Then 3 months later (3 weeks ago), I get a call from my good friend Paul. He’s just caught up with this blog (he’s about 3 months behind). He assumes the liver damage blogging is current and phones me up. Oh, did I mention he’s a GP? He’s Dr Paul.

I bring him up to speed and he has a thouroughly different attitude to my GP. Thing is he’s a mate, he’s looking out for me, and I can hear in his voice genuine concern about my moderately fatty liver.

I’d assumed from my doctor’s attitude that there wasn’t really anything to worry about. Dr Paul however ensured that I wasn’t left with this misconception. Dr Paul made it very clear to me that this is a situation which needs FIXING not leaving. That it needs more than just ‘being healthy’ for a while. It needs reversing!

So I need to do more than just be good. If I want to have a chance of reversing this and have a reasonable life expectancy, then I need to get fit, stay fit, and have an excellent diet for at least 5 years. I guess inside I already knew that really. My GP’s attitude gave me an easy reason to hide from an uncomfortable truth.

The best friends are the ones who help you face things rather than enable the hiding. Thanks Paul

So Paul and I decided between us that a rowing-machine had the best chance of actually getting used. So that very night I ordered one. It’s remarkably easy to take action when the action is browsing the internet and typing a credit card number! But as Anthony Robbins says “never leave the site of setting a goal without taking an action”. Mind you he says cabbages have energy measured in hertz. He’s either gullible or mad, but he still says some useful things too! A few days later the rowing machine arrived and so my wife names her and we now have “The good ship Polyanthus” moored up in the garden room.

Since then I have re-discovered the pleasure of exercise. I used to love working out in the gym when I was in my late teens (with Paul as it happens), but that was high-weight low-rep muscle building exercise with competition between mates being an important factor. Now I’m loving aerobic exercise!

Dr Paul gave me the great mental image of blood pumping through my heart and liver and ‘clearing away’ all the accumulated fatty deposits. So heart rate and pumping blood  and breathing deeply are important.

I’ve used the rowing machine 8 times in the last 3 weeks. Building it up steadily with a target of being able to do a 30 minute workout. The machine has a ‘heart’ program where you set the target heart-rate and workout duration, and it varies the ‘load’ to keep your heart-rate around what you’ve set.

I’ll be adding a “ships log” to the blog and a graph to show my workouts. To summarise, I’ve done about 11.5 miles, and burned about 600kCals. In a 30 minute work out I’m hitting about 2.3 miles, 194 kCals and loving every minute of it.

So more news no habits, exercise and eating coming to you regularly. And a big thanks to my mate Paul.

I only had chance to do the weight measurements this morning (will do the size one’s tomorrow morning).

Good steady progress, but to be honest I’m expecting this ‘easy’ early weight loss to slow down soon and I’m a little suprised that I lost 0.9kg this week. I’m guessing the walking habit as a lot to do with that, and I think more physical ‘activity’ habits need to be in the pipe-line.

The process of focusing on positive Habits rather than the fundamentally negative of ‘eating less’ is working fantastically for me. My wife starting to change her eating habits having seen “the effort your putting in and how well you’re doing” makes me proud of myself too. And it increases my accountability more by making me feel responsible for setting a great example for her.

Best of all I had a great weekend with the family at the seaside. I enjoyed the whole thing without feeling guilt-ridden for eating fish & chips (I left the least healthy bits to one side and left plenty of chips), and without feeling guilt-ridden for not wanting to spend long on my feet on the beach with the kid (I paced myself and enjoyed sharing a 2 hour long walk with them).

I guess the suprising thing is that the most enjoyable part isn’t seeing a number getting small on the scales, it’s feeling like I’m taking control of this facet of my life. That I’m gaining momentum with it, getting steadily better at being a healthy person.

The “Tone Up Wheel” arrived last week, and I think that needs to be the basis of my next habit.

Some of the blood test results came back yesterday, and apparently my cholesterol level is 6.2. Some googling leads me to believe that is at the top end of ‘Slightly Elevated’. Not a major worry in it’s own right, but coupled with my weight, it’s something else I should be addressing, so it’s on the body feedback list too. I suspect most everything I’m doing will help this anyway, but putting in the body stats helps keep it as a focus.

It’s been interesting to read that in the UK the recommendation is that a level of 5 or lower is healthy, whereas most of the rest of europe think that 4 or lower is healthy. I prefer to err on the side of caution, so I’ll aim for the 4 I think.

Thanks everyone for reading, and stick with me, with your help it’s working well and I’m confident I can maintain the momentum.

I’m beginning to realise that time keeping affects diet, health and habits. I should be doing more walking than I am. But because I’m often late, I don’t have time to walk to the station and end up driving (or catching a taxi from the office after I leave late). Also when I’m in control of time I can plan for eating healthy food, but when I’m in a rush it’s just the vague justification I need to eat something unnecessary. There’s something to this, and I need to boil it down to some positive habits – more on that as I figure it out.

Suffice to say that going to bed late has a serious knock on affect throughout the rest of the next day, and it’s probably something I need to address soon!

Either way, I’m feeling positive generally as I can honestly say I haven’t put a foot wrong in 18 days. Even I’m impressed with that. I know it’s not about being perfect, more about building habits. Having this blog and the record of the Habits feedback, and the supportive messages I’ve received have all really helped. It’s such a simple and effective system for me that I’m genuinely surprised it’s working so well.

Goodnight all, and if you’re reading this on Friday, think of me.

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.