40 Day Detox

Today is Wednesday the 11^th of August 2010 and it’s Day 7 of the detox. If God is believed to have needed to rest on the 7^th day then so do I! I was thinking about exercising everyday for the 40 days but as I’ve not been gaining muscle or losing fat, I’ve decided to see what happens if I rest my muscles and give them a chance to repair themselves. Might rest actually increase my muscle growth? Could less actually be more? We’ll see tomorrow morning when I weigh myself. 

As for today’s weight readings my weight did drop 0.8kg to 69.7kg. However my Body Fat increased again 0.8% to 20.6%. Body Water was down to 54.5% and Body Muscle down 0.4% to 41.3%. This suggests that eating smaller spread out meals did help in reducing overall mass. However my fat content has increased again due to something. Perhaps I’ve been over doing my nut consumption?

This morning had to go out and get some lemons for my morning citrus drink. On my way back I caught a whiff of the Subway next door. I couldn’t resist so bought a wholemeal salad sandwich for me and the Mrs. 

I decided to look into whether London tap water has toxins in it or not and seek out alternatives if it seemed like a good idea. I’ll write more about water on a later blog post. All I’ll say for now is that after my research I decided to buy a water filter jug and sourced a 2.4 litres Optima Aqua jug on the Argos website. It’s only a fiver and the filter cartridges are a lot cheaper than Brita cartridges (a vey popular water filter brand). I can’t see much difference in its filtering ability either. Rather than order it online I decided to go to my local Argos branch in Ilford and buy it from there. When I checked the catalogue in store it only had a 2 litres or 2.25 litres jugs and no 2.4 litres jug. So while in the store I called my wife and asked her to go online and see if it was a 2.4 litres jug online. It was. So I then asked her to reserve one for me. The website showed that Leyton was the only branch with any in stock. On my way home I stopped off at The Body Shop again and this time ended up buying four fruity shower gels for £12. In hindsight it sounds expensive. However after a week of getting accustomed to purchasing organic natural products, at the time it seemed like a good deal. I called my friend Zar who lives in Leyton and arranged to meet him whilst picking up my jug from his area. 

I went home, quickly ate lunch (brown rice, black-eyed peas and roast vegetables with yogurt) and headed to Leyton. By the time I met Zar in Tesco 40 minutes later. I was hungry again! So he found me at the sandwiches section. I spent at least 10 minutes trying to find something suitable that would not break my detox rules. I was initially going to go for a mozzarella, tomato and basil wholemeal sandwich at £2.20. Then on another shelf a few meters to my right I noticed a healthy option Cheese Ploughman’s sandwich which had low fat cheese, salad, sweet pickle and fromage frais as a filling rather than mayonnaise in wholemeal bread. I checked the ingredients and it seemed fine except maybe a little bit of sugar for the pickle (my first indiscretion of the detox). It was only £1.50. Then I noticed a yellow meal deal sticker on it which meant I could buy a sandwich, a snack and a drink for just £2.00. How could I resist? The sandwich was healthy enough. For the snack not only crisps were on offer but also small bowls of fruit, and for a drink I could have bottled water. Great! There was a slight problem however. I was there way past lunch time and many of the products in the deal were no longer in stock. No water for a start. The only fruit bowl available was sliced apple with cubes of cheddar. Though cheddar wasn’t originally off my list I did make the commitment later on to avoid it as it is high in saturated fat. There were juices available, but all the juices on the deal were from concentrate so not really juice. I went for the deal anyway and figured I’d eat the sandwich and the apple slices and let my wife have the cheddar and apple juice (she likes apple juice). As I was about to leave I noticed a small red grape Tropicana bottle staring at me saying “New!” I could hear it calling out at me: “Pick me!” “Pick me!” I read the ingredients: pure red grape juice, nothing more nothing less. And so I picked it! 

Decaf green tea

While I followed Zar around in Tesco, I remembered the only place I saw stocking decaf green tea online was Tesco. And stock it they did indeed. I grabbed two packs which also happened to be on offer for just a £1 a box for 25 tea bags. Sorted! Then I noticed a pack of 800g of raw almonds for £4.00. Into my basket they went. I’ve been eating roasted almonds lately, but have had some really good experiences with raw almonds in the past. My roasted ones have nearly finished, so will soon be able to let you know if I experience anything miraculous from the raw ones later this month. I noticed Zar buying some shower gels at £1.79 I was thinking how only a few weeks ago I would have sought a cheaper alternative, whereas early today I had just purchased four 250ml bottles of shower gel for £12 – and that was on an offer! 

