The Monster On The Stairs

The young teenage me needed a pee. I was home alone in my parent’s house as I sat in the living room crossing my legs and uncomfortably shuffling as the feeling in my bladder intensified. It was early evening and the sun was going down but the lamp lit the living room adequately. Outside of the living room door, however, I imagined darkness. The dark hallway leading up to the dark stair case where I needed to climb to reach the dark first floor to enter the dark bathroom to pee. I could wait no longer. The spine tingling feeling of being chased as I scramble up the stair case was about to happen.

Opening the living room door presented me with nothing like I imagined. The dusky evening still provided some light and nothing like the pitch black in my head, but every light switch, barring the kitchen switch which was further away, went on anyway including the stair case and upstairs lights. I knew, though, that the light has never stopped the monster from chasing me up the stairs before. It’ll be back again.

I walked along the hallway towards the stairs, glancing behind me to make sure that no piercing eyes were peering at me from beyond the kitchen door left slightly ajar. Nothing. So where was it? I gulped and took my first step onto the stairs. As was my usual routine I picked out a jolly song to mutter as I slowly took my second step. I began to check through my peripheral vision to see if a whispy hand was reaching out for ankles. My song had gone. Adrenaline started to take over. The natural fight or flight feeling was beginning to peak. Each step became quicker and quicker until I could feel it breathing onto my neck…..

I ran, fell, scurried, jumped through the other 20 steps to reach the top! I turned and…nothing. The stairs were empty. I had escaped the monster on the stairs once more. ‘It’ll be back’, I thought as I caught my breath and had my pee at last. Going back down the stairs? Well, that was always a breeze.

Has anybody else ever had this feeling? I know adults who I have spoken to who say they still get this feeling sometimes. My boys at 5 and 8 are experiencing it now and I can only imagine that it comes from an anxious place.

I haven’t experienced this since my mid teens and I guess it would’ve been around the time that I decided that ghosts, spirits and Gods (good or bad) didn’t exist to me. Perhaps if I knew in my mind that no supernatural powers were at play then it couldn’t possibly be that. And I knew that an actor called Robert Englund dressed up to become Freddie Krueger and at the time of my life I started to watch A Nightmare On Elm Street and other horror movies I was able to separate fake and reality. I can no longer fear something that I don’t believe in or if I know it to be an act in the case of a movie.

Last night my eldest asked me what I was scared of. I find this such a tough question. I ask myself this question often too. I told him anything that takes me out of my own control scares me. I gave rollercoasters as an example but in my head the real example would be to lose somebody close to me or for me to die and leave them behind to grieve. Death doesn’t scare me, but thinking of those having to deal with my death terrifies me.

My son goes to a religious school and, as I mentioned in a previous blog, I respect his beliefs in a God. We have regular discussions and I never dismiss his beliefs just because they are different to my own. Coming up to Easter is a tough time for him as he learns about Jesus on the cross. Him playing Fornite has nothing on the graphic stories he is taught at school. He cares about Jesus and I love him and admire him even more for his extension of love that he gives to others. And for such a caring child I really wish he hadn’t have had to hear the stories of Covid, Afghanistan and Ukraine in the past couple of years. But they are our reality. We took him and his younger brother to the local charity where they were sorting clothes for the Afghanistan refugees and he helped a refugee boy in his class settle in.

There’s lots of reasons for kids and adults to be anxious about and, whatever the monster on the stairs is, seems to be a manifestation of this. It would be interesting to know your experiences of this whether in childhood or as an adult. Is it a thing that most of us experience? Because sooner or later, we’ve all got to pee!

Ban My Sunday Lunch And Me And You Will Be Having Words!

I usually post a massive meal of mine on Facebook and almost every time I think, ‘Hmm! Is that wise to post high calorie food and drink when I promote myself as a Personal Trainer?!’

This fleeting question is always met with a resounding ‘Hell yeah!’ And I need to explain myself…

I eat what I like and I tell my clients to do the same. There’s just one thing that I need to promise myself and that is I must stop when I am full. I have learnt to respect my body enough to not choose the low nutrition food all of the time. My 80/20 rule is very loose but it keeps me mindful of trying to keep 80% of my food nutrient dense. But I’m not going to polish a turd. If I’m having a Sunday lunch it’ll come piled up with all the trimmings. If I’m having my favourite beef curry and fried rice from the Chinese takeaway I’ll order the salt and pepper ribs and chips. These are meals that I have accounted for so I know not to eat anything ‘heavy’ around these mealtimes.

