So I have decided to try bringing my weight down. On Monday I ate nothing at all and that brought me down from 13 stone 9 pounds to 13st 4lb (I weight myself at exactly the same time in the morning, after a shower, after having drunk just one cup of tea). Of course I’m aware that I hadn’t actually lost 5lbs of fat and that it was more to do with fluid and other processes going on, but a good start nevertheless. The next day I just ate veg and a couple of hard boiled eggs in the morning, then a meal in the evening with cabbage supplanting the potatoes. Next day my weight was 13st 6lb and on the ensuing day I did the same and my weight remained unchanged.

By this time a lot of people were telling me to count calories and, since I’m a bit anal about this sort of thing, I started looking up some stuff. On the internet I found that the amount of calories I need to maintain my weight ranges from 2300 to 2800. I mean, is cycling 8 miles 3 times a week, and weight-training for half an hour once or twice a week, moderate exercise? I don’t know. Anyway, to lose 1lb a week I needed to reduce my calorie intake by 500 a day, apparently, so I started counting up. By my calculations I consumed 2090 calories on Thursday and that was really hard work with me spending most of the day feeling hungry.

The result this morning was a weight of 13st 7lb. No matter – I know that when you start doing this your weight can yo-yo but that it is the average that counts and, thus far, my average weight is sitting at 3.5lbs below what it was last week. Of course I can’t judge any of this on just a few days dieting and one day counting calories but … but I suspect that my maintenance need is at the upper end of the scale and that a sensible weight-losing calorie count for me is about 2300 or maybe a bit more. Seriously, cutting out the food to the extent that you end up sitting on the sofa in the evening eyeing up your wife’s leg and thinking of mustard is maybe just a bit extreme.