For the most part I’ve been taking December as a ‘month off the Internet’, save for the occasional pop round the door of Twitter or Facebook to say hello, or tell crap jokes which then get ignored or scorned upon. It’s been refreshing, and I’m not really sure how much I’ve really missed it, but that has as much to do with still being burned out by Nanowrimo as it does with the Internet itself, I suspect. Nonetheless, given that it is the end of the year I feel somewhat compelled to come back and pester you with some half formed thoughts about the year that has gone by.

First of all, I’ve decided not to burden you all with the standard top ten lists malarkey this year. Unless you are really very good at them and your opinion carries some weight then let’s face it they are by and large a big heap of Gillian McKeith. Either you list a load of stuff that everyone’s already heard or seen and come off as being too mainstream and boring, in which case why bother. On the other hand if you try and go for more obscure things then you end up looking like a shallow scene wanker trying to point out how cool he is by listing a load of stuff you’re not cool enough to have heard. Over at Demon Pigeon Dan and the others lampooned this pretty effectively, so I’m just going to say there are a few albums this year which have blown me away, if you’ll spare me a moment’s indulgence I will tell you what they are.

Firstly the new Dillinger Escape Plan album, Option Paralysis, blew me away in March and has rarely been off my stereo since. It manages to be both the melodically adventurous and poppy metal album I’ve ever heard, and conversely the most brutal as well. There’s only one word for it, and that’s bewildering. Other metal albums I’ve really enjoyed this year have been the new Knut album, Wonder, and the excellently named Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza’s third album. I reviewed all three for Demon Pigeon so if you want more on them by all means click on them there links. I quite liked the new Misery Index album as well, even if it is a bit generic it’s a good laugh.

As for non-metal I’ve loved the Joanna Newsome triple album Have One On Me and the new Sufjan Stevens album Age of Adz. The latter especially is a lovely bold move by Stevens, incorporating digital effects and even auto-tune and vocoder without ever sounding generic or bland. These are by no means the only albums I have enjoyed, but they are the ones that stand out. As for gigs, well it’s been a bit sparse but the excellent Damnation Festival was a great day out, and Richard Herring’s Hitler Moustache was probably the best stand up I’ve ever seen.

I’ve only been to the cinema a handful of times so I feel ill-qualified to talk much about this year’s film crop, but rather predictably I loved Inception and HP7a. I’m sure Social Network would have made me very happy with its mix of being geeky/being written by my favourite writer/being directed by David Fincher, but I never got to see it, so I am now left to wait impatiently for the DVD release. Not being able to see many new films has not stopped me from getting addicted to the Kermode and Mayo podcast however, and hello to Jason Isaacs if you are readong. Which of course you aren’t. I’ve been watching far more television this year, and it’s been a bumper bonanza of goodness in that regard. I was mentioning to Ellen the other night how it’s felt that this year British Sci Fi has taken over again from its glossier American counterparts. Consider the quality of the second series of Being Human or Misfits, or most strikingly the new Stephen Moffatt helmed Doctor Who and contrast that with the rather stale reimagining of V, or flashforward, or any of the other Heroes clones wheeled out to fill the void left by Lost and Battlestar. Long may it continue, although the news that the new American based Torchwood is being mainly done by ex Buffy writers may mean American Sci Fi goodness returns next year. In non sci fi I think Any Human Heart was about as perfect as TV drama gets, just a sumptuous feast of excellence.

At the end of the most turrbulent year in politics that I have experienced in my adult life, I now strangely feel I have nothing to add. This may be because i think everyone is now so much more engaged with what is going on around them that I have nothing to add to the reams of available information or commentary, or it could just be because I couldn’t possibly put anything better than my favourite blog of the year Enemies of Reason, which has grown month by month into the most authoriative and correct voice in my feed reader. If you don’t already read every single word that Anton Vowl puts out, then I highly recommend you do so. But please don’t judge me for having the same wordpress theme as him. All I will say is that having supported the Liberal Democrats for all of my adult life on the grounds that they were a little less interested in power and more interested in their values it’s quite staggering the extent to which they have sold those values out for a modicum of power. 