Also, I don’t panic around the time that we traditionally class as mealtimes. Breakfast is exactly that…a time to break a fast. It doesn’t have to be as soon as you wake up. For me personally, thinking of food so early on a morning is not appealing. If I’m not hungry then I don’t eat a breakfast. I’ll eat when I’m ready which is usually around 10-2. Dinner time (or tea time) is the same. Its far too early for me to eat with the kids. They’re very hungry when they finish school so their tea is at 4:30ish. My wife and I are conscious of sitting with the kids to eat though, so we will have something small with them just to make their mealtime an event with the family around a dinner table rather than a plate on their lap watching YouTube. When the kids go to bed our meals can be as late as 9pm.

So here’s my opportunity to kick the myth into touch once and for all…your 700 calorie meal at 9 at night would still be 700 calories in the morning. Eating late before going to bed might cause certain issues to some people, but making you fat isn’t one of them. Research shows that we tend to eat more calorie dense foods on the evenings and turn to snacking when we sit down to watch the latest box set. Perhaps that’s where the ‘don’t eat past 7pm’ headlines came from and it probably originated from The Sun or Daily Mail so it doesn’t count as factual journalism.

My ultimate goal as a PT is to be myself. I’m not going to prescribe anybody a lettuce diet and go to the kitchen drawer to dig out the takeaway menus (everyone has one of the those drawers right?!) But I also recognise that everyone is different with individual needs. So my eating habits might not suit the next person. That’s where my skills, knowledge and experience take over for each person that I speak to.

One thing is for sure though, I’ll never ban a food for anyone.

Don’t you dare ban my Sunday Lunch!

The Strength Phase

I walk up to the barbell. The calluses on my hands are stinging and my thoughts take me back to a similar lift I performed some 20 years ago when I put my back out. My deadlifts have vastly improved since then but the psychological games in the strength phase always seem to bite. Its not my favourite phase of my programme. The body and the mind take a hit. Repeating a moderate weight over and over is much easier for my body and brain to take. The pump is rewarding too which is less noticeable with a 3 rep set. I’m not a power lifter so I sometimes try to talk myself out of the the strength and power phase of the programme. How important can just a two or three rep set, or sometimes even just a one rep set, be to my goals of building lean muscle? Surely my body needs reps. That’s what the popular articles say. But what does the research say?

There’s a belief that, to make muscle grow we need to rep a weight (considered to be around 70% of a 1 rep max) for 10-15 reps. But that is just a small part of what we need to consider before we can stimulate real muscle growth. Otherwise all we will achieve is a pump (sarcoplasmic hypertrophy) which will only look good for the changing room pics after your workout.

Bodybuilder and auther Christian Thibaudeau writes…”The main purpose of heavy lifting on the basics when your sole goal is to build muscle mass is to improve the capacity of your nervous system to send a strong excitatory drive.”

This means that the stronger your nervous system signals are, which are developed through low and heavy reps, the better your performance will be in your hypertrophy phase of training. Planning a structured progressive programme can vary depending on time of year and lifestyle, but the fundamentals always remain the same. We must go through a process that stimulates the nervous system, produce growth hormone and increase testosterone. If you have these in your quest for muscle Hypertrophy, the process will be much more rewarding.

Staying In The 10-15 Rep Range For Too Long…

You need to keep reminding your body what you are asking of it. Stale workouts are the gym equivalent of ‘blue balls’. You are stimulating the muscle without ever reaching a climax. Tempo, technique, various positions, intensity and length are absolutely essential to the process to get the desired results.

Your body stops responding to the so called hypertrophy rep range and this is where results begin to slow down or stop altogether, especially for the regular gym goer. The more experience you have and the more you have worked your muscles, the more savvy you need to be to wake them up again. They’re bored, you’re bored. Have you noticed any significant growth to your muscle recently? That’s why you’re pressing and curling, right? It might be time to change your phase of training if you haven’t. Remind your muscle why you are at the gym.

The Best 1-5 Rep workouts To Do…

Movements that require multiple muscle groups to work at the same time are known as Compound exercises. The main ones are bench press, deadlift, squat and rows. You might not even include these in your usual hypertrophy workouts in their conventional form but they should definitely play a huge part for improving nervous system signals in a strength phase. These compounds will develop your overall technique in other movements too.

The sore hands, the extra aches and pains and the psychological games that You Vs Bar will give you will be worth it in the end!

