun has set to how it looks in the daytime. You can go the other way. You can take a random turning elsewhere and deliberately get lost in order to explore the area. You can run down darkened country lanes with a torch in the dead of night and pretend you’re Alan Wake. You can run down mysterious forest paths in the hope you might find some magical kingdom or The Faraway Tree inside (hint: you probably won’t, and all that is likely waiting for you at the other end is a large, muddy field that smells a bit like shit). In short, you can have a bit of fun with your exercising rather than enduring the businesslike approach of the gym.

That’s not saying the gym’s bad, of course — it’s good to have a sense of structure and “formality” to your workouts at times. But it’s also helpful to get out there and enjoy yourself with it, otherwise it simply becomes a chore, and chores are no fun whatsoever, and then they don’t get done and they build up and you feel guilty and obliged to do them all at once and then you swear never to let them get to that stage ever again and then you do and you swear lots and then you die.

Or something. Perhaps not.

This is my experience, anyway. I still go to the gym and I still enjoy doing so, but getting out there and running through my thrice-weekly Couch to 5K sessions has reminded me that going outside and Doing Stuff can be fun too. I recommend you try it.

#oneaday Day 758: Keep Moving!

Thus far the return to a regular fitness routine has been going pretty well. I’ve shaken off all vague feelings of illness, so I can’t use that as an excuse any more, and I have a variety of activities that I’m able to do so I don’t get bored. Also, as stupid as it sounds, associating the act of running with one of my favourite characters from Katawa Shoujo — that’s Emi, for anyone not tuning out when I mention that game now — gives me a positive attitude towards it, even if I suck in comparison to people who are fitter and slimmer than me.

Fitness is tricky business, though, as anyone who has tried to get themselves into a decent routine and struggled will attest. Just arbitrarily deciding that you are going to “get fit” isn’t enough for most people, in my experience. You need things to aim for and the means through which to motivate yourself.

I thought what I’d do today is share what I’m doing in the hope that it might rub off on some of you. Feel free to pinch any of my ideas if you’re struggling with the whole “motivation” thing.

First up, I have a selection of things to do — I don’t do the same thing all the time. If you’re a gym member, it’s easy to think that you should be using the gym as much as possible, and when you’re there, it’s also very easy to get stuck in a rut doing the same routine over and over and over again. And sure, sticking to a routine can allow you to work on the parts of the body that you’d really like to focus on, but good grief it gets boring after a while.

So mix it up. When you’re at the gym, try some different machines. If you do weight training, use the machines sometimes and the free weights at others. Try using barbells if you normally use dumbbells. Challenge some different cardiovascular machines. Bump up the difficulty. Set yourself more lofty targets — ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes. Challenge yourself to meet those targets without stopping for a rest, or with only a certain number of rests, or completing a certain amount of distance in that time period.

But don’t necessarily stick to the gym. Go outside and do something like cycling or running. While you may feel horrendously self-conscious attempting to perambulate your wheezing carcass at a faster speed than your normal zombie-like shamble in an environment that contains other people, there are plenty of ways to tune out the outside world. Loud music, for example — and we’ll come back to that point in a minute. The clothing you wear makes a difference, too — hide your face under a hoodie or a hat and you’ll feel much less self-conscious, plus you get the added bonus of being able to pretend you’re Ezio Auditore running away from the city guards. That and keeping the windchill off your ears, too. Also bear in mind that there’s a strong possibility that anyone who sees you running — especially in inclement weather conditions — will be impressed at your dedication to bettering yourself. (This rule is also known as the “Fat People Shouldn’t Be Ashamed To Be Seen At The Gym Rule”.)

On the subject of music, pick something that inspires you. No-one else is going to hear it (unless you have crap headphones that leak sound everywhere, and even then only if you’re exercising around other people and playing your music at full volume) so it can be absolutely anything you want, even the most shameful of crap in your iTunes library. In fact, in the age of Spotify, you can feel free to try out different genres of music to see what gets your pumped up. You may find that 80s cheese does the trick, or thumping dance beats, or — God forbid — dubstep.