On a personal level, I think I can call 2010 a good year overall, although financially it’s been an absolute nightmare. But Ellen and Rosie and I moved into a proper family house in May, I am close to passing my driving test, I launched Demon Pigeon which has turned out to be reasonably popular, although I am not under any illusions as to my own responsibility for this success given the excellent assembly of writers that are now doing the words. On top of DP I wrote a lot for Blood on the Motorway (still hope to launch soon) and wrote the first draft of another novel. On the flip side after a very successful first six months the Year of Health experiment turned out to be a pretty catastrophic failure and I am back up to the weight I was at the beginning of the year, and that’s before even the indulgence of the next few weeks to go on top of that. I have managed to give up smoking however, so that one goes firmly in the win column. As for the weight I am going to try again in January, but one suspects this will be a battle I will be having with myself for most of the rest of my life. I say most, because I plan on not caring when I get to pensioner age. I have taken the YOH site down now since it was being spammed to a ridiculous level, but all the posts are now floating around in here, so if you missed any of it feel free to try and work out where they are.

As for next year, well I have other news that I cannot share at the moment but I think it’s fair to say that 2011 is going to be a brilliant one. I will share more when I can, but that might be a few months away yet. As for you lovely readers, if you’ve managed to make it through this most sparse of years, where my average post count has never crept above one a week then I must say a hearty thank you, and I wish you all a lovely Xmas and a Happy New Year. I leave you with a video from my favourite album of the year, because nothing says Christmas like a buff man shouting over tech metal.

Merry Xmas you beautiful bastards.

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I don’t think it will be a huge shock to anyone who is still reading this, but the whole Year of Health has run entirely out of steam, and the experiment is over. The time has come to admit defeat. Sad but true.

Over the weekend Ellen and I finally admitted the truth to each other. What started as a blip turned into a break. The break turned into a collapse. But the good news is that it’s not a total collapse, it’s just that the boundaries of what we were trying to achieve were just a little bit too ambitious. The sheer effort of keeping up these changes over a year when you also have to move house and live off an insanely small budget just don’t make it feasible. But now, nine months into the year, and with the last three months being essentially a write off, I still think we can look back and still be somewhat proud of what we’ve achieved, even if we didn’t fully realise what we intended to do.

Firstly, we’ve both quit smoking. If nothing else we can both be pretty proud of that. I have never given up for this long before and I can say with all honesty that it’s not something that I think about with any regularity. Unlike previous attempts this really feels like its taken hold, which is odd, considering that I thought it would be the hardest part of what we were trying to do.

Secondly, we have both lost weight. In the last few months I’ve put just over half a stone back on, but that seems to have stabilised and means that I am still one and a half stone down from where I was on January first. While I’m not in shape by any stretch of the imagination, it’s a drastic improvement on where I was. Ellen has actually done better than me and lost over two stone and she too seems to have stabilised, and she looks great and it seems to have done her the world of good.

So these are the main points, but there are other positives as well. We have made some real improvements to the way that we eat. While we now allow ourselves treats and are not particularly strict, there are quite a few things that we’ve taken out of our diets that make it a far healthier overall. Our main meals are much healthier overall, we use all fresh ingredients, and have moved to things like oil spray, low fat milk, healthy snacks and other low fat alternatives. The difference is that where we cannot abide the ultra-low versions (such as Flora Extra Light, which is just horrible) we have settled on the regular low fat range, which in comparison often tastes a lot better. Having made these changes permanent, it means that while we’re not being particularly strict, we have as many good days as bad days, and that seems to be the trick to not putting the weight back on.

It’s not all good news though. We have already said that after Christmas we’re going to try for another big push, and try and keep a cycle of six months on, six months off. When we do this the second time round, one thing we’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better is exercise. Neither one of us managed to commit to any particular regime for more than a week, and we didn’t have the funds to invest in something like a rowing or running machine to make it easier. I did try the sit up/push up regime that I mentioned before, and it was definitely starting to work, but in the end it was much easier not to do than to do. That for me was the real death of the whole experiment. Well, that and the fact that I work in a chocolate factory.

