TheDisapprovingBrit

I know. This shouldn't be a woot. Salad should just be a choice by this point in my life. But it's not. I never really understood the compulsion to eat leaves. I tried a single leaf of lettuce a few times, and it just tasted...like a leaf. Like I could pick any leaf off any tree nearby and it would taste the same. A few months ago, my aversion to salad was so bad that even the side salad that came as a garnish to my steak would literally trigger my gag reflex if I actually tried to eat it. Cold leaves with warm meat? Nope. Salad isn't food, it's what food eats. I'm forcing a change in attitude, by reminding myself of two points that hadn't previously occurred to me: First, it's pretty pathetic that me, a 35 year old man, should be beaten by a fucking plant. Second, like bread, pasta or rice, leaves aren't *supposed* to taste good on their own. They're supposed to complement whatever you're having with them. There's a reason people put dressing on that shit. So today's lunch was a pack of ready-to-eat cajun chicken, a small mixed babyleaf salad (which contained various red and green leaves of unknown origin, plus cucumber, red peppers and baby tomatoes), and a bottle of mango and peppercorn oil-free dressing. It was....OK. Which is about a thousand times better than my preconceived prejudice was expecting. I didn't end up using any dressing - a sprinkle of salt improved it immeasurably, so further dressing wasn't necessary. By the time I finished it, I was actually starting to enjoy it. I'm going to try and eat more of it. Maybe try for two salad lunches this week. Three next week. Maybe eventually I won't need to add chicken to it. We'll see.

Data points are *good*. I'm doing my best to make a habit of going to the gym every morning before work. Even if I only have a quick swim, it wakes me up and helps establish the routine. I'm definitely finding morning workouts easier to fit into my day than trying to go after work. After work, I'm into relaxation mode and it's that much harder to motivate myself to go. Before work, I *have* to go to the gym - I haven't showered yet!

C25K looks pretty good. I still don't have a defined plan as such, I'm just going to the gym every morning as part of my routine. Yesterday I ran 3K on the treadmill before breakfast. I've also found out that a local running shop has a weekly breakfast run - 2, 3 or 4 miles followed by a free breakfast. Definitely considering getting involved in that. What I really need to get into the habit of is tracking my workouts. Right now I'm just "doing stuff" for the sake of doing it. Sure, exercise is better than no exercise, but I need a more defined plan. That's my next step, I think.

I've started going to the gym opposite work to kickstart the day before breakfast, and this morning I realised I don't have any granola left in my drawer at work. So I had a Mars bar and a banana instead. It wasn't granola, but it worked.

We all know taking photos regularly is a great way to track your progress. What photo apps are you using? Is there an app designed specifically for this purpose? If not, I think I've identified a gap in the market that I for one would be willing to pay for. Let me elaborate. Think Mario Kart, single player. When you set a lap, you get the ghost kart to pace yourself against. I want that in a photo app. So I take my first photo, and then when I come to take my second, that first pic appears as a ghost in the viewfinder, so I can make sure I'm consistently using the same pose/angle etc. That way, I can collate the lot into an awesome progress gif when I'm happy that I've reached my goal. Does this exist?

A friend just had a poster made for me that reads "Carpe that fucking diem". It kinda fits.

So I've joined gyms a couple of times before, and I've always stopped after a couple of months because I've gotten lazy. In fact, my new years resolution was to not waste money on gym memberships I'll never use. Until last week. Last week my boss expressed an interest in running next years London Marathon, and was asking everybody if they were interested in doing it with him. Now I'm pretty sure he had no intention of running the marathon, but he knew that none of us would do it either. Even as he asked me, you could tell by his tone that he was just posturing to make himself look good, knowing full well that he'd never have to deliver. He'd already asked everyone else if they wanted to do it, and I'm the last one he asked. No way in hell am I ever going to even consider running a marathon, right? Not this time, chump. "Yeah, why not. It's only 26 miles and there's bound to be a pub at the end. How hard can it be?" I replied. He still didn't believe I'd go for it. This is me. 35 and 200lbs, with a love of McDonalds and a strong aversion to anything involving effort. His face when I handed him a printout of my ballot entry on Monday amused me greatly - that look of "Shit, my bluff has been called. I've got to go through with this now" Shit. I've called his bluff. I've got to go through with this now. But this is OK. I can work with this. It’s just under a year until the marathon, and I won’t know if I’ve been selected to run until October. That gives me a minimum of five months in which to establish new, healthier habits on the assumption that I’m preparing for the biggest marathon in the UK. Forming the habit of exercising and healthy eating is the bit I’ve never been able to get through, so having a reason to HAVE to get through it and establish that routine should be a massive help. And so, here I am. Male, 35 years old, 200lbs. I walk to work probably 4 days a week on average, which is two miles each way. There’s a gym right opposite work which I plan to join. My initial plan was to start running to work each morning, a quick swim and shower at the gym, then change into my work clothes, and pretty much the same again at the end of the day, probably with an hour or so at the gym a couple of times a week on top. The snag here is the need to carry my work clothes and such in every day – I have no idea if getting used to carrying a load while running is necessarily a good thing in terms of posture etc. Maybe I’d be better driving in an hour earlier and spending that time in the gym instead. tl;dr: I’m lazy and unfit, so I decided I’m going to run a marathon. Now what?