As we were leaving Tesco at the front entrance there were two promoters working for Warburtons Family Bakers giving out free samples of buttered slices of Warburton bread. I had never heard of Warburtons until I moved to Middlesbrough eight years ago. Prior to that I had thought the best breads were Kingsmill, Hovis etc. But in Middlesbrough I discovered Warburtons. What a bread! Their white bread is soft and melts in your mouth. I don’t eat white bread anymore but if you do I recommend trying it. I was a big fan of the Warburtons Seeded Batch. But since coming back to London I’ve been eating Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Multiseeded Bloomer – which is also delicious. 

Warburtons Seeded Batch

I had thought Warburtons Seeded Batch was wholemeal bread. It sounds healthy doesn’t it? As I took a half slice of buttered Warbuttons Seeded Batch from the promoters tray the words “It’s wholemeal isn’t it?” slipped out of my mouth. Why? Oh why? Did I have to ask?! She informed me that the base is white bread with five whole grains added to it. The words didn’t register in my mind so quickly. Or maybe they did and I’m in denial. I continued to take a bite from the bread. The bread was light and fluffy. Yet the seeds were crunchy and added a nutty flavour to it. The butter felt cool as it stuck to the top of my mouth and slowly melted, mixing with the bread that was also melting in my mouth into dough. Can bread really taste this good? Yes it can. And Warburtons Seeded Batch certainly does. I wondered how could I have forgotten and why did I stop eating it? My friend Zar who was fasting for the first day of Ramadan didn’t mind so much when I ate my sandwich earlier in front of him (after seeking his permission). But as I described to him how good the bread tasted he exclaimed “Ah! Man! Why do you have to eat that in front of me?!” “I didn’t feel that bothered about fasting only until now!” He soon got his own back however when highlighting how I had just broken one of my detox rules: no white carbohydrates. It was day seven and this was my second indiscretion all within a matter of minutes. 

I still had a quarter of a slice of bread in my hand when he pointed out I had in effect polluted my detox. For a moment I felt like I had betrayed myself. It felt as though I had been cleaning my system for a whole seven days and by breaking the rules I had to pretty much start all over again with the cleansing process. This was more likely a psychological perspective rather than physiological reality. With this doubt and regret entering my mind I was now faced with a dilemma. What do I do with the rest of this delicious piece of half eaten bread? I said to Zar: “If I eat it myself, I feel as though I may incur the wrath of God for breaking a commitment I have made to myself. If I give it you and encourage you to break your fast, I will incur the wrath of God for making a Muslim break his fast. And if I throw it away I will incur the wrath of God for wasting food…” And with this reasoning I did the littlest of the three evils and enjoyed feasting on the rest of the bread. 

Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Multiseeded Loaf

Whilst writing this bit I did the stupid thing of Googling Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Multiseeded Bloomer and have found to much sorrow that it is also has a white bread base. So in effect, since the very beginning, I’ve been breaking my detox rules without even knowing it. 

Anyway, the Tropicana red grape juice was very sweet but very tasty. Overall a pleasing puchase. 

Zar showed me the way to Argos, where I collected the water filter jug I had reserved online earlier. While I stood there waiting to be served, the female member of staff looked as if she might be Polish. I read her name tag. It said Katie. I wondered how she pronounced it in Polish? Was it Ke’ti? My attempts at placing her ethnicity were quickly proven wrong when she said “Ello, how can I elp you taday?” in the thickest cockney accent. I gave her my receipt, she gave me my jug. Or so I thought… 

Aqua Optima Water Filter Jug: 2.4 litres or 2.0 litres?!

On my way home I looked in the Argos bag and noticed that the jug given to me only had a 2 litres capacity. I had ordered and paid for 2.4 litres jug. So back I went to inform them of the mistake. I was served by Katie (pronounced Kaaytaay) again. I told her what the problem was. I even got her to load the Argos website and showed her what I ordered: a 2.4 litres Aqua Optima water filter jug. She looked at the site and looked at the box I had in front of me and noted how they did indeed have the same catalogue number though their dimensions were 0.4 litres apart. She said, “Let me go and speak to my manager.” She went away for a couple of minutes, and returned. She said: “I’ve just spoken to my manager and she says that even though it says 2 litres on the box it’s actually 2.4 litres.” “It means the same thing.” Ooh… Rarely do my emotions flare up as they did in that moment. Heat was building up inside, my heart started to pump hard and the adrenaline kicked in. I wondered in my head: “Does it say IDIOT on my forehead?” But I controlled myself and instead said: “How can they be the same thing? You have a few similar products in your catalogues by the same company. One jug is 2 litres, another is 2.25 litres and a third is 2.4 litres. I’ve paid for the 2.4 litre one and the one you’ve given me is just 2 litres. They are not the same thing.” I thought to myself, if you tried to convince a five year old child that 2 + 2 = 5 they wouldn’t buy it. Why would I buy her manager’s argument? So I said: “This is not acceptable. I don’t agree with your argument. It’s mathematically and logically incoherent. I want to speak to someone else about this. Where is your manager? Let me speak to your manager. She’s talking shit!” 

