28 Days of Pain - Day Two

By Jamie Hill

Reason to lose weight #567 - To fit into a really, really nice Superdry jacket that my wife bought me for my birthday. It's a lovely jacket and could probably protect me from an avalanche if I ever found myself in one (happens a lot in Marlborough). I can wear it at the moment but doing it up does leave me feeling rather 'snug' to put it politely.

It's my belly that's the problem. The jacket doesn't like stretching over the belly. All of my fatness seems to go to two place on my body - my belly and my chin. My face is rounder than it ever has been before and my belly looks like I drink 12 pints of beer a day, which I don't. My legs are skinny as anything. This leaves me at 6ft 2 ins looking like quite a ridiculous figure of a man.

I thought that I would feel a lot worse than I do today. Okay, there's a bit of stiffness (not that type of stiffness, Finbar!) and a bit of muscle ache but I feel surprisingly limber for someone who swapped his couch potato lifestyle yesterday for running non-stop for 20 minutes.

One effect that was pretty bad was the light-headedness I felt for most of yesterday. It was there in the background for most of the day.

Today, probably quite sensibly, is my day of rest. This also happens to be the day every week when I'll have my weigh-in. I've got to stress though that these 28 days are not so much about losing weight as changing my shape and getting rid of my belly. There's nothing more demotivating than watching the scales hardly move when you're pushing yourself from one extreme to another.

Right my first weigh in tells me that I'm 17 stone 1 pound. Wow, that's more than I was expecting. Ho-hum. That's a bit embarrassing actually. I must be in the obese category. Let's try not to think about it too much, eh?

Here's the rules again in case you had forgotten -

1. Run four times a week.

2. Fast for two days a week. This means for two days a week (not on running days) I eat no more than a 1000 calories (which is about a third of my normal intake).

3. Only snack on fruit. If I feel peckish I'm not allowed sweets and cakes (the devil's work!) and have to have fruit to fill the gap.

4. Have three square meals a day (this will hopefully stop the snacking).

5. And then after the 28 days of pain, that this will definitely be, I am going to undertake a massive run (in my eyes anyway) where I emulate Mo Farah's 10,000 metres. I've never run this distance before. As far as I'm concerned it could be running to the moon and back as it just seems impossible at the moment. This is the distance I will be working up to and I will be doing this run on Saturday September 29.

Tomorrow is my next run which I'm not looking forward to at all.

Still only 26 days of pain left before I kill myself with a 10,000 metre non-stop run.....