Straight away lets introduce the star of the show, or possibly the villain of the piece:
   

Hmmm, a bit unsightly - sorry about that. Possibly it's more of a pot belly than a spare tyre, but never mind, I've bought the domain name now.

It wasn't always like this. In my twenties I was quite lean, typically weighing in at about 10st 7lbs. This has gradually crept up and up until today I'm 12st 6lbs, just a couple of pounds down from my all-time high.

In common with most middle-aged men (I'm 51) all this spare weight seems to have congregated around my midriff. Here are some other afflictions of this time of life:
- You get sudden inexplicable urges to buy a campervan and some nose-hair clippers.
- You start to think that Radio 2 is 'quite good, really'.

It's got to go! I've started on a program that, over time, will consign this spare tyre to the dustbin of history. This blog will chart the progress of this effort and ramble on about various other things besides.

"I'll stick with you baby for a thousand years
Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years
Golden years, gold whop whop whop"
David Bowie

Having introduced my midriff I suppose it would be polite to introduce the rest of me.

I'm John, 51 years old. I live on the South Coast with my wonderful partner of 16 years standing. We're getting married in November. We don't believe in rushing things.

We've finally got the house to ourselves. Partner's daughter #1 is long gone, making her career in Leeds. Partner's daughter #2 is living with her boyfriend, returning occasionally to say hello and to use the mail-drop and laundry services. Partner's son has just gone off to JMU university. My own son is into his second year at Surrey University.

For most of my working life I worked in the I.T. department for the UK headquarters of a large American corporation. Four years ago I had the great good fortune to be made redundant. I now operate as a sole trader, providing I.T. services for small businesses in the local area.

All in all life is great. Golden years indeed.

"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.

I've just noticed that in the last entry I've fallen into the trap of using google as a verb (I google, thou googlest, he/she googles, ...)

Never mind. To recap, I was using Google to search for articles on cardio and weight loss. In particular I searching on the term 'anaerobic threshold', wondering if high intensity cardio had anything to offer. Somehow I found myself at the Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle site.

The site itself is of a style that you may well have seen before. You get one long strip of information going down the middle of the page with product benefits, testimonials, more product benefits, extras thrown in, yet more product benefits, click to order. On a quick skip down the page it looked interesting, so I gritted my teeth and read it in detail. It all sounded plausible and this statement at the bottom of the page particularly impressed me:

"I'm not looking for a huge mass of followers - I'm looking for a small handful of winners who are sick of all the marketing hype and BS in this industry and are willing to put in the honest hard work necessary to make their dreams a reality - people who simply need the right information, motivation and coaching to help make it happen."

Honest hard work, great, I love a challenge! However, I'm not that easily won over and I'm always suspicious of a scam. Somewhere out there, I thought, will be some web content saying "Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle - don't touch it with a barge pole!". I looked. I couldn't find any, but I did find some answers to forum questions from non-affiliated parties who basically said the product was sound.

So, one last check to ensure that there was a money back guarantee. There was.

I got my credit card out.

“Goals are dreams with deadlines.”
Diana Scharf Hunt

Having bought Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle it downloaded without any problem and I set about reading it. The introduction was fine, reinforcing what I was expecting from the blurb on the web site.

Chapter 1 was Goal Setting. I was interested in what it said. It wasn't the sort of thing I would normally go in for, but I could see the logic of it. Then at the end of the chapter I was instructed to stop reading and to write my goals before I read any further.

Now this left me feeling uneasy. Much of my previous experience of goal setting had been whilst working for The Corporation. We had to write our annual goals in January, at a point where we knew next to nothing about what projects we were going to be working on during the course of the year. And in addition your goals had to be full of inter-personal development and management 'fad-of-the-month' stuff. At the end of the year some darn-fool manager would appraise you against these goals and grade you down because you hadn't done enough for diversity or some such thing. The whole process was a complete farce.

Then when I set up my own business I joined up with a networking group. There were a couple of members there who were dead keen on goal setting, so for a couple of months I tried setting some monthly goals for my business. It was a complete waste of time. The nature of my work is very much events driven, so I never ended up doing what I thought I might be doing.