So she had a word with her manager and out they both came. Her manger was an older female around 40, with black hair… didn’t catch her name as I was busy preparing myself to confront this evil member of Argos staff. She stood in front of me and just looked at me and didn’t say anything. It’s as if she knew she was about to deal with an irate customer and she was waiting for a confrontation. Perhaps her adrenaline was also pumping hence why she might have seemed a bit flustered. I looked her straight in the eyes and was also silent for a brief moment. In all honesty I was expecting her to say something first. I think she might have eventually… I can’t remember exactly. But I do remember saying: “I’ve ordered and paid for a 2.4 litres jug, this is a 2 litres jug. I do not accept your argument that they are the same thing.” She then said: “I didn’t say they are the same thing. Sometimes suppliers provide us with false information about a product.” At this point I wish I had first let her say to me what she had told Katie to tell me, as she hadn’t said it to me directly, so she could now deny it. But it basically went from first trying to convince me that 2.4 = 2.0 to pointing fingers at how incompetent suppliers can be. When I suggested that it could be an error on Argos’s part neither member of staff were willing to accept that as a possibility. I was appalled. This was a case of the most awful customer service I have ever experienced (being hustled by and Arab dealer in the Middle East doesn’t count). 

If in the first instance they had simply apologised and accepted that an error had been made somewhere along the line, I would have most probably walked away with the jug and thought it was still a good deal for a fiver. But their attitude of treating everybody else as if they were stupid (customers and suppliers) meant that I had to, as a matter of principle, seek a refund and write in and complain at their appalling customer service. 

That aside, when I came home I had a cup of decaf green tea. Once again I had to go and dig too deep and read the details on the box and discover that it still had 0.2% caffeine in it. As I had banned caffeine outright for the detox, I decided that would be my last decaf green tea during the detox. In one day, not only did I break the rules for the first time but I broke them three times! 

For my evening meal I ate salad (lettuce, cucumber, carrot, olives, tomatoes, green chilly, celery, fresh basil and parsley leaves and a drizzle of walnut oil) with cottage cheese. It was delicious and I managed to stick to not eating any starchy carbohydrate for the evening.

So Ramadan has begun. Good luck to all of you who’ll be fasting this month. Hope you get what you want out of it, maybe even a detox of your own. You may prefer to read my blog posts after breaking your fasts… 

Mmmm... food

My weight dropped 0.4kg today to 70.5kg. But despite the change in training regime of exercising after eating, my fat percentage still rose and my body muscle decreased again. It’s really messing with my head! It’s like trying to deal with Google Search Engine Results Pages when you optimise your webpage for specific key terms and expect to be seen higher but Google responds with fluctuations, sometimes placing you at the top and sometimes you’re webpage is completely off the radar. It’s very frustrating and disheartening. But I shall persevere. 

Fit Day Control Panel

I have had more consistent results before when using an online diet journal (like Fit Day) where you record and track every single item and portion of food you eat in the day. But I’m avoiding this as it can be very time consuming to do. Today and tomorrow are rest days for me. But for the next few days after the break I will try to reduce my food portion sizes and spread my eating throughout the day rather than three large meals and see if that makes any difference. If I still see no results I may well have to resort to signing up with a diet journal after all. 

I started my day with a double lime hot drink. No honey this time to reduce the calories. For breakfast I had my fromage frais, muesli fresh fruit and nuts mix. But this time I reduced the portion. I limited it to five tablespoons of fromage frais, five of each berry and grape and five almonds. I then covered the bowl with a thin layer of muesli and then drizzled some honey on too. Today’s portion looked about a third of yesterday’s portion. Eaten slowly, chewed thoroughly, it proved to be as satisfying as yesterday’s breakfast. 

I may have managed to initially fool my stomach, however after about an hour it was hungry for more so I snacked on pistachio nuts while getting on with stuff. 

After a couple of hours I was hungry for a meal again so I filled a small plate with black-eyed beans and roast vegetables. Using a smaller plate rather than a large plate is a technique to help reduce your portion size when eating. I then ate it slowly, chewed thoroughly, and savoured each moment, feeling the textures of each food in my mouth, taking time to taste what I was eating and appreciating the aroma (another technique for eating less and really appreciating food as a blessing). I ate only half of this small plate of food and decided to leave the rest for later. 