Podcasts are a good thing to insert into your earholes while you’re exercising too, not because they’re inherently energetic in themselves, but because they provide the illusion of time passing more quickly. By concentrating on the sound of peoples’ voices and what they are saying, you’ll find you naturally stop clockwatching, simply letting your body run on automatic while you listen to, say, the Minotti brothers yelling at each other on the Exploding Barrel Podcast, or the Squadron of Shame waxing lyrical about chin-strokey gaming topics.

My personal recommendation for listening material is to check out some soundtracks, both movies and games. Action movie soundtracks and games that are full of spectacle typically provide excellent soundtracks to work out to — particular favourites of mine include the soundtracks to Speed, the Matrix series, Metal Gear Solid, Split/Second, Shadow of the Colossus (particularly awesome when lifting weights), the bizarrely cheerful soundtrack to the iPhone version of DoDonPachi Resurrection and Space Channel 5. If you’re a JRPG fan, battle themes are particularly awesome to work out to. If you can create a crescendo of intensity culminating in the most epic final boss themes you can find, so much the better. There’s no better feeling than finishing that last set of reps as the choir starts belting out One Winged Angel.

Finally, and I think this is probably the most powerful motivational factor in my case: track your progress. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut, but to see measurable results provides powerful inspiration to push yourself harder and go a little further. Exactly how you do this is up to you, but as a gamer and social media junkie I use Runkeeper to track cardiovascular workouts (including mapping my runs when I go outside) and the very excellent Fitocracy social game/network to log complete workouts. I also share my completed workouts on Facebook and Twitter. While some may not like the “spam”, it’s easy enough to ignore, and the few people who do congratulate me on a job well done after the fact makes it worthwhile.

On that note, if you can build up a support network for yourself — be it people you regularly work out with or online friends who cheer you on from afar — you’ll find yourself motivated to succeed, particularly if they’re the sort of friends who would rib you mercilessly if you give up. If you’re going through a programme like the Couch to 5K thing I shared with you all the other day, then work with a friend or team to get through it together.

Above all, though, have fun with it. It may feel like work at times because it is — it’s something you need to make yourself do, and made of activities that your body often doesn’t feel like doing if you tend to live a fairly sedentary lifestyle. But unlike going to actual work, you’re free to tackle it and make it fun in whatever manner you please rather than sitting in a cubicle allowing your soul to be sucked out through your ergonomically-designed management keyboard.

I hope that’s made some of you think a bit. C’mon, if I can get off my arse and get active, I’m pretty sure that you (yes, you, with the beard/glasses/pointy nose/weird hair/lovely hair/nice tits/flatulence/worryingly prominent erection/kind face/greasy trout in your hand/jar of olives clutched to your breast/smelly armpits [delete as applicable]) can do it too.

#oneaday Day 756: Emi’s Inspiration

Bettering yourself is a difficult thing to do. First of all, you have to really want to change, which isn’t necessarily the same as not liking something about yourself. It’s the difference between self-pitying cries of “I hate that I’m like this!” and inspirational yells of “I may be like this now, but you better watch out, cause I’ma kick your ass!” or something equally obnoxious.

There are lots of ways you might want to change yourself. It could be eating better, working on a new creative project, getting more exercise. Chances are, there is something you would rather do better — probably even several things. Once you’ve picked one, that’s where the challenge comes in — motivation to begin.

Inspiration can come from the strangest places. In this post back in 2009, I commented on the strange effect that changing my Second Life avatar from one which loosely looked like me to someone rather more buff an’ ting had on me. I suddenly felt inspired to better myself, and to attempt to hammer and chisel my flabby body into some sort of shape, to be more like my virtual self.

Well, I can’t say that it had a massive effect on me — I’m still overweight and would very much like to change that — but that initial push over the edge gave me some preliminary interest in fitness, and the knowledge that yes, I could do it if I applied myself.