The Reset Button

As I chatted to a fellow football dad this evening we got on to discussing the tipple we would be going back to. Although not essential to this story I can confirm that mine is a red wine and my new bezzie’s drink would be a gin & tonic.

Anyway, I told him that my wife and I had a dry January and we also appreciated a sober October. He had a dry February as it is the shortest month to endure. Hmm, clever I thought. I must remember that for next year.

What we both agreed on is that it is important to reset the body and mind from time to time from going ‘off piste’ so to speak. What was keeping an alcoholic drink just for the weekend becomes a Wednesday ‘midweek’ drink too. If the football is on then I would pour a glass for the occasion. In fact, before you know it, anything becomes an occasion! I’m sure at one point during lockdown my wife and I celebrated me taking the bins out with a chateau pape de neuf.

Maybe we can all identify times in our lives where we need to press the reset button. A chance where we can readdress our mindset and take a deep breath before we go again. In this past week, every evening I have intentionally put Come Dine With Me on TV at around 10pm so that I can see something fun and throwaway before I go to bed rather than watch the news. I’m not ignorant and I care about world events, but sometimes it gets too much and I need to reset my mind and turn off. I’m lucky, I know, that I live in relative peace where I can switch off and others can’t.

Every day during lockdowns I would look for the news that would give me the new death toll from Covid. It gets depressing. Eventually I had to try and find head space for other stuff to fill my head. And just for a couple of weeks banana bread, tik tok and Miranda became my reset buttons.

Sometimes, even if it is something that you either enjoy doing or feel compelled to do, if it can become detrimental to your physical or mental health, walking away from it for a short time to to gather yourself can press the reset button.

You are not restricting yourself, you are not abandoning anything, you are not uncaring. You are just taking a time out.

If It Isn’t Challenging You, It Isn’t Changing You.

I see females who regularly pick up their 22kg child and carry them into a supermarket, after pushing their child for an hour around in a full shopping trolley weighing over 30kg in total they perform a farmers walk with their shopping bags weighing at least 10kg each. I then see them in the gym picking up 2kg dumbbells to do a 20 minute routine because they want to ‘tone up’ and lose weight.

I see men running on a treadmill for 40 minutes followed by three sets of heavy dumbbell bicep curls everyday and in conversation they tell me that they want to grow muscle and lose belly fat.

Can you spot where they are going wrong?

They are not challenging the goals that they have set themselves. In fact, they can meet their goals just as easily outside of the gym.

Depending on weight and speed this man can burn around 300 calories on a treadmill. Yet with the correct portion control could manage a calorie deficit without using a treadmill. And struggling through a few ego bicep curls won’t grow muscle as not enough growth hormone (HGH) will be stimulated in his workout, so a daily squat and pressup routine after a good night’s sleep would be more beneficial to begin with.

The female is way short changing herself if she thinks that the 2kg dumbbells is enough for a Romanian Deadlift. I perform squats and deadlifts regularly at home just by tidying away my kids toys. A Super Mario Mansion is a good 10kg. I’m squatting as I take the clothes washing from the washing mashine and I get a decent HIIT routine by simultaneously clearing the dish washer, making four breakfasts, two cups of coffee, a juice and a glass of milk each morning whilst running back and forth from the kitchen and dining room.

So when I go to the gym I need something more challenging than what my daily life is giving me anyway. I’m in a pool of sweat after taking three bed sheets off and remaking them all. I have leg DOMS after a couple of hours gardening and I’m knackered after an hour playing football with the kids thinking I’m Neymar JR. Give me 150k deadlifts any day!

To get the changes that we want and to meet the goals that we set ourselves then we need to do something about it and that often means looking at what we do in our formal exercise routines. If you are a fairly sedentary person then walking an hour each day is a great way to start. But I’m really talking to those who are already hitting the gym hard or have home workout routines yet are getting frustrated by their returns.

Ask yourself honestly, do you do enough in your workouts to elicit change? Do you do the right stuff to get the changes that you want? Are you fuelling your body enough or too little?

Always remember, with every workout programme tell yourself ‘If it isn’t challenging me, it isn’t changing me.’ Give your body a reason to change but most of all give yourself a reason to change, because until you believe in the process your body won’t either.

Just One Stomach Flu Away…

Do you recognize the title?

The line ‘I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight’ comes from the movie The Devil Wears Prada. Its a most excellent film.