My favourite beans, black-eyed beans with rice

I was researching proteins from plant sources when I came across some very useful information about complementary proteins. When you eat meat you get all the amino acids your body needs. When you eat quinoa or dairy products the same thing is true. However if you are eating legumes, nuts or grains, eating either of them on their own will not provide your body with all the amino acids the body needs as some contain some amino acids while lacking others. For this reason it is important to combine them together. For example the black-eyed beans I had should have be complimented with rice. Some more examples of complimentary vegetarian proteins: beans and tortillas; peanut butter sandwich; macaroni and cheese; tofu with rice; hummus with pita bread; chickpeas and rice. 

On the subject of rice I found out another interesting fact. Brown rice digests more slowly than white rice. However white basmati rice digests slower than brown rice. So which rice is healthier: brown or basmati? That depends on your perspective. Though white basmati rice has a lower GI than brown rice it is more processed and is thus cleansed of the nutrients found in brown rice. So if keeping blood sugar levels low is more important to you, for example you are a diabetic, then white basmati rice may well be the better option than normal brown rice. If getting more nutrients for your calories is important to you then brown rice is the way to go. However the best of both worlds would be wholemeal basmati rice. 

There is a theory that our bodies feel hungry because they crave nutrients. If you provide the body with all the nutrients it needs it no longer expresses itself through the pangs of hunger. If you eat highly processed foods, you’re getting less nutrients and therefore you feel hungry quickly and you eat more until you get all the nutrients your body needs. Eating nutritiously, the proponents of this theory suggest, leads to eating less.

I have been considering the possibility that I have been over doing my resistance training and not giving my muscles time to recover in between each workout. So I have decided to take a two day break. Today I will do my walk and a brief cardio workout but no resistance training. While tomorrow I will do neither. 

I beat my double lap around Valentines Park record again by 52 seconds and made it in 1 hour 43 seconds. Trying to beat my lap time is getting harder and harder. I have to try and keep focused on each step. As it’s an hour long it’s very easy to find myself daydreaming or lost deep in philosophical thought which leads me to forget what I am doing and I end up slowing down. It was raining today but I still did my workout. Though I wish I hadn’t worn my glasses. It was like driving in thick rain without any windscreen wipers. 

On my return, as my workout hadn’t been as intense as if I had also done my resistance training I mixed the juice of two apples with two carrots. Having a full glass of apple juice would have probably contained too much sugar. Mixing it with carrot made it less potent and therefore less likely to exceed what my muscles needed immediately. It actually tasted really nice. I had my post workout protein shake with flax seed oil as usual. 

A little later I ate the rest of the vegetables and black-eyed beans but this time accompanied by brown rice so that I got a fuller range of amino acids in one meal. I snacked on pine nuts during the evening and drank herbal naturally caffeine-free tea. 

Towards the end of the night I did a ten minute stationary bike ride on my wife’s indoor bike while I filled the tub. I figured I could do with relaxing my muscles after almost a whole week of exercise. As I am only using natural toxic-free products on my skin during this detox, I didn’t use my Radox bath therapy bubble bath. I didn’t have a natural alternative so soaked myself in plain water. After about 30 minutes it was clear that it wasn’t as relaxing as when I have used Radox in the past. Radox really does contribute to making you feel a lot more relaxed.

Finally I had some cottage cheese for a dose of slowly digesting protein and went to bed.

It’s day five and I’m still not getting results. Today my weight went up by 1.1kg to 70.9kg. I wouldn’t have minded this as long as it was a gain in muscle. But this again was not the case. My Body Fat went up 1.3% to 19.4%, Body Water went down to 55.4% and Body Muscle went down 0.6% to 42.0%. 

Albert Einstein on Insanity

Albert Einstein defined Insanity as “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I don’t want to be classed as being insane so today I decided to not exercise on an empty stomach at all and see what would happen if I exercised later in the day after fuelling my body with food first. 

I started my day with a double lime and honey hot drink, followed by muesli with fromage frais, a handful of nuts, a handful of blueberries, a handful of blackberries, a handful of green grapes and a teaspoon of honey. 

I use Sainsbury’s Be Good to Yourself Natural Normandy Fromage Frais. Per 100g it contains 50 kcal; Protein 8.0g; Carbohydrate 4.2g; and Fat 0.1g. Its Protein to Carbohydrate to Fat ratio is better than 100ml of Cravendale skimmed milk which contains 37 kcal; Protein 3.6kg; Carbohydrate: 4.9g; Fat 0.3g. It’s also better than 100g of Sainsbury’s Be Good to Yourself Natural Probiotic Yogurt which has 55 kcal; Protein 5.6g; Carbohydrate 8.0g; Fat 0.1g. Higher protein content is also the reason I’ve started to consume Sainsbury’s Be Good to Yourself British Natural Cottage Cheese before going to bed. It contains 75 kcal; Protein 10.8g; Carbohydrate 4.6g; and Fat 1.5g. So when I want to consume more protein I go for cottage cheese and fromage frais, and when I want to fuel or refuel my muscles with carbohydrates as well as get some protein I will consume milk and yogurt close to workouts. 

