I’m Dave Amphlett, and I’m not Just Big Boned. It’s an excuse that I and people who love me have used for years, and I’m fed up with it. Besides, bones just don’t wobble like I do!

Let me tell you a little about myself before I go any further. I’m a 37 years old married man, with two young children. I live in Surrey in the United Kingdom, and travel by train to work in the City of London most week days. I write software for a living which requires activity of the brain, eyeballs, wrists and fingers only. The rest of my body is free to vegetate and it does. And then there’s food. Oh how I love food. Sweet sticky fatty naughty food that makes me feel good. I know I comfort eat, and I do it because it comforts me (at least in the moment). Other than that vice I’m a pretty “good boy”. I don’t smoke and I drink very little. But health wise I’m a mess. I play no sports. I do virtually no exercise. I’m seriously overweight, unfit and unhealthy. I get ill more often than I should. My energy levels are generally low, and I don’t sleep particularly well.

That was cheery wasn’t it! So why am I doing this blog? Well I’ve been thinking a lot about sorting my health out, and that was the problem. Thinking was all I was doing. So I wanted to take some action. This blog is the start of that action. “well done, type away, that’ll help” I hear you say, and it’s a fair point. But I figure I’ll start with what I’m good at and work out from there.

You see I have changed myself for the better, financially, and I figure some of those same principals could apply to changing my health! The last two years (2006 & 2007) were pivotal for me. Prior to that I was wasting every penny I earned. I had massive interest payments on a mountain of debt. Now I’m debt free except the house, and I see my savings growing every month. I can’t tell you how confident I feel about the way I handle money now. It’s fundamentally different. I’ve changed, for the better, and if I can change that, then presumably I can change my health too.

During all that thinking I did I decided there were 3 key things that got me the changes I wanted: Habits; Feedback and Accountability, served on a platter of simplicity.

I’ll discus these 3 keys in more detail in future posts, but here’s a quick summary. I changed my Habits, dropping bad habits and forming good ones. I set things up so that it was easy for me to get feedback on how I was doing, to see my progress. And I made myself accountable to others for everything, from sitting down regularly with my wife to review our debt, to telling friends and family every time we met about what I was trying to do (so that they’d keep asking me about how I was getting on).

So why this Blog? I want to use this Blog to experiment with these 3 keys to changing my behaviour. To document my progress for my own sake, and hopefully find others who’ll share their thoughts, feelings and ideas with me so that we can help one another. I want a record of what works and what doesn’t, and a record of the hard facts of my progress. And I want a way to be more accountable. Friends and family aren’t enough, I want the world to hold me to account (well at least you, even if you just accidentally bump into the blog).

So that’s it, the beginning. I have a theory that if you do anything for 30 days in a row, then you’ve developed the habit, so let’s see if I can post here EVERY DAY for the next 29 days and begin to chart my way to being healthy.