Check
out this picture of me aged 24.
Just
look at that six-pack. What a legend I was. Unfortunately, when I was
28 I moved out and ate rubbish for six months, and I'm struggling to
get back to that shape. It's increasingly difficult when you're
juggling your time between a career, a writing ambition, learning
about your own memory condition, keeping in touch with friends and
learning to cook. But it's possible.
I
hammer the abs machine during every gym session- normally six a week.
So I know that my stomach is still reasonably strong. Perhaps not so
much as in this picture, when I was Thai boxing twice a week and
getting a kick-pad slammed into my stomach for two minutes at a time.
When I was 22 I even once took a punch in the stomach off a doorman
to prove a point. He said I took it “like a man.”
I'm
not Thai boxing any more- nor working in bars where I'm comfortable
enough to take body-shots off security, but the weights I'm doing are
making me stronger all the time. The abs muscles are there; now it's
time to shave off what fat I've got. So here's the plan. About.com
explains weight training and fat burning here.
It
takes 90 minutes of exercise before the body starts to burn fat. So,
here's what I did: 45 minutes of weights as normal. Then I got on the
exercise bike and read the screenplay of Human Traffic, the hilarious
and iconic 1999 raver movie. It took 60 minutes to read. I pedalled
constantly throughout. So that's 15 minutes of fat burning achieved.
I should probably have drank a bit more water: I was a bit dizzy by
the end of it. But what a script. The energy of the movie jumps right
off the page, and you can see why it was optioned by the studios.
At
home, I've got a huge pile of unread books that I've bought at book
signings and charity shops. Human Traffic was the smallest of those.
The plan: work my way up in size order through these books, and on each
day off that I have, develop some endurance, get the six-pack back
and get some serious reading done.
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