Blueberries

Blueberries have the highest antioxidant capacity of all fresh fruit which has many benefits including boosting your immune system and fighting the aging process by neutralising free radicals. Blackberries are also high in antioxidants. They can also apparently help relieve diarrhoea and intestinal inflammation. If only I had known this the other day when I first started drinking protein shakes. The morning after my first protein shake I suffered from what is affectionately called the “protein shake shits”. Anyways, I digress, back to the health benefits of my breakfast. Ah yes, grapes. Grapes can help fight heart disease. It’s the reason why French people get away with their high fat diets and yet not suffer from as much heart disease as say Americans and Brits. It’s due to their high consumption of grapes and wine (which is made of grapes). 

As I didn’t do a long workout on an empty stomach this morning I had more energy than on previous days and managed to get a blog post up by 3pm.  I then ate one peanut butter on multiseed toast and an avocado with peanut butter (strange mix I know) to fuel me for my workout. I figured my body would need some time to process the food before being of benefit so went shopping for groceries as we had started to run out of fruit for juicing and other wholesome stuff. I’m quite surprised by how much food I have managed to get through in less then a week since starting this detox. Maybe that’s why I’m getting fatter? 

My Route Around Valentines Park, Ilford

By the time I got home it had been over an hour since my pre-workout snack and I was feeling hungry again. So I ate a banana and munched on a handful of almonds as I made my way to the gym. My performance in the gym was by far the best it had been to date. I went past the 100 mark and did 110 Lat Pull Down’s and 110 Crunches in the first set. My second and third sets were also improvements from the previous days in these two exercises. I struggle most with Dips and Chest Press. The most dips I’ve managed so far is 30 since the beginning of the detox and on the chest press I only managed 40 reps in the first set. But overall I was pleased with my performance. I also beat my walking record by 23 seconds, completing my two laps in 1 hour 1 minute and 35 seconds. I’ve mapped out my route on Map My Run. Turns out in total I’m walking 7.14km. It’s therefore taking me 13:52 minutes to walk a mile. That’s 1.92 m/s. 

Brown male with a beard = Islamic terrorist

When I returned to the gym to get on the cross trainer there was an orthodox Jewish girl on it surrounded by other Jewish kids and adults. While I waited, I wrote down my latest walking record on a piece of paper and I noticed some of the Jewish adults looking at me in a suspicious kind of way. It was hot, I was tired and well, I just didn’t want any trouble. I’ve been in similar situations before. 

Thirteen years ago one January afternoon, I was stood outside King Solomon High School waiting for a lift from some work colleagues. I was doing one of the most boring jobs in the world: stocktaking. (Listen up kids, this is what happens when you rebel against the system and quit education – you end up doing shitty jobs. So don’t do it. Learn from my mistake. Figure out what you want in life early on and just get on with it. Have some dreams and make them happen. Leave the philosophising to me).

Zaheerjeel Ahmed

Anyways, back to the January of 1997. I was stood with an old school friend. My memory fails me as to who it was. I think it was either a friend called Zaheer or Nafeez (Oops I’ve just been informed that the fellow usual suspect was Sherjeel Ahmed, sorry Sherj!). Our colleagues were going to pick us up and we were going to head to somewhere in St Albans to stocktake a La Senza women’s lingerie store. Embarrassing? Yes… As I stood there I noticed the CCTV camera near the school gates move slowly from left to right and then focus on me. It felt like the Terminator rolling his head left and then right and then staring straight at me. Then I noticed the electronic school gates close. I think it was within 5 minutes I noticed a police car circling Fullwell Cross roundabout. I must have seen it go round and round at least 3-4 times. Neither of us had yet clocked on what was going on. 

I spy with my little eye something beginning with T and ending with T… (Click image for answer)

Within the next couple of minutes we were surrounded by four police cars and two police vans. Talk about excessive! When they parked up they screeched to a stop and jumped out of their cars – just as you see them do on The Bill and marched towards us. I wasn’t scared. No not all. I thought the situation was absolutely hilarious. You see this was back in 1997. This was pre-911, pre-7/7, pre-Jean Charles de Menezes. We bearded brown people weren’t yet fully embraced as the enemy within. Sure we could easily get locked up and be treated as guilty until proven innocent for accusations of domestic abuse – because that’s obviously what brown men with beards did to entertain themselves. But it took a couple of false flag operations the next four to eight years later for us to be put up onto the pedestal of the most wanted terrorist list. So being eighteen and a little naïve perhaps, I did the unthinkable. I had fun with it. 

