Not So Fat Nat



So, it's been one month of sticking to my new healthy eating regimen.... well, apart from those calorie-laden waffles and macaroons in Lille... and I am rather pleased to report that I've shifted nearly 9 pounds (4 kg) to date.

Rather than bore you all to tantrums and tears with my tedious weight loss tales, I will only be reporting on my progress on here every now and again. But, if per chance anyone wants to follow my journey to a healthier lifestyle in any detail, I have started putting together a separate blog of tasty low-fat recipes, trendy tips and tintillating tales of my trials and tribulations, rather aptly named Not So Fat Nat...that you can find over here.

Still a work in progress and perhaps rather self-indulgent, but I'm hoping that it will somehow keep me on track.. or at least distract me from exploring the contents of the biscuit tin!

Happy Friday everyone...

Getting Pissy

Picture found HERE

Way back when I first started throwing random mutterings together into one place and calling it a “blog”, I wrote a piece inspired by a conversation that I had with my hairdresser, a lady who definitely wears the trousers in her household, insisting that her man sits down to pee as she cannot abide the “Splash Factor”. In that post (Just Taking The Piss), I mentioned that while many men are quite happy to be “dudes who pee like a lady” in the interests of keeping the pee-ace at home, there was a group of feminists at a Swedish university who were taking it a step further. They’d been campaigning to ban all urinals from campus, “because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women." I thought at the time that the feminists had missed a trick, because now, thanks to the SheWee, we girls can indeed stand up and pee too.

I have long been toying with the idea of acquiring said urinary aid, mainly to avoid having to sit on less than desirable public toilet seats on my travels both at home and abroad, or peeing onto my shoes while I attempt to hover over squat toilets (which are surprisingly more common than you may think....for example in parts of Italy!). I could have really used a SheWee when snowshoeing recently in Norway...having to strip down to just a base layer in subzero temperatures in order to get my pants down was no piss in the park, I can assure you. The wind chill on exposed butt cheek is sheer torture! No such need for public indecency with a SheWee, just unzip like the boys do, position the SheWee, and write your name in the snow...

Anyway, I have finally stopped pissing about and bought my very own, hot pink SheWee Extreme, complete with extension pipe and solid travel case. I figured the last thing I want to be doing, when hiking in the wilds of Canada in June and nature calls, is to be baring my sizeable butt to the elements or, in particular, to a hungry grizzly with a preference for white meat.

Just Chewing The Fat

Having a fat bum, hips and thighs is healthy....or so claim researchers at the University of Oxford in this month’s edition of the International Journal of Obesity. Any American readers please note, by “bum” I mean your rear, not some homeless person that sleeps rough and asks you for spare change at the traffic lights - you may prefer the term “fanny”, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish over here in the UK, and that is not for here....besides, when last did you see a chubby hobo?

Anyway, back to the bum story....apparently, extra weight on your hips, bums and thighs can protect against heart and metabolic problems, as slow burning hip fat sucks up harmful fatty acids and spits out a hormone called adiponectin that protects the arteries, and promotes better blood sugar control and fat burning.

Woohoooo! I can finally justify the significant presence of my lard arse....

Butt hang on, if having a backside à la J-Lo 'n Beyonce 'n Co. is the Next Big Thing, what the heck was I doing last night in the fittingly named “Hips, Bums and Tums” aerobics class of my local gym, desperately trying to reduce the size of my derrière? Yeah, yeah, you guessed it....with my new-found energy levels from all that strenuous hot chocolate drinking snowshoeing in Norway, I’m now on a new year fitness fling, along with half the population.

Not having set foot inside an aerobics studio for the last four ten years, I’d picked the H, B and T as the least frightening option. The other classes (Bodyattack, Bodyblast, Bodycombat, Bodypump) all sounded like they took place in a warzone and were highly likely to incur Grievous Bodily Harm. I was more than a tad apprehensive about attending the first session as I was sure I’d forgotten all the Jane Fondaesque moves (toe tap! box step! grapevine!) and would be the stumbling idiot at the arse end of the class.

But, as with most things you dread, it turned out OK in the end... the class was actually quite enjoyable and I didn’t faint, trip over my own feet (or anyone else’s), fall over clutching at my heart, slip in a pool of my own sweat, or get asked to leave and never return. I may even be up for another hefty dose of clench and squat next Tuesday night....big bums may be all the rage, but I still need to fit mine into last year’s jeans.

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Quite ironically, this was my 'fortune' from the cookie that came with the Chinese takeaway that followed the gym class (yeah, I’m really taking this healthy living lark seriously)....

I’m going to take this to mean....stop worrying about the size of your bum!