I had never dieted before, not in any serious way, and I always presumed that you needed to have a massive relapse for a diet to fail. But that’s not how it works at all. Instead it’s a thousand tiny failed battles, from taking one chocolate bar, or having one nice meal and slowly but surely you move the boundary of what is acceptable that little bit further back for yourself, until eventually you’re nowhere near strict enough with yourself and the effort has failed and you are sat munching on a big bag of chips and a battered sausage and you also have a cake in the freezer. It has been such an effort to cling on that in the end the prospect of starting all over again is just too damn tiring, too exhausting to contemplate.

And so we retire the Year of Health. From a logistical standpoint this website never really worked in the way I thought it would. It’s a very difficult topic to write about, very hard to make interesting. I had hoped it would serve as an introduction to blogging for Ellen, but I realised that it’s not really her cup of tea. But since she stopped it’s been difficult to find a reason for me to update it any more, and certainly I’ve not done anywhere hear enough to promote it, or try to monetise it, which was the original idea. I also really wish I’d gotten around to putting my Akismet anti-spam filter up, as not a day goes by without this place being besieged by spammers. So I don’t know what to do with this place now. I think I’ll leave this last post up for a little while, then import all my posts into the other blog for posterity. In future if I have anything more to say on this matter, then I’ll be saying it there and not here.

Truth be told I do feel a bit sad that it’s ended this way, with a whimper at the start of September, rather that with a bang and fireworks at the end of the year. As I write this a part of me thinks that maybe I should give it another go, make one last push over the last four months of the year to get into gear. But equally there’s another part of me that knows that when I finish writing this paragraph, I’m going to go down to the canteen to get a bar of chocolate, and it’s that utter lack of willpower that is preventing me from completing what I set out to do. I think that willpower is not something I have a great deal of, and like any finite resource I ran the risk of using it all too quickly. Perhaps my energy would be better spent recharging it, and seeing what I can do with it next year.

In the meantime, if you’ve stuck with me throughout this whole experiment then I’m sorry I don’t have a happy ending for you, and I thank you for all the good wishes and advice you gave over the course of the year. And keep your eyes peeled for next year, when I try and do it all again

Thanks

Paul

I’m not going to sugar coat it. It’s all gone a bit wrong. Since moving into the new house my seemingly temporary blip has turned into a full blown collapse. In the last month I have put back on 6 pounds, and have spent most of my days eating ridiculous amounts of chocolate at work and not keeping any track of my calorie intake. Every day I resolve to start again, but then as the day wears on I think that maybe I’ll start again the next day. On top of this my exercise has gone down to zero, given that I no longer walk to work. All in all, the only thing I can really say is still going is the Smoking. Somehow the one aspect of this radical life change that I thought would be impossible is now the one thing that I no longer even have to think about. I could just walk away now and call it a victory, but it doesn’t feel that way.

The worst part about this is that it really shows how hard it is to keep up with this. I had hoped that after five months of healthy eating that the changes would automatically become a permanent fixture, that I would no longer crave the takeaway pizza or the Kit Kat chunky. But I do, and I don’t know if that will ever change. Even if I can kickstart this whole thing, how can I make sure that come the end of the year I don’t just fall back into old habits. I suspect that that will have to wait for further examination, at the moment I just really need to get back on the wagon. The first part of dealing with a problem is to admit to it, as the alcoholics are so fond of telling us, and I think I just did. Whether or not I can move forward from this and get back on track is another matter.

Well I’ve been exercising for nearly a week now, and I think it’s starting to have an effect. I’ve started off slowly. On the first day I did 25 sit ups and 10 push ups (proper ones mind, not silly little ones that involve your knees) and I’ve been slowly increasing it so now I am up to 35 sit ups and 13 push ups. Not an earth shattering increase granted, but still going in the right direction. Also, on Saturday we all went swimming at the local water park, and we both made an effort to do some proper swimming while we were there as well. I managed to do 16 lengths of the (small) pool before feeling as though my entire body was going to shut down and I was going to sink to the bottom like a paperweight.

