Ok, I know I said I wasn't going to watch any more of this series after the Vic Reeves episode. However, as last night's programme was about weight loss I thought I would give it another chance.

As it turns out it was pretty reasonable, with questions that were worth asking and same fairly solid advice. If those MRI scan images of the fat congregating around the internal organs didn't scare the bejeesus out of you then I don't know what would.

Still, I think they could have done a bit better in some areas:

Is it my metabolism? It's good that they debunked the myth that being overweight necessarily results from a slow metabolism. However, the fact remains that the higher your metabolism, the more energy that you will burn. Your basic metabolic rate isn't fixed, you can increase it with exercise and the right nutritional habits.

Can keeping a track of what we eat make a difference? To my mind they got this and the bit about portion size all a bit back to front. If you are going to lose weight then you have to establish a calorie deficit. That means that your meals have to be planned with this in mind and this dictates your portion size. You eat exactly what you've served up and that's all you eat.

Filling foods and the soup diet. Reasonable advice, but why no mention of the benefits of frequent small meals? With frequent small meals with a high protein content then you're not going to get seriously hungry between meals and there is no need to liquidise what would otherwise have been a tasty offering.

In summary, anyone who was attracted to the ideas put forward in this programme is going to feel quite at home with the nutritional approach taken by Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle and this will help you take it on to the next level.

In my Shoulder Pain post I mentioned that I was getting some discomfort that could be related to my rotator cuff and that I was thinking about buying The Ultimate Rotator Cuff Training Guide. Well I have now bought this.

The ebook starts off with some sections on anatomy and the pathology of rotator cuff problems. My thought is that these could have been a bit more detailed, but I suppose they tell you as much as you need to know. It then goes on to talk about the role of posture and how performing certain weight training exercises badly can cause rotator cuff problems.

However the heart of the matter is the exercise routines that are provided. The first of these is for maintenance of a healthy shoulder. The second, which is most of interest to myself at the moment, is for the rehabilitation of an injured rotator cuff. This is a progressive six week programme with exercises performed three times a week. In addition to rotator cuff exercises there are also exercises for scapular stability.

So I'm now doing these exercises and for now all other weight training on my chest, shoulders and upper back is on hold. I'll report back on this periodically. All in all, the book costs less that a single visit to a sports physio, so if the exercises do the trick then it will be worth the outlay.

Update 7th April 2007: to see the concluding post on this topic please click here.

Like everyone else we grossly over-cater at Christmas. Through the month of January we gradually whittled our way through various left-over bits and pieces, so not much went to waste in the end. We had also frozen some bags of turkey meat and the last of these went in a curry yesterday.

I've now also got back to the level the fat reduction that I had achieved before Christmas. I've re-published my weight loss chart (or more correctly my fat loss chart) in celebration of this. Actually this doesn't quite show the worst of it. Checking on my spreadsheet I see that I didn't record my figures between 21st Dec and 2nd Jan. I'm sure the real peak was a bit higher than that shown.

It just goes to show that it's much easier to gain the fat than it is to lose it. But Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is a lifestyle change, not a diet. You can put it on hold for a short while but the important thing is to pick up and continue from where you left off.

I've recently been checking my web stats, looking at some of the search terms with which visitors arrive here. Some of the obscure ones are quite amusing. I rather suspect that the person searching for 'big and fat bums and boobs' was rather hoping to look at someone elses, rather than lose their own. The person searching for 'photos of my wife shaving' must have been similarly disappointed.

Quite a lot of people are searching for 'spare tyre exercises' or some variant of that. If you are one of them then I've got some good news and some bad news for you.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first. The direct consequence of any exercise that you do is to build muscle, not to lose fat. So, you can do 200 abdominal crunches per day and your abs muscle will be perfectly developed with superb six-pack definition. However, if it's hidden behind 12lbs of abdominal fat then sadly it's not going to turn any heads on the beach.

Now the good news. When you do prolonged cardiovascular exercise, such as running, cycling or rowing, then your fat deposits will be one of the two sources of energy used for this. Plus, if you do this at a high intensity then it will raise your metabolic rate, so you will continue to burn fat at a higher rate for several hours just through your normal day-to-day activities. Doing weight training also raises your metabolic rate, to the same effect.