They split us up and questioned us separately. One of the female police officers said to me: “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m waiting to get picked up for work.” She then said, “What do you work as and where do you work?” With a grin on my face I said: “I am a terrorist and I work in a semtex factory.” WARNING: Do not try this at home! Leave such sarcasm with the Police to the professionals. I wasn’t shot in the head 7 times, or battened in the ribs, or handcuffed and flung into the back of a police van. On the contrary she responded with disarming embarrassment. Rather then getting me into an arm lock and throwing me to the floor they were completely embarrassed for being there and having to deal with us. She asked me a few more routine questions, mentioned that the school had noticed us behaving suspiciously outside the school and were simply doing their job. When it was clear to them that the school were just being paranoid and we were just two harmless brown blokes waiting to get picked up to go to work they apologised for inconveniencing us and let us be.

Beardos are not Terrorists

Those were the good old days when the Metropolitan Police Service asked questions first and acted later. Not like now. It’s unlikely that I would ever attempt to pull a stunt like that again in the current political climate. They’ve probably enacted laws now (thanks to my old schoolmate Lamine) giving the police the right to keep you locked up without any evidence for even whimpering such a thing! 

When I got to work I realised how lucky I might have been that they decided against searching me. I was carrying a book I was reading called “The Vanished Imam: Musa Al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon”. 

How did I get onto that story? Oh yes, the Jewish girl and the cross trainer. Well I decided that I would not stand there and wait for it to become free. Consciously I thought to myself that I’m tired now, I can’t be bothered to wait and I’ll go home and make up the exercise by using my wife’s indoor bike for 30 minutes. That’s what I was thinking consciously. Subconsciously it seems a lot more was going on in the back of my mind! 

When I got home I drank freshly squeezed pear juice. In the previous days the citrus drinks didn’t seem to be doing the trick of stopping me from feeling exhausted. A few months back when I experimented with fresh juices post workout I did notice pear and apple juices doing the trick and making me feel energised again. So I thought I’d try that again. I also had a protein shake with skimmed milk. 

For our evening meal I made roast vegetables to go with the black-eyed beans my wife had made earlier. The roast included: two bell peppers, a carrot, an aubergine, two courgettes, three handfuls of okra, a handful of mushrooms, one large onion, 5 green chillies, some root ginger, 4 cloves of garlic a handful of fresh basil leaves, and seasoned with olive oil, sea salt and pepper. I also grated some mozzarella cheese on top. I’ve made this a couple of times before and it came out really nice. This time however it was ok, nothing special. Perhaps I cooked too many vegetables at the same time and failed to season it properly. I ate my evening meal with a glass of fresh carrot juice. 

I thought about getting on the bike and treating myself to half an hour in the tub to relax my aching muscles. But thinking about doing both activities was about as much energy I felt like investing in either activity. Instead I took a 5 minute shower, ate 5 tablespoons of cottage cheese and had an early night.

Today my weight stayed constant at 69.8kg for a third day on the trot. However my Body Fat went down to 18.1% my Body Water was 56.3% and my Body Muscle went up to 42.6%. Could this rise in muscle percentage have been due to the high protein, low fat cottage cheese I consumed just before going to bed? Possibly. Maybe it was the almonds. 

Despite the slight improvement I decided to make some changes. High fat cheddar was now banned. There is some mozzarella in the fridge which I am going to sprinkle on roast vegetables later this week. But once I’ve finished that pack, I will no longer be consuming high saturated fat dairy products. My dairy product consumption will be limited to skimmed milk, low fat cottage cheese, low fat fromage frais and low fat natural yogurt. I will restrict starchy carbohydrates to before and after workouts to fuel and refuel my body. I will avoid carbohydrates and fruit in the evenings as my need for the quick access energy will diminish as the day comes to a close. My training regime will also see some changes. I am considering the very real possibility that by doing a two hour workout on an empty stomach I may well be going into starvation mode and melting away the little muscle I have whilst keeping the fat. So this morning I decided to limit my empty stomach workout to just walking around the park twice. My new personal record is 1 hour 1 minute and 58 seconds. 

I came home to a double lime and honey hot drink and a protein shake. For breakfast I ate virtually fat free fromage frais mixed with a handful of blueberries, blackberries, green grapes, muesli, mixed nuts and a teaspoon of honey. It was a breakfast fit for a king. It beat any off-the-shelf cereal I have ever eaten hands down! 

By not doing an excessive workout in the morning I also found that my energy levels were not as low as in previous mornings. I was able to sit at my computer and start work on this blog. 

A couple of hours after my first workout I prepared for my next training session by eating two multi-seed toasts with peanut butter and a banana. I wanted to make sure I had enough energy in me so that I would not go into starvation mode during the workout. While I was eating, I got a text from an old Woodbridge High School friend of mine asking me to join him and a group of lads at Valentines Park for some cricket. Yes of course, how could I forget? Earlier in the week I had opted into the idea when his brother contacted me on Facebook trying to arrange a session for Sunday. 

