Fattening for Christmas

As usual, over the holiday period, this time extending all the way from Thanksgiving to the New Year, I did not bother counting calories. I also skipped much exercise due to a combination of houseguest and minor injuries. I have yet to officially weigh in but I expect that, in British terms, I gained about a stone; my trousers certainly fit tighter. While more than I expected, I started out with a good safety margin and I always lose the weight quickly once back on track. Nonetheless, I should be more careful next year: while I was not the cause of buying much of the holiday desserts, after all I am still working through a backlog of Hallowe'en candy, I still need to be better at resisting them once in the house.

My routine fasting helps only so much; it has felt nice to be back to limiting my calories which is what really makes the difference. I know that my daily 8MJ limit changes my decisions enough while allowing me everything that matters, at worst I can just push some foods to a later day. For example, while it costs around 1.8MJ to do so, I plan to walk over to a hotel bar this afternoon for a couple of pints of lager with a friend but I shall probably have fewer cookies before bed tonight.

Slacking off with my exercise does not seem to have hurt my performance, I have easily been able to get back to burning over twenty of the cross-trainer's calories per minute on average. I am ignoring a couple of minor issues: the heel of my left foot is sore and my left calf feels tight but I seem to be getting away with that. Next weekend I plan to reintroduce the longer workouts; on weekday evenings I plan only shorter workouts to let me get a bit of other useful stuff done before the evening meal.