Later on, I tried the Couch to 5K running programme, which takes 9 weeks to get you from wheezing, sweating mess up to someone who can run continuously for half an hour without stopping. It’s an excellent system, and one which has a very positive impact on anyone who tries it. But again, it can sometimes be difficult to get started.

One of the interesting things that those of us who have played Katawa Shoujo noticed was the inspirational effect that some of the characters had on members of the community. I’m not necessarily even talking in the “overcoming their disability” sense — rather, I’m referring to certain admirable character traits which a number of the girls in the game demonstrate to both protagonist Hisao and the player themselves proving to be a powerful motivational factor.

The most oft-cited example of this is Emi, an amputee girl and track star who describes herself as “The Fastest Thing on No Legs”. She overcame her disability to become a strong, fit runner, so why shouldn’t a person without a physical disability be able to do the same thing, too?

You can probably see where this is going.

What would happen, then, if you combined the infectiously cheerful, never-give-up personality of Emi with the well-paced Couch to 5K programme? Well, you get the following chart, which I include here after the break as a courtesy to that certain subset of you who have played Katawa Shoujo and are considering taking up running but having absolutely no idea where to start. Indeed, even those of you who haven’t played Katawa Shoujo but would like to be able to run for more than five seconds without HHNNNGGGGing can benefit from this. (To support the programme, I also recommend downloading this app for iPhone.)

As for me, I’m back into an almost-regular gym routine but haven’t done a long run for quite some time, so am planning on ploughing through the whole Couch to 5K programme again — with Emi’s help, of course — very soon. I shall be providing occasional progress updates on here when I can be bothered and/or when I don’t have anything interesting to write about that day.

Why don’t you get up off your arse and join me? See you on the track.

(Click Continue Reading if you’re on the front page to see Emi’s chart.)

Continue reading “#oneaday Day 756: Emi’s Inspiration” →

#oneaday Day 715: Try Again Tomorrow

Well, gym plans were stymied by feeling like I might throw up; likely a combination of tiredness, illness, inactivity, too much crap Christmas food and various worries weighing on my mind.

Ah well. There’s always tomorrow.

So it is, then, that I’m lying in bed at 9:15 in the evening, feeling a bit queasy and unsure as to whether the Lemsip I just had was a good idea or not. Too late now, anyway; time to just ride it out until I (hopefully) feel a bit better later. At least it means I didn’t have to put the groceries delivery away, not that I mind helping with that under normal circumstances.

I may have mentioned this on this page before, but I hate being ill. I try not to use it as an excuse not to do things but sometimes you just have to heed your body and go take a rest for a while. It’s frustrating when it’s difficult to tell what it might be that’s making you feel sick, though; was it something you ate? Something you did? Or just your body failing to obey Wheaton’s Law?

In this case, couldn’t tell ya. I know I’m anxious about a bunch of things including an upcoming job interview (not to mention the collapse of my precious regular employment) so that may well be the root cause of all this. Or it could just be that something I nommed on today was a bad idea.

Perhaps I’ll try and get some rest now, then, and I’ll either wake up refreshed tomorrow morning, or wake up at about 3AM, unable to get back to sleep. One or the other.

#oneaday Day 636: A Vote for Fitocracy is a Vote for… Wait, No

Andie and I joined the local gym yesterday, and had our induction sessions today. All is good and we’re feeling suitably motivated to proceed. This will likely mean leaving EA Sports Active 2 by the wayside — boo, no PSN trophies for me, but seriously, who gives a toss? — in favour of using actual proper exercise machines. And also not having to strap on those motion sensors which occasionally disconnect for no apparent reason.

Don’t get me wrong, EA Sports Active 2 is great, and it offered enough to get me motivated to start gymming it again, but there’s no substitute for the “real thing”.

The thing with being a member of the gym is, of course, maintaining your motivation factor. There are lots of ways you can do this — going along with a friend, keeping a log of your progress or, increasingly, using some form of website or app to both track your progress and brag about how awesome you are and how swell your guns are looking.