A taped ball, not quite as manly as a cricket ball, but a step up from a tennis ball

At the park I was greeted by Ihetsham, his brother Waqas and a mixture of young and old guys who I think were mostly Sham’s relatives. In the end there were twelve of us in total and we played a couple six-a-side games. I had fun. I might have played embarrassingly bad and single-handedly lost us one of the games, but, I did have fun. And that’s the most important thing. The first over I balled, I started off ok, but as the game progressed I found it difficult to control the ball. Or should I say hand. My hand refused to obey my orders. Fingers: “Let it go.” “Let the ball go.” My fingers just refused to let the ball go in time. So I’d end up balling a crazy bouncer that was ridiculously wide. I tried again. “Let it go.” “Let it go.” Hand says: “Let me think about it.” This time the ball travelled really fast. But not in front of me towards the wicket and the batsman. No, no, no, no, no! Not even that. No, not even a crazy wide. This time the ball went flying behind me 180 degrees completely the wrong way. It’s as if my right arm, hand and fingers mutinied against me and decided they wanted to play with the other batsman stood behind me and aim towards the wicket at the other end of the pitch. It’s a conspiracy I tell you! 

Then it was my turn to bat. Perhaps I would perform better at this? No. First innings out for a duck, balled out on my second or third ball by my old classmate Ihetsham Ashraf. My second innings I was out for a golden duck (facing the first ball). My third innings I did a lot better. I got thirteen runs not out. The baller I was facing was a young man. I think he was 8 or 10 years old. Did I feel bad for hitting him for a four on his first ball? Hell no. I was enjoying every moment. I needed this. I hadn’t played cricket in almost a decade and I needed to get comfortable in the crease. I needed to ease my way back into cricket. I needed to boost my confidence because all performance is 95% confidence after all (scientifically objective statistic courtesy of yours truly). I needed to remember what it was like feeling the bat hit the ball and watch it whizz off into the air. I needed to feel my heart beating as I ran across the crease. It felt good. 

Even when it came to balling it wasn’t all bad. I balled my old classmate Ihetsham out twice during the course of the afternoon. The first time he knocked me about for a few twos and maybe a four here and there, but then I balled him out middle stump. I can do this. I can put down the mutiny of my right arm, hand and fingers. I can make them obey. I can make them cooperate. I can make them excel as a team and perform. The second game I got to ball an over, I think I balled Ihetsham out first ball. It was a beautiful ball. As I let the ball go I pushed down on the ball with my middle finger and thus twisted the ball slightly to the right. It landed in front of him inline with the off stump and it swung in. It swung in! He went for a shot; it flew past his bat and knocked the leg stump out of the ground! I was getting good at this. My confidence was up. 

But then it seemed those treacherous imbeciles were conspiring against their master again. The rest of the over lasted about two and half overs. Mostly wides and no bowls, a lot of fours and sixes. That over lost our team the game despite its promising start. 

Regardless of my treacherous performance, those two hours were a lot of fun. If I got the chance to play again I definitely would. Practice makes perfect. 

After the game I headed over to the outdoor gym and continued with my resistance training. It was hot and there were lots of people around especially kids pissing about with the gym equipment. This was very off-putting. After doing my first set of dips I considered quitting and going home. Then I remembered the quote: “Turning up is 80% of the battle”. Simply by being there and getting on with it even if it wasn’t to the best of my abilities it would contribute towards my goals. My performance was a mixture of some sets being better than previous days and some worse than previous days. But I’m glad I did it anyhow. 

When I got home I had another double lime with honey hot drink, protein shake and a mango. I then ate a black-eyed beans curry my wife made with brown rice. A little later in the evening I went to my parent’s house for a visit. There I ate pink lentils that my mum made that evening and urad dal that my dad made the day before. Both were seriously delicious.

When I got home, as I didn’t have any cottage cheese left in the house I had about 10 teaspoons of fromage frais hoping it would do the trick and then went to bed.

The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is weigh myself on the scales and get a break down of my Body Fat, Body Water and Body Muscle readings. From day one to day two I went down only 0.1kg from 69.9kg to 69.8kg. From day two to day three I stayed at 69.8kg, and no I did not convert fat to muscle. From day one to day two my Body Fat, Body Water and Body Muscle stayed constant at BF: 18.8%, BW: 55.8%, BM: 42.3%. From day two to day three my weight stayed the same at 69.8kg but my Body Fat went up to 19.5%, my Body Water went down to 55.3% and my Body Muscle went down to 41.9%! This is despite all the exercise and cutting out many things from my diet. I thought of a few reasons this could be happening: 1) I’m consuming too many fat and carbohydrate calories (e.g. Cheddar Cheese and Quinoa); 2) The reading might have detected more fat due to The Body Shop strawberry butter I put on my body after coming out of the shower the night before; 3) My two hour training on an empty stomach in the morning is forcing my body into starvation mode and it’s starting to burn my muscle as a form of fuel, rather than just fat and carbohydrates. 

