Week 25 of my diet and I have yet to join a gym, use a fitness video, or follow up on the single stationary excursion that I’ve taken on the exercise bike that resides in our living room, gathering fly-strewn cobwebs. What I have done is increase my walking.
In fact, I have become a walking machine. A trip to a cinema five miles away? Let’s march there and back. A trip to a supermarket an hour by foot? My trainers are laced, I’m ready to go; if I was a dog, my tail would be wagging.
This is making me a much fitter person, and a much more annoying one. Not everybody wants to spend three hours hiking to the cinema – particularly if the treat on offer at the end is that piss-poor Sex and the City film – but I have become such an ardent exponent of the existential joys of putting one foot before another that my companions seem too scared to disagree with my travel plans, instead demurring graciously as I proselytise, wild-eyed, about the lungfuls of healthy air we’ll be sucking in as we march through, um, smog-filled central London.
I have also been walking to work and back every day – 45 minutes each way, at a pace – and have therefore encountered the many issues associated with doing that most sensible thing: integrating exercise into your working day. For instance, should you wear a specific exercise outfit while doing it, then change into your work clothes when you get there?
I have not been doing this, on the basis of time and efficiency, and instead spend all day sniffing at myself surreptitiously, wondering whether I smell, whether everyone’s talking about it, whether I’m quickly becoming the office pariah.
To assuage these worries, I spray on great scads of cotton-fresh deodorant, and then spend all day terrified that I am stinking out my colleagues with the great perfumey stench emanating from my armpits.
The fear of stench is, of course, a direct result of sweat. It’s a long time since I’ve sweated a lot (you tend not to when you spend most of your time lying on a couch, flicking through magazines and eating brie, which were the highlights of my former life), but since I began marching to work, I’ve been sweating up a storm.
Of course, the sweat breaks out on your face and chest at the worst possible time: the moment when you stop walking, which is, in my case, also the moment when I step into the lift with my colleagues (I’m yet to start doing anything quite so radical as, you know, climbing stairs) Pressed nose-to-nose with some of the most important, well-put-together people in the office (it’s always the important, well-put-together people who seem to be in there) I find myself caught between acknowledging the water pouring down my beetroot face, or not. Is it better to say, “I’m sweating, I’ve just walked a few miles into work very fast”, so everyone knows that you know that you look incredibly dishevelled, exhausted and, frankly, crazed? Or is it best not to address the issue, and have them imagine that you get into this parlous state simply by walking five minutes from the bus stop to the office? I do not yet have an answer.
On the plus side, believe me, if you start walking like a maniac, you will lose weight. I had been going through a long-ish plateau in terms of weight loss, which didn’t bother me too much, but was slightly boring. With this walking frenzy, though, it feels like it’s shifting.
In fact, yesterday three people said that I was looking thinner, and while I’m never sure whether people are being honest – humans have an annoying habit of being, you know, incredibly nice, and saying exactly the right thing to someone who’s on a public diet, even if it’s not true – the three in a day factor seemed a good sign.
So long as I don’t start sabotaging myself by swallowing down huge vats of extra calories to replace those I’m burning up (always a worry when you start a sudden, intense exercise regime) I should be fine. My trainers are on, and I’m off home.
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