So, you can't spot reduce your stomach fat, but you can burn off your general fat deposits. If your stomach is mostly where fat goes on then similarly that is where it will mostly come off. As ever more details can be found in Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

Working with the Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle program, my diet is now much healther than previously. However, my intake of saturated fats is higher than the program recommends. For example I still use full fat mik and cheese and I eat quite a lot of red meat.

My view is that saturated fats have been rather demonised because of the link with raised cholesterol levels. If you've got high cholesterol then cutting back on saturated fats is definitely a good idea. Also if you are overweight and struggling to lose the weight then cutting back on saturated fats might also be worth a try. Beyond that though it's just the usual case of all things in moderation. There may even be some specific health benefits from eating saturated fats, according to some sources.

However, I do have family history of early death caused by sudden heart attacks, so I thought it would be a wise precaution to get my cholesterol levels checked. The result came in at 4.9, which is just inside the ideal range. Apparently the UK national average is 5.7, so I was pretty pleased with that result.

As I mentioned a few posts ago I've now joined a gym so that I can use their cardio machines. I still do my weight training in my home gym.

Anyway, when you spend 30 minutes at a stretch pounding away on the elliptical it gives you plenty of time to be watch the other gym members going through their paces. For example, there's the chap who sets the weight on the lat pulldown machine so high that he literally gets his whole body pulled up on the recovery, then uses his body weight to get the next rep started.

However, there's one thing which I see absolutely no-one doing and it's something which is absolutely critical to a successful weight training programme. I've not a single person keeping a training log.

Whether you are looking to build strength or whether you want to build muscle bulk the key thing is progression. You should always be looking to do one more rep or to move up to a new weight once you have reached your maximum number of reps for that exercise.

Now clearly there will be some days and some exercises where your not at your peak and you can't manage this. However you should always be able to look back through your training log and see that you have made some good progress over recent weeks. If that's not happening then it's probably time to switch to a different exercise for that muscle group to get you out of the rut.

Measuring your body fat percentage through the use of skinfold calipers or some other method is an important part of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. For the past three months I have been recording two sets of skinfold results in parallel.

The first of these is a suprailiac skinfold measurement, following on from the method used by my original Accumeasure calipers. The second uses the three-point Jackson Pollock method, with readings taken from the chest, stomach and thighs.

Having gained experience with the latter method with my Slimguide calipers I am now fairly confident that it is more accurate. The problem with the suprailiac skinfold is that it seems to be very sensitive to where you pinch.

So, from now on I will be basing my fat percentage results solely on the three-point readings. However, these readings tend to come in lower than the suprailiac measurements, on average coming in at 1.7% less. So I will be adding this value to the measurement in order to keep consistency with past results and my goals.

According to news reports Prince Charles, whilst visiting the Imperial College London Diabetes Center in Abu Dhabi, commented to their nutritionists "Have you got anywhere with McDonald's? Have you tried getting it banned? That's the key.". McDonalds response was that they had moved on and included more healthy options on their menu. That's certainly true and fair play to them for that.

However the fact remains that if you're looking for a healthy meal McDonalds probably isn't the place that you think of going. That would be akin to calling at your local knocking shop and requesting a peck on the cheek. No, if you're going to go to McDonalds then in all probability what you want is a Big Mac, Medium Fries, small Chocolate Triple Thick Shake. To you sir or madam that will be 1360 calories and 59g of fat, all served up with a sullen grunt from an economic migrant.

Meanwhile, what of Prince Charles' food preferences? This from the Telegraph web site: "Two of the mutton dishes Prince Charles enjoyed at the Ritz were prepared from sheep grazed at his Highgrove home in Gloucestershire. Gary Rhodes said the campaign had revived his own interest in mutton and he now served a variant of Irish stew made from mutton encased in a suet pudding." The fact remains that posh restaurants are just as prone to serving up high calorie, high fat dishes as any junk food restaurant. Are we going to ban those too? At least McDonalds are good enough to publish their nutritonal facts on their web site, something which I don't expect to see The Ritz do any time soon.

So perhaps it's best to stay at home and enjoy healthy food there. My advice to all of you is to ensure that your kitchen staff have read Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle so that they can serve up meals according to its nutritional recommendations. Get your Personal Private Secretary to have a word with your butler about that.

Sorry, what do you mean you haven't got a butler?