Replacing carbs with veg, or just removing carbs without increasing portion sizes elsewhere, is doomed to fail, as you've found out with your two egg omelette. But also, as a self-confessed "former carb addict" I wonder if you're expecting too much of yourself too soon? If you don't *enjoy* the changes you're making in your diet, you're setting yourself up for failure. If you're considering half a spoon of peanut butter and a handful of crisps to be a failure, then you're half way to "well I failed already today, might as well order a pizza". A handful of crisps is less than you would have had a month ago, right? So that's pretty awesome. Don't sacrifice happiness for diet - look for steps in the right direction that don't affect your enjoyment of food. In my case right now, that's just increasing veg intake without worrying about any other changes to my diet. A side effect is that the portion of pasta/chips/whatever carb I'm having on the side inevitably reduces to accommodate the veg on the plate. When I'm in the habit of having veg with every meal, then I'll look at changing another small part. Baby steps, barely noticable in themselves, adding up to a significantly healthier lifestyle without me even realising it.

I love quiche, and my girlfriend makes them pretty regularly. We don't usually have veg in them, but looking at changing that is definitely a good idea. I used to be able to buy something called "Fish fusions" which was basically like salmon in a chilli sauce or something along those lines - granted, it's still processed and not as good as cooking fresh, but they were microwavable, so those along with a steam bag of rice and veg made for a pretty healthy and tasty lunch at work. Sadly, they don't seem to make them anymore, and their replacements aren't microwavable. The microwave rice and veg is still an option, it's just a case of finding a few things that will go with it.

Hi, It's a new year, so time to stop putting things off and take a bit of control of my life. I've been lurking for a while, so here I am to actually do something. Starting with a wall of text. I'm 35, male, in the UK, and every year for the past couple of years I've made the same mistakes - "It's the first of January, it's my new life" and, gym membership in hand, I'm psyched. I go to the gym religiously for a couple of weeks, before I "just skip a day to let my muscles recover properly" and never go again. This year, it's a change of approach. I want to improve my lifestyle in four key areas - finance, exercise, diet and work; but I'm not going to throw myself into anything that I can't sustain. That means no wasting money on gym memberships that I know from experience I won't commit to. It's all about the small lifestyle changes that work around what I already do, and don't intrude on what little spare time I do have. First, instead of driving to work, I now walk the two miles each way. That means I'm arriving at work refreshed, but not exhausted. It gives me two half hour chunks of time to myself, where I can reflect on what I want to do with the day, or wind down and daydream during the walk home. It's also saving money on both gym membership and fuel. I've also found out that a couple of friends like to go to a local climbing centre at the weekend - I've been climbing before and loved it, but I lost touch with the friends I used to go with, and didn't realise any of my current friends liked to climb. So I've asked them if I can tag along with them when they go - making it a social activity rather than a workout means I'm far more likely to stick to it. For my diet, step one is simply to add veg. I'm not looking to completely change what I eat just yet, but by making sure a third of each meal is veg, I'm making a decent and easily sustainable start that I can build on, and cutting down on 'filler' carbs like potato or pasta. I've also installed MyFitnessPal to track calorie intake. The challenge I still need to address here is work lunches - I've never been a salad fan (although a NF article I read about finding my "gateway vegetable" will hopefully kick me into life a bit here). For now it's either sandwiches or fruit boxes, but I'm still looking. Finance wise, the first thing is just to track my spending better. Just like calorie tracking, it seems that just being more aware of where money is going means I'm no longer wasting it as much as I was. I'll tweak my actual budget over the next few months, when I have a better idea of how much I really need to spend on my day-to-day living. For work, my big problem has always been motivation. Simply eating breakfast and walking to work means I'm already less tired when I arrive now, making it easier to focus. Along with that, I've started taking an 'inbox zero' approach to start and end the day. My first and last jobs of the day are to review anything still on my radar, and categorise it to give me a clear idea of my workload. I'm loving a lot of things about NF, and hopefully getting a bit more involved will help me stay motivated!

I love the way YNAB does things, but its insistence on forcing my budget into calendar months was a dealbreaker. So right now I'm using an Excel spreadsheet which borrows heavily from YNAB, but is based around my pay frequency instead of calendar months. It makes it a hundred times easier to keep track of how my budget is coming along, because the cut off point for a budget period is always the day before I get paid.