So that left me in a quandry. I really wanted to carry on reading the book. And I really wanted to get the most out of the book. But I really didn't want to have to write those goals!

Tune in next time to see how I resolved this.

Last time we left our hero hanging by his fingernails on the precipice of a goal setting exercise. Well, in true comic book fashion, with one might leap he was free.

I gave the matter some thought. The reason that I hated the goal setting process at The Corporation was that their process was crap and nonsensical. My fat reduction goals would be real-world and meaningful. The reason that my own business goals didn't work was that I was being driven by external forces out of my control. My fat reduction goals would be based on things that were under my control. Best of all, the only person appraising myself against these goals would be me. I'm normally harsh but fair when it comes to self-appraisal!

So I resolved to write these goals. As it turned out, Tom's book made this really easy. He gives clear guidance on the types of goals that you should set yourself and how these should be written. He also gives lots of examples. So, here are my goals:

• I eat five balanced nutritious meals per day.
• I avoid all foods on the bad list except, occasionally, white bread and bacon.
• I exercise daily (except for Sundays), with cardio and weight training on alternate days and I record my results.
• Every week I weigh myself and check body fat and I record these figures.
• I am on track towards reducing my body fat by 3% by December 15th 2006.
• My improved nutrition and exercise regimes are giving me considerable improvements in motivation and energy.
• By April 2007 I have lost my spare tyre and am needing to replace all my trousers.
• By June 2007 I have a body which I am proud to display on the beach. It is the envy of most 40+ men.
• I am progressing well towards my long term goal of 12% body fat.

You'll notice that these goals are written in the present tense. There's a really good reason for that, but its beyond the scope of this blog to tell you why. It's all in the book.

"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation."
Gerald Weinberg

Speaking as a programmer myself I just love that quote.

Anyway, with my goals written I was able to set about reading the rest of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. Essentially it has four cornerstones - Goal Setting, Nutrition, Cardio and Weight Training. Nutrition gets the lion's share of the content, but then there's a lot to say about that subject.

The key thing is that these four elements work in tandem to produce a result that's greater than the sum of their parts. And that is the answer to the chap on the radio in this post who claimed that cardio caused muscle wastage. Well it might, if done in isolation. But if done as part of a programme that also includes good nutritional practices and weight training then it won't.

Having four cornerstones seems comforting somehow. The concept of four walled constructions seems to have served the building industry pretty well, notwithstanding the Pentagon and the London Gherkin. Mind you if modern day house building techniques get any flimsier than at some point they're going to have to resort to a honeycomb structure. That way they'll get the benefits of low weight combined with high strength and rigidity and so be able to stand up to an onslaught of woodpeckers.

I was a big fan of the Dilbert cartoons when I was working for The Corporation. Even now they serve as a reminder of how great it is not to be working there any more, brilliantly satirising all the nonsense that goes on in large organisations.

There's one cartoon which I would have liked to have shown here, but that's probably not a good idea as regards copyright. So, I'll describe it instead. Dilbert's company have decreed that, as a cost-saving measure, coffee and donuts are only to be served at meetings for managers at above. Come the next staff meeting a large plate of donuts is piled up in front of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss. "Hey guys", says the boss, "it's tough on me too, I'm really not sure if I can manage to eat all these donuts!".

Anyway, many weight loss programs include the advice to eat frequent small meals. Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle also strongly emphasises this. In addition the book provides strong scientifically-based reasons why you should do this.

Now my first reaction to this was that I wouldn't be able to do it. But then I thought why not? I work from home, I'm the master of my own time, so I really don't have any excuses. The book provides helpful advice so that anyone, with a bit of determination and forethought, would be able to do it.

So, I now eat five meals a day, spaced out at roughly three hourly intervals between 7:00am and 7:00pm. The first four meals are small, the fifth is a regular sized evening meal. Now that's falling short of the ideal set out in the book, but the book also emphasises flexibilility. If this regime gets me to where I want to be then that's fine. If not then I can always change it.

The book also provides clear guidelines about what constitutes a meal. Needless to say, a plate of doughnuts doesn't qualify. Following these guidelines, I'm probably eating more real food than I've ever eaten in my life. What has gone is the junk.