There are plenty of these available — Runkeeper Pro is my app of choice on my iPhone — but a lot of them are relatively simple affairs that just track what you’ve done without any particular form of motivation bar what you make up for yourself. Runkeeper does email you every time you break a personal record, but that’s about it.

Enter Fitocracy, an up-and-coming website that’s still in beta. Fitocracy takes the concept of fitness tracking and jams it firmly up the arse of social gaming. This means that every time you track some fitness, you get points. Points mean levels. Levels, as we’ve seen from fifteen billion social games that really don’t need a levelling system, are a powerful motivational tool — and, as each level gets progressively harder to achieve, they inspire you to push yourself a little bit further, whether that’s demonstrating your patience with clicking on a Facebook game, or feeling the burn a little bit more with your workouts.

There’s also a Quests function, which is an awesome idea. Take on a Quest and you’ll challenge yourself to do a specific exercise or combination, with points on offer as a reward upon completion. Obviously a large amount of this is down to your own honesty — but then so is fitness tracking itself, and the only person you’re cheating if you lie is yourself. Levels don’t get you anything per se, they simply provide a degree of motivation to the whole experience.

I will be trying out Fitocracy with some interest over the next few weeks — and possibly longer if it turns out to be awesome. It’s invite-only at the minute, but if you’d like to try it out for yourself, get in touch and I can hook you up with one of my remaining ones so you can check it out.

In the meantime, I have some grinding to do.

#oneaday Day 617: Phase 1 Complete

I’ve beaten Phase 1 of EA Sports Active 2 and while I may not be all buff and ting just yet, I like to think it’s helping. Of course, measuring actual results is more tricky, though a big part of the challenge in getting fitter is the psychological barrier of getting into it in the first place.

I could just step on the scales, but 1) we don’t have any and 2) I hate stepping on the scales as it’s embarrassing, even when no-one else is around. In my adult life I’ve never been a slight fellow (ironic, since I was skin and bones as a young kid) and it’s always been a bit of a hangup of mine — and all the more frustrating if the good habits you’ve made a specific effort to get yourself into (exercise, trying not to have KFC every lunchtime, that sort of thing) doesn’t appear to have an effect.

When I started doing the running a while back that, combined with some pressups and situps, had a noticeable impact on my body. I’m not sure if I actually lost weight or not (for the aforementioned reason) but my body certainly changed shape. I had a noticeable waist for the first time in ages, and while I still had a horrible big wobbly gut, down the sides it was more noticeable that some of the bulk had gone.

When I started working every day again, the timing meant it was more difficult to squeeze in exercise, so following my 10K run in London back in May (May? I think.) I kind of fell out of the habit, which is why I picked up EA Sports Active 2. I already had the first one on Wii, but I’d heard the second one was much better in terms of how the programme was designed as well as having motion sensors you couldn’t accidentally garotte yourself with, unlike the previous game’s Wii Remote and Nunchuk combo.

It’s challenging — and I’m working on the “Medium” intensity level at present — and there are some exercises which I dread coming up (particularly: foot fires, stride jumps and mountain climbers, aka to other fitness types, inexplicably, “burpees”) but doing the activities 4 days a week (sometimes more) is making me feel a bit better about taking positive steps to improve myself, or something. As I say, specific progress is somewhat difficult to measure when you don’t like stepping on the scales, but psychological progress is still progress, too — and while I still dread the loading screen for mountain climbers, I find I can get through a set of them without wanting to die quite as much as I used to.

Plus, of course, there’s trophies. While in a lot of contexts trophies and achievements bug me, here they’re used well to mark milestones in your training, as well as some “fun” ones marking good performance over the long term in some of the minigames. EA Sports Active 2 also really loves progress bars, and as any social game developer will tell you, progress bars are an excellent motivational system. As such, you have a progress bar for how far through the whole programme you are, a progress bar for an individual workout, progress bars for all the trophies, progress bars for your personal goals — it may sound silly but it’s one way of tracking progress that you can see — even if it’s mostly measuring dedication rather than improvement in your fitness.