The line comes from the fact that the character believes she will hit her goal weight from either vomiting or not eating. It is true she will lose weight, but this will only be temporary. So here’s what we know…

The National Science Teachers Association in the USA use this line to teach about biology and body image. This is because it is one of the biggest false beliefs amongst dieters and for those with eating disorders such as bulemia.

When we become ill with a stomach bug our body’s need to try to eliminate the virus so we begin to vomit or have diarrhea. Everything we lose during this illness, which usually lasts 24 to 48 hours, is fluid. Your body, at this stage, has no desire to lose fat. In fact only when we begin to be more active and are eating again will the body want to lose fat.

The line in the movie was funny and in context with the story, but it amazes me how many people I speak to who also get bodily fluid and fat confused. Indeed, hitting a target weight is hitting a target weight however it is achieved, but I feel that it is important to understand what it is we are losing from our body’s to meet this goal.

Just like a car, you need to put fuel into a car to make the car move. To move it uses up the fuel that has been put into it. Your body goes through the same process and, perhaps we could take the analogy a little further. When we speed up, travel for longer distances or carry more passengers in a car it takes more fuel from the tank. In today’s fuel prices I’m not sure that this is what you want to be doing, yet it is exactly what we need to do to burn fat.

Of course your body is much more complex than a car and how much fuel (calories) you put into your body and how much fuel you use throughout the day is difficult to measure. You don’t have a fuel gauge. However, a sensible approach to calorie and macro counting can be useful for a short time until you develop a consistent routine with your nutrition. This enables you to identify what and how much you should be eating to meet your goals and, yes, if you enjoy chocolate, a glass of wine and eating out that should be allowed too! But if you have never counted then how will you know how much of it fits in with your goals? I wouldn’t try to fit a carpet if I hadn’t measured the floor first.

We often mistake our fitness abilities with the numbers on the scales. If we see those numbers as a secondary issue and focus firstly on our ability to move better, walk and run further, lift and push heavier and accompany this with a balanced diet, then you will soon get the numbers on the scales anyway. But to focus on the scales first and your fitness secondary will leave you like a hamster on a wheel occasionally coming off to nibble on a carrot. Take on an exercise routine that you enjoy, choose meals that are nutrient dense and allow for the foods that are not as nutritious within your daily calories and work with a professional for accountability. Get off of the hamster wheel.

Losing weight is absolutely fine as a goal if that is what you want to do, but it’s the finer details that are what actually accomplishes this goal. Going to the toilet, being ill or even sweating only means that you have lost water from your body which will replenish again when your body has recovered. Hitting a target weight should be due to a commitment of a healthier, enjoyable lifestyle that enables you to see past the weighing scales.

Your challenges and targets should be fun, not one that depends on you getting ill to achieve it.

A Place In The Sun

Derek and Joan love Spain. So much so they’ve just put an offer in for an apartment in Andalusia situated at a purpose built community for British ex pats. They sit outside in the plaza at the local Irish pub eyeing up the fish and chips on the menu waiting for the call back from the estate agent, Juan, with some good news.

My wife and I are watching A Place In The Sun. There’s a hint of jealousy towards Derek and Joan. It’s almost April and despite a couple of days where I ventured out in a T-Shirt last week, it is now snowing.

I have a coat that I threaten to pack away into the loft each year around this time but it certainly got an outing today as I went to take the kids to school. No exaggeration it could be 20 years old or more. I bought it when I thought I could get away with the Liam Gallagher look. Now when I wear it I feel like Peter Falk as Columbo. Old and disheveled. Every time I wear it I find a different pack of rizzlas from the early 2000’s.

Although no official diagnosis I’m certain I have SAD (Seasonal Adjustment Disorder). But maybe I just hate cold weather. I mean, I don’t suffer with my mood when it turns from Spring into Summer. I just suffer from being warm to bloody freezing!

Some people like winter time and the events that happen during that time. But trudging the streets in fake blood asking for sweets, burning the effigy of a man whilst eating toffee apple, hearing Noddy Holder scream those immortal words long before it’s Christmas or trying to stay awake for Jools Holland’s Hootenanny isn’t my favourite times of the year. Walking along a sunny beach, cranking up the BBQ and sitting in the garden watching the sun go down are a few of my favourite things which all happen to be during the summer time. In fact, the only negative I can think of to a British summer is that the footy season has ended. There’s always Wimbledon I suppose.

Without a doubt a massive mood lifter to me is going to the gym. Training has kept me right for years and I’ve stated many times I think that finding a life that focussed around the gym saved my life. I once felt aimless, useless and soulless. The gym made me feel the opposite. Until I became a husband and a father, the gym was my life line.