Whatever is going on something is not working! These thoughts were going around in the back of my mind most of the day. 

Anyway, back to the morning gym session I did on an empty stomach again. My resistance training generally improved with an increase in reps in most sets from yesterday’s session. However, my 2 laps around the park were slower by 41 seconds. I completed my 10 minutes on the cross trainer as usual. 

When I got home I had a double lime with two teaspoons of honey mixed with hot water drink, a fresh mango, a protein shake with milk and flaxseed oil and two toasts with peanut butter. The hot water is supposed to boost the “kick-starting the metabolism” effect. 

Despite the attempt at refuelling I was once again quite exhausted after my work out for the rest of the morning/afternoon. 

For lunch I had quinoa with the last of the vegetable curry. Through the day I snacked on nuts to try and boost my energy and give me a continuous source of protein. 

Me eating a bowl of fruit in the smoking area of Tiger Tiger in Piccadilly Circus, London

A couple of my friends had been in touch asking me to join them for a night out. I wasn’t sure if I’d be up for it due to low energy. However by the time it was evening I was feeling normal energy levels again and decided to go out with them. We ended up at Tiger Tiger in Piccadilly Circus – I would not recommend it, not on a Saturday night anyway. There were lots of fat unattractive people on Stag and Hen dos trying to unconvincingly dance to crappy 80’s music. It was hot, the air conditioning was broken and leaking and thus there were lots of sweaty smelly people everywhere. Yuck. Definitely not my kind of scene. Though it’s possible I felt like that because I was completely sober. No alcohol. No drugs. No tobacco. Just almonds. Which, mistakenly I left in the cloakroom. At one point I got the munchies and so we went on the hunt for something I could eat. Luckily across the road from the club was a Spar. There was a large variety of foods on offer. I would have loved a wholemeal salad sandwich. No chance. The vegetarian sandwiches they did have, like, the Ploughman’s Lunch, though in wholemeal bread, contained mayonnaise, and mayonnaise contains egg – which is a no, no. The only foods that suited my detox regime was a bowl of salad which was £2.89 or a small bowl of fruit which was £1.69. So I went for the fruit. I ended up bringing back the bowl of fruit and eating it outside the club in the smokers’ area. Yes that’s right, I’m taking this detox thing hardcore! And when I was inside all I was drinking was water with a slice of lemon. Lovely. After completing my midnight munch I reluctantly went back inside with the boys. 

Despite the shitty venue, there were however, two great things that came out of the night. 1) I got to meet up with a couple of my friends who I hadn’t seen in a while – always good to see them. 2) I was inspired by a Chippendale-looking shot-serving guy who had his top off and had an extremely well carved body. I looked at him and then thought back to the photos I’d taken of myself over the last couple of days (I’m taking photos of myself every day to track my progress) and thought, man! I need to get my act together and stop looking like a pregnant man (really). I looked at him and contemplated how I was not getting any results the last few days and thought I really would like to share my before and after pics with you guys at the end of the 40 days. In order for that to be possible I must get results. The only way I could show you topless photos of me now is if I have something impressive to show for this 40 day detox and I have to at least have a flat belly by the end of it. So I decided I would up the detox regime. I will start looking into how to train and fuel myself properly. Sure, these last few days I have proved to myself that I can eat incredibly delicious meals without the crap and dead animals I would normally eat. However I need to realise that my body is a biochemical machine and food is its fuel. I must treat food as fuel. I make the commitment to myself to understand what I need to eat, when to eat it and abide by the rules I will soon discover. 

The chicken at KFC is not suitable for vegetarians

At the end of the night I went on the hunt for munchies again. When I asked the lady working in KFC if they had anything vegetarian she simply said “What? Here?! No”. McDonald’s salads all seemed to have meat in them. McDonald’s Spicy Veggie though delicious comes in white bread, which meant no. Finally I sourced a Subway. There you can choose exactly which bread and exactly which fillings you desire. Perfect! After finding out their veggie patty had potato in it (no potatoes allowed) I bought and consumed a 6 inch salad sandwich in wholemeal bread with no sauce. It was delicious and only £1.99. 

On my way home on the night bus I started Googling how to burn fat while keeping muscle and read through a few articles on bodybuilding.com. All I will say for now is that as a result of my preliminary research, when I got home I ate the rest of the cottage cheese we had left in the fridge before I went to bed. And while I slept, my body was busy working away at rebuilding my muscles…