Weight loss: an update and a video

Oh, how I love thee...

I won't lie... this week hasn't gone wonderfully well regarding my weight loss target. After starting with the target of losing a stone by Christmas, I now have to lose a bit more than a stone before Christmas. I'm putting this down (mainly) to the delayed action of my 'last hurrah' weekend, which resulted in the addition of an entire 3lb to my body weight. I managed to get rid of most of that during the rest of the week, but last night saw an evening out in which the eating of curry and drinking of beer was necessary for fear of offending the birthday boy. So we'll see.

One thing I've successfully achieved is changing my choice of beverage at my bi-weekly after-school pub trip with colleagues. I'm loathe to give them up entirely as the layout, ethos and organisation of my school doesn't exactly lend itself to bumping into people outside of my department, and without my Tuesday and Friday wind-downs (and wind-ups...) it's perfectly conceivable that I could interact with nobody but maths teachers for weeks on end, and who knows what damage that could do to a mind.

Anyway... to the point: I've swapped my bi-weekly beer for a bi-weekly Diet Coke. I'm sure some people would suggest that a glass of diet water would be even better, but I'd feel somewhat uncomfortable about walking into a pub and sitting there for two hours and not paying for a drink. Buying drinks is, of course, what keeps pubs open.

A quick internet search* leads me to believe that a can of Diet Coke contains about 1.3 calories in comparison to the 142 on offer in a standard can of Fat Coke**. Compare this again to my usual tipple, a pint of beer (usually a Black Sheep, London Pride or Greene King IPA at this particular pub), which contains around 200 calories and you'll see I'm making an even bigger saving in terms of fatness. And, incidentally, financially.

The biggest issue with doing this is that I really like beer. And I feel like a bit of a girly ponce sitting with a Diet Coke in front of me. These issues are somewhat allayed by the fact that two of my drinking buddies are also trying to lose some weight and are happy to join me in a D.C. so we can possibly pretend we're in some kind of weird Diet Coke-drinking club and people won't judge us on our choice of drink***.

And then I found this...

... and everything is fine now.




* i.e. please correct me if you know better.
** Regular, non-diet Coca-Cola.
*** They'll be casting aspersions on our lifestyle choices instead, and for three people who are teachers and geeks, we're used to that.