"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
Confucius

Actually in this case the journey started with a slightly longer hop, namely a car ride to a music festival this summer. I can't remember which one it was - this year we made it to Trowbridge (highlight The Waterboys), Wickham (highlights Richard Thompson and Seth Lakeman) and Beautiful Days (highlight The Levellers, of course). They were all great.

Anyhow, it was summer, there wasn't much news and the newspapers had run a feature of Blair and Cameron wearing their swimwear and looking not entirely lean. (Actually I thought Blair didn't look in too bad a shape for his age, but Cameron needs to leave that bike alone and get some serious exercise.) We had the radio on in the car and this came up as a phone-in topic, leading by natural progression to the subject of man boobs.

At some point a fitness expert called in to the show, to make the point that man boobs were just excess fat, laid down in middle age along with the expanded midriff. He then stated that the mistake that most people make was to do lots of cardio in an attempt to tackle this problem. This didn't work, he claimed. Rather than losing fat, cardio exercise just resulted in muscle wastage. What you should do instead was to do weight training exercises of the major muscle groups. This would raise your metabolic rate, allowing you to burn more fat as a consequence.

Now this wan't exactly what I wanted to hear. All my attempts to keep my weight down in recent years had been based on doing cardio on my rowing machine. 2006 had been a good year for this thus far, as between January and July I'd been managing to do about five cardio sessions a week. Granted I hadn't lost any weight but at least it had been stable. By August I'd lapsed, but was planning to get back to it after the holiday season.

So, was this right? Time to start googling.