I did some growing up in the gym. I had many ‘give your head a wobble mate’ moments. In my first proper job I had to stop off at the shop to buy a couple of whisky miniatures to down before beginning my shift a few times. It was that or a panic attack. Slowly, however, the gym became a much bigger influence in my life than any quick hit.

I developed a routine over time which meant that I went to the gym before I started work. It meant extra early starts but I felt fantastic walking into the office and the rest of the day couldn’t bring me down. The gut wrenching feeling I sometimes had as I woke up was quickly quashed once I began to train. But there was always a telling sign to my mood each day and that was the weather. The colder and grey it was outside, the more difficult it was to snap out of a low mood. If the sun seeped through the bedroom curtains in a morning, the easier it was to start my day.

My little boys help me get through a bad weather day too. I’ll stand in the cold rain all day to see Jonas score a goal. And I’ll happily build a family of snow people with Finlay to see his chuffed freezing face at the end of it. Plus, their early morning starts and them needing me for breakfast and school prep ensures that I need to get my arse in gear straight away, whatever the weather!

The weather forecast doesn’t look like I’ll need to shove my Lieutenant Columbo coat into the loft just yet so I will brave the last bit of cold before I’m able to blow up the paddling pool.

Oh, and just one more thing…Derek and Joan had their bid accepted.

Will The Real PT Please Stand Up?!

Kerching!!

Did you hear that? That’s the sound of another cheap gym selling cheap Personal Training.

I’m not surprised that, what was once a list of PT friends on my Facebook page, are now calling themselves Lifestyle Coaches, Personal Coaches, Health & Wellbeing Coaches and Holistic Wellness Coaches. Anything that avoids the term Personal Trainer.

From my experience the nationwide gyms are exhausting the term Personal Trainer, employing people ‘in training’ towards their qualifications and charging the gym member a small fee whilst paying their PT minimum wage. The experienced and savvy PT rarely charges by the hour, instead setting a price per week that includes session planning for the hour and other physical activities for their client throughout the week, messages and calls, nutritional guidances and (where necessary) emotional support. This means that their prices are higher than what the gym offers.

Sometimes I pop into the Poundshop to buy a dustpan and brush. Cheap and cheerful can be good! I’ll only be sweeping up guinea pig poo with it. It might not last too long, but hey, it’s a quid! But if I’m going to the gym because my doctor tells me I’m obese or because my sciatica is keeping me awake all night, cheap and cheerful isn’t good. Poundshop PT isn’t good.

It’s no wonder that many fitness professionals are staying clear from the PT tag.

It would be a very short PT session if I told someone how to lose weight. Eat less, move more is essentially what it entails. And I use weight loss as the example because around 80% of people who come to me have that goal. I’d gladly give that advice for free, I’d find a different career and the UK would be full of men with their shirts off in summer drizzling half a bottle of cooking oil on their six packs. But it’s much more complex than just eating less and moving more.

Even Sandra, who is shamed every week for not hitting her target at Weight Watchers knows this. Don’t you think she would be losing weight if it was so simple as eating less and moving more? She feels unsupported and frustrated going to an outdated dieting institution so she joins the gym and they offer her PT for £12 an hour. They sit her on an ab crunch machine and tell her to cut out every single bit of food that becomes comforting during her low times. The cycle continues.

Personal training should be the occasional call or message during the week asking how your client is. It should be giving advice on different ingredients and recipes to try. It should be about advice on how to schedule extra time for themselves away from the kids and work. It should be about creating accountability, setting achievable goals, producing consistent and relevant workouts, making exercise fun and being the one face in the gym your client can rely on.

Calling myself anything other than a Personal Trainer takes me away from the absolute joy of seeing a client accomplish their goal, whether it be a personal best or a longer term goal. Even online, when I get the bleep to inform me that another goal has been met I give a ‘yesss!’

It means a lot to my client so it means a lot to me.

I’ll never not be a Personal Trainer. So when I’m old and on my death bed put your ear to my mouth and you’ll hear my last breath be,”squats and deadlifts, squats and deadlifts”. And if you see Sandra, pass it on.

Between A Rock And A Hard Prince

This week on social media I have seen arguments about the Chris Rock and Will Smith incident. It seems there’s a Team Rock and a Team Smith thing going on. But I’ve tried to stay away from making comments myself because I am undecided and I’m not fully convinced that either of them look particularly great from this. But here’s my thoughts anyway…

Chris Rock told a pretty crap joke aimed at someone with alopecia. It wasn’t even funny. But then I am not the oracle on what is funny and what isn’t. Is comedy the same as any art? Subjective? Was Jimmy Carr’s Holocaust joke funny? I didn’t laugh, but others might.

