A Sea Change & Subsequent Experiments.

Playing around with some established tropes and trying new ideas.

First though a note to viewers : with having two distinct threads that i’m working on at the same time iv’e chosen to return, at least temporararily, to twice per week posting. Thus my crafting, modeling and projects will get the Monday morning slot as I mainly work at my crafting table at the weekend while I can often sum up the things I have been doing with my exercise and dietary regime on a Friday.

Yesterday, at time of writing, I started the day with the longest walk that i’m capable of – the one that follows most of the Tavistock canal path and which, for me at least, ends at the front door to Costa in the high street. I had to push along as fast as I could because we were anticipating another weather front coming through med morning. All in all it was an uncomfortable walk until the path turned more directly downwind although still cold and damp. At the finish I felt almost pleased as the walk clocks in at a hair under 7000 steps and I honestly thought I would crack a 10.000 step day for the first time in years. In a way that’s my old way of thinking : that walking is essentially slow and easy cardio exercise and that what counts is firstly movement and secondly the volume of that movement, ie that more is better.

Today, the day after my long walk with the rest of the day spent sitting down. i’m trying something a bit different – in fact i’m experimenting with three of the things that Dr Alex suggests in his video series : firstly the approach that utilizes NEAT , secondly having a protein based breakfast and thirdly going for the second of my short walks within a few minutes of eating, One of Dr Alex’s shorts :

My sea change in thinking is that iv’e just gone into my second cycle of exercise and dietary change and iv’e chosen to focus on improving my metabolic health rather than focusing so much on the blunt tool of maximizing my exercise volume and intensity to see changes displayed on our bathroom scales. This morning i’m not going out for one of my medium distance exercise walks with a loaded pack up a steep lane and I don’t intend to measure my weight on the next Monday morning and instead take a baseline waist measurement instead.

My overall plan for the day is to stand up every hour or so and just walk around, including the stairs, and then every second hour to complete a short there and back again to the first lane junction which takes about 15 minutes. Some time during the day I will do a longer and weighted circuit as that I think is useful for other reasons and in the middle of the day I will do at least one bodyweight squat session. I hope to finish the day having been up and down the first section of lane at least five or six times. I’m not so much even competing with the taxis as dancing with them !

The thinking behind the scenes is that I don’t so much have a weight problem as a visceral fat problem as evidenced by my waist girth, and it seems that multiple Insulin spikes due to consuming high sugar foods are the primary cause of that. I’m hoping that by calming the everyday Insulin spikes and therefore reducing the overall Insulin signalling to my visceral fat that I can start to shift it. According to Dr Alex’s other videos there are other things that I can work on : one is Alcohol which is irrelevant because I only have a few beers once per year, I do suffer with poor sleep due to my prostatitis and I am already taking stage two cardio exercise daily.

Ideally today I would be wearing my pedometer to measure overall movement as seen in steps taken and then compare that with the single long walk I took on the canal path – only iv’e failed again to set it up although I do know the step count for my out and back up the lane. In the days ahead I intend to use it daily and see what things tend to naturally cause a higher step count. Physical movement and activity seems to be the key although I also think that it’s valuable to continue with at least one longer walk per day and really focus on making that my regular stage two cardio session. The other point here is that my new bodyweight squats exercise may be even more valuable than I thought when I started that routine.

It’s funny but this routine kinda/sorta reminds me of something that I came across and enthused about several years ago when Australian outdoor Youtuber and PhD candidate Beau Miles did a marathon by running around his block once per hour and then packed the rest of the 24 hours by completing a whole load of individual jobs and projects around his homestead. Beau Miles is obviously a runner so for him to run a mile is easy peasy, for me that would be next to impossible although it did occur to me to try 24 hours doing a ten minute walk followed by 50 minutes of project work. Right now what i’m trying to find out is the effect of just standing up, moving around and going for a short walk up the lane and back has with what i’m trying to do. On the first day that I tried it and without my pedometer I can already say that I was up to 5.000 steps at lunch time and by evening I suspect that I will have already exceeded the step count of my single long walk. In the next few days I hope to be able to set up my annoying pedometer to do a daily step total and see what that comes out as.