But while some things are going in the right direction, others aren’t. At the weekend we invested in some new scales, seeing as the other ones we had were varying dramatically over the course of minutes. At one point I put on three pounds in the course of a minute. So we got some more, and they are a lot better, but they are just confirming what I pretty much already knew. I haven’t lost any weight in about a month. I have been really really strict, and as far as I’m aware I have only gone over my calorie count once this year. At first I lost a stone on two weeks, but since then, nada.

But while this is certainly dispiriting, I’m not going to let it stop me. My aim was not about weight, it was about getting in shape, so the key for me now is to keep up the good work with my diet, but to start taking the exercise more seriously. I’ve made a start, but in the next few weeks I need to think of some ways to step it up a gear. I really feel as though I’ve got the smoking beat now (I’ve been off the patches for four days now, and I’ve not killed a single person!) so this has to be my focus now.

-Paul

I’ve been on the nicotine patches now for 20 days and the good news is that they are really working. Day 20 and I’ve not been tempted once. Not a singe cigarette. Tomorrow will mark three whole weeks, and from that point on I know it’s going to get much much easier.

There is one downside to the nicotine patches, however, woe betide the poor fool who goes to sleep without taking it off first. My particular patches are the 24 hour kind, so the idea is that you leave them overnight so you don’t get a craving in the morning, but to my mind it must only be masochists and the deeply insane who would think that this is a good idea. For leaving a patch on overnight can only lead to one thing, nicotine dreams.

Over the last three weeks I’ve been stupid enough to fall into this trap, and what I’ve experienced has been the most lucid and horrible dreams.  For instance, the first one involved me walking outside of York University when I came across a very distressed Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States. He told me that someone was trying to kill him, and suddenly we were attacked, but I got the upper hand. After the kerfuffle out popped from behind a hedge Ros and Lucas from Spooks, who congratulated me, but not before I realised they were in on the plot, and off went me and Joe Biden, running for our lives as shots rang out from all around us.

Now ordinarily this sort of dream would be a laugh, something you giggle about the next morning before promptly forgetting, but not if you have a nicotine patch on.  Then, you experience every nerve shredding moment. When I woke (and I did wake up, several times throughout the night, not aware that it was the patch responsible) I was genuinely as scared as if I had lived it, and then when it came time to get up I felt as though I hadn’t slept a wink.

So the moral of the story is quite simple, if you’re going to quit smoking by all means use the patch, they are excellent. But make sure you take them off at night.  After each instance I feel like I’ve been attacked by mind bullets, like my medulla oblongata has been used as an exercise bag for Mike Tyson. I don’t recommend it.

Other than that the diet side of things has been going really well. This week was when everything starts to slow down considerably and the weight has stopped falling off, but we knew this would happen.  Having conquered the smoking more or less, the next thing that I want to get started on is the exercise regime. So far I’ve not been doing much more than walking to and from work, but starting next week I am going to start doing a few push ups and sit ups every night, as well as the occasional ab-crunch that I saw in a magazine article. Obviously I’m not going to start too full on, I don’t think my body could take it, as unaccustomed to exercise as it is, but it’s more about starting to get into a routine with it.

But three weeks in, more or less, I think we can both be really proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but now the hard work really starts!

Day one wasn’t too bad for the smoking side of things. More than anything I found the main problem was when my brain told me that I should be going for a cigarette, and there was a split second or two when my conscious self went ‘ooh, good idea.’ But the nicotine cravings weren’t too bad, due to the single nicotine patch that we found in our medicine box.

This morning was a whole different story. I woke up feeling weak and shaky, my mood all over the place, and I felt sick. I fished around in the hope I would find another patch but to no avail, so I trudged out into the snow and went to the chemist for patches and an inhaler. The last time I quit I did it with willpower alone, mainly because my quitting was financially motivated and I couldn’t afford the patches. So this time I figured I would do the same, but I didn’t take into account the fact that quitting is made ten times harder when you are also trying to lose weight.

Ellen and I have both been very good so far at the calorie counting, and although it’s been a bit weird being hungry and not doing anything about it, the worst thing is that when a cigarette craving strikes, my natural instinct is to squash it with a snack.

Now that I have my patch on, things are going better, and although it’s not been a great morning, at no point have I found myself tempted to go and buy some tobacco, so that’s a good thing.  On the exercise side of things I think we’re both of the mind not to do too much too fast, so I did the stairs exercise (one up, one down, two up, two down, continue up until feel like collapsing) yesterday and will do the same again today.

