Foreign Perspectives

As you may know we’ve been gradually ramping up our weight loss programme over the last couple of months and are just about to step it up another gear.

What we’ve been doing so far is to reduce our sugar and salt intake by changing our diet onto sugar free and low salt alternatives. That turned out to be much easier to do than you might expect although reading the little diet information panel on the food packets has turned up a few surprises: would you believe that a salad would run to almost 900 calories?

In tandem with that we’ve been going on brisk walks when it’s relatively nice weather which in practice means just about every day. That won’t necessarily get the weight down but should reduce the amount of fat in us and increase the amount of muscle (muscle is denser than fat so you can gain weight if you exercise).

Just a week or so back we added Bladderwrack into the equation. That’s a natural diet pill which basically increases your metabolism. We didn’t do any real research on this ahead of time and chose it simply because it’s the cheapest diet pill on the shelf in Tesco (about £1/week). Having said that, it does appear to be working with something like 5 pounds or so of weight-loss marked down to it over the last week when we started using it properly (ie after every meal rather than sometimes).

Finally, we’re upping the ante with the exercise as of tomorrow and have joined Fitness First. Why them? Well, surprisingly perhaps they are by far the cheapest option around at the moment. The local pay as you go gyms sound cheap at £3 or so per session but even three sessions a week adds up to £40 a month. One really good option seemed to be the council gym which advertises a pay as you go option for £22 a month or rather it appears to because it’s £22 a month on a 12 month contract and classes are £4 a go on top of that thus our total would be around £60 a month. Esporta is an all-inclusive option but at £50 or so per month is getting on for triple the equivalent option at Fitness First.

Payment options with Firness First are seemingly at the discretion of the membership person who signs you up but ours are working out at £29 for student rate, £34 for normal on a pay as you go basis but will drop to around £20 when we go for the 12 month contract version.