From Thursday, I move on to Phase 2 of the 9 Week Program(me). I’m not sure what to expect. Phase 1 was pretty tough at times — I’m wondering what Phase 2 offers over and above this. Perhaps longer workouts? I hope it’s not longer sets. 55 mountain climbers in a row is enough to give me a headrush and make me want to lie on the floor for quite a while.

#oneaday Day 609: Five a Day

“Healthy eating” is often misinterpreted by many (including myself) to mean “eating things that taste like pieces of wood that you found on the forest floor”. And yet it doesn’t have to be that way, it seems. Sweet treats are all very well and good, but firstly, they get pretty dull after a while (once you’ve had one chocolate bar, there are very few variations on the theme besides what the crunchy bits are made out of/taste of) and secondly, of course, they’ll turn you into the sort of person who requires a crane to get them out of your house.

This is an exaggeration, of course. Unless you eat, like, nothing but chocolate bars all the time, in which case heart disease will probably take you long before any cranes have to be involved.

But anyway. Since starting my EA Sports Active 2 workouts (which I’m still keeping up with, FYI) I’ve been looking a little more carefully at the things I eat each day — largely because of the nagging woman who gently reminds you that you should be eating [x] number of fruit and veg portions per day, and [y] number of glasses of water. As a result of a little investigation and exploration, I’m doing quite well on [x] though [y] often still eludes me, because water is pretty boring.

It seems there’s quite a wide variety of things that actually taste reasonably nice while actually being healthy, too, particularly on the fruity side of things. There’s a snacky thing called “Fruit Flakes”, for example, which is basically a little bag of fruity sweets, only they’re actually made of fruit instead of E-numbers and enough sugar to send a hyperactive five year old to the moon without the aid of a rocket. Today, too, I tried some things called “YoYos” from a company called “Bear” — they’re basically fruit rollups, but all-natural and, bizarrely, made using sweet potato as well as the fruits in question. They don’t look quite as appealing as more sugary variations on the fruit rollup theme — they have the look and texture of fruit jerky — but they taste all right, and apparently each one is one of your Five a Day. I’ve had two today. Check me out.

Crisps are a thing that the reformed glutton often misses, as crisps are tasty. While they’re not quite the same thing, I’ve found Snack-a-Jacks to be a perfectly acceptable substitute. Some people aren’t a fan of rice cakes, believing them to actually be pieces of packing polystyrene rebranded as a lightweight snack, but the addition of a little flavour to the mix with Snack-a-Jacks makes them more than acceptable — and without having to cover them in cheese, jam and any combination thereof, either.

One thing that does irritate me a little about healthy eating, however, is advertising. I’m thinking particularly of the Special K adverts here. Now, as a breakfast cereal, I quite like Special K. It’s moderately tasty, supposedly good for you and doesn’t taste like lumps of chipboard. There’s also about a bajillion different varieties of it nowadays — some with fruit, some with other variations. It should be a cereal for which everyone can find an acceptable variation.

So why, then, is it marketed exclusively towards women? That’s not an exaggeration, either — there hasn’t been a man in a Special K advert for as long as I can remember, and it’s almost constantly marketed as the cereal that will make you look good in a one-piece swimsuit/figure-hugging red dress. I don’t particularly want to wear either of those things, and I have far too much penis to ever be called a woman, but I like Special K. Now, to be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no shame whatsoever in walking into a shop and purchasing a box of Special K, much as I would have absolutely no shame whatsoever in walking into a shop and purchasing sanitary towels for a female friend who needed them. But the fact I even have to make that comparison is at least a little objectionable — is the assumption that men are only interested in eating some sort of protein-packed Meat Flakes for breakfast and sprinkling them with bacon, while the women virtuously crunch on their Special K?

Who knows? Regardless, the main thrust of this self-indulgent ramble is that EA Sports Active 2 has, among other things, succeeded in getting me to be a bit more conscious of what I put in my mouth. This is, I believe, a good thing — and another check mark in favour of a fitness and health programme that I’m having increasing amounts of respect towards. We’ll see how I feel in 9 weeks time when the programme I’m following is supposedly set to finish!