But truth be told the planning of this left out the very simple truth that it’s a lot easier to talk about going healthy in the abstract than it is in reality. But on Day 2 we are both still here, and still dedicated to following through on this.

-Paul

So first of all, a very happy new year to you all.  Last night was a pretty low key affair, seeing as Ellen was working until 10 at night and then started at 8 this morning, so we made do with a bottle of wine and the car crash of entertainment that was Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, but we still managed to salvage a lovely night out of it.

But of course this being the first day of a new year, you’ll be expecting resolutions, and lots of them. Well, there is one big one, and a few smaller ones. But the main one is a project that starts today, which I would like to officially unveil for you! Year of Health is a joint project my me and Ellen to get fit over the course of a full year. I wont go into any more detail than that for now, but please feel free to visit the site and give us much needed encouragement.

Other than that the big aims are to get Demon Pigeon launched this month (provisional logo artwork is very cool) and to launch the main Blood On The Motorway site by the end of the year.  I will also be gutted if I haven’t passed my driving test and moved house this year.

All in all I’m feeling pretty positive about the year ahead, or at least I would be if I didn’t need a cigarette so badly.  I hope that wherever you are reading this your hangover isn’t too bad, and I hope all my readers have a very happy 2010.

So it has begun. I spent a lot of time with Paul over the last week in preparation for today and I’m really glad we can finally put our plans into action. We have brought a couple of really good low fat cook-books to base a lot of our evening meals around and we have  our evening meals for the week. We will have a more flexible approach to lunch and dinner as we don’t tend to eat these together much. The books we chose are “Ultimate Low Fat” and “The BBC Good Food Healthy Eating Cookbook” If we’d have paid the full retail cost, this would have set us back £45 but thank God for the sales. We only spent £12.

I had to get up early today to go to work. The joy of being a support worker means I get to work on days like New Years Day (heavy sarcasm). Breakfast was 2 crumpets with Marmite and a satsuma. I took lunch with me which was a tin of Heinz soup and a turkey sandwich made with Weight Watchers bread. This bread is blooming marvellous. It’s thick cut, and tastes like proper bread. Only difference is the slices are smaller but I can’t moan about that when I’m meant to be dieting. Only 68 calories per slice!

Tonight I’m making Pork Stroganoff and I can’t wait for it because I’m starving now. I think the hunger really started to kick in around 3pm. I had a banana and a couple of Weight Watchers biscuits (very yummy) but I’m still hungry. I guess I’m so used to eating whenever and whatever I want that it is going to be very hard for a while but I am very determined to lose this weight. I weighed myself today and my weight is now 15.13 stone. This means I have put on about half a stone over Christmas which is a bit shocking especially as I knew I was going to be dieting. Oh well at least I had some fun.

Of course, Paul has also started today. I think he may be having a harder time than me because he is also giving up the fags. I gave him an old Nicotine patch that I had from when I was giving up and maybe that’s helping but I don’t have one for him tomorrow. He says he wants to go cold turkey so we shall see how he copes with it. Unfortunately giving up smoking and cutting down on food intake doesn’t really go well together so he’s a bit grumpy today.

-Ellen

Of course this is foolishness in the extreme, anything we do too excess now is only going to mean more work in the New Year, but at the same time it’s mentally easier to know that you are starting having gotten things out of your system. So today we went and bought enough food to last the next few days only, each of us choosing a few meals that we really want to be able to enjoy before we start.

With every thing that we will be doing with diet and exercise, the one thing that scares me most of all is the smoking. I’ve given up before, for nine months, and I did it cold turkey, with no outside help. Obviously I slipped again but at least I know that I can do it, even if it’s going to be twice as hard this time with all the other changes we will be making.  But I hope Ellen understands that I might not be a particularly pleasant person for the first two weeks, when I can’t even replace my nicotine cravings with food!

As for the diet and exercise side of things, we’re going to be putting up a weekly food and exercise plan for our own reference and yours, and of course if you have any advice or encouragement then please do feel free to leave it below.

Paul