Anyway, funny or not this joke was aimed at Will Smith’s wife who then felt obliged to give Rock a slap. I’ve told some crap (probably not politically correct) jokes in my time but I’ve also given somebody a slap for being insulting to me or my family. I’ve been Chris Rock AND Will Smith before. Maybe I haven’t been at the Oscars and my jokes or my aggression hasn’t been in front of the viewing world but for a split second I can put myself in both of their shoes.

I’m hearing so much about cancel culture these days and this does worry me. I grew up watching Love Thy Neighbour, Fawlty Towers, Rising Damp, Carry On and Only Fools And Horses. I had DVD’s of Chubby Brown as a teenager and I read Viz. They all discriminated against gender roles, race, religion, sex, wars and abilities. These days I prefer Ricky Gervais, who somehow escaped a slap at the Golden Globes and has spoken out about cancel culture himself. His series After Life is so innapropriate at times yet one of the most poignant things I have ever seen . A part of me wants to blush and turn to my wife and say “he can’t say that!” But in the next scene I’m tearing up at the sadness his character is going through.

Did Love Thy Neighbour make race relations in 1970’s UK better or worse? It wasn’t its role to educate it’s viewers but does it have a responsibility to do so either way?

Will Smith has probably sat in an audience listening to Chris Rock many times and laughed at someone else’s expense. Rock is hardly the type of comedian that will talk about his Nan’s cute catchphrases like Peter Kay. Rock is edgy and becoming a famous black American comedian in the 90’s at the same time as Will Smith becoming a famous black American actor I’m sure that they are aware of each other’s work. So does Smith usually laugh at Rock’s jokes but just not the ones involving his wife?

When does comedy become innapropriate? Yeah we have all heard of bad taste humour and we seem to be ok with that. But what if a joke is about the Holocaust, slavery, a religion or rape? When should it be cancelled? Should it ever be? With hash tag campaigns and voices that previously went unheard these days, there are certain topics that seem to be ‘no go’ areas when it comes to comedy. Yet Carr recently pushed it’s boundaries at a live gig recorded for Netflix.

And maybe it needs comedians like that who are willing to test these boundaries. If we see it as an act rather than a person speaking their opinions, then we can continue to discuss the seriousness of the subject matter. For as long as these topics are in the forefront of our minds, whether on stage at the Appolo or in Parliament, then we will keep having serious discussions on how to be a better society. Perhaps these comedians are actually, intentionally or not, becoming the scapegoats. They receive the world’s attention and get paid for it and we disect their subject matter. Win/Win?!

I have no answers and that’s why I am not Team Rock or Team Smith, but perhaps it just comes down to a man doing his job as a comedian and a man doing his job as a husband. Even if they both did a bad job at them.

Trying Not To Make A Hash Of It

I’ve just finished training at the gym. It was a tough one today as I like to start the week heavy after a couple of days rest. I can feel that my blood sugar levels are low and I will need to eat when I get home.

My drive home was filled with meal ideas, but I had a big problem. Over the weekend, due to two kids birthday parties, lots of driving my family around to various errands and a great barbeque at the in laws, my eating habits had become a case of grabbing what I could here and there and plenty of it. The chips at the kids party that I snaffled into my mouth as none of the parents were looking were delicious but having had a Full English the day before I felt that I probably should try and have something a little less fatty and greasy. Anyway, young Joshua from class 9 shouted ‘those chips aren’t for you!’ so that put paid to anymore chips.

Also, it was Mother’s Day on Sunday. My wife had baked a cake to take for a mum. So after my three cheeseburgers and potato salad I ended up with a huge slab of sponge cake for dessert. Undoing the jeans belt isn’t a done thing at your in laws so I waited until I got into the car. I knew that tomorrow would have to mean some sensible meal choices.But then tomorrow came.

I’m not one for actually sitting and eating fruit. Sitting in itself would be a massive achievement on a morning getting two kids ready for school. So my wife and I have a good routine for getting in our fruit and veggies first thing. We invested in a Nutri Bullet some time ago and it’s been really useful to us. This morning in went a banana, spinach, blueberries, oranges and protein powder before I went to the gym. A good start. But by the end of my session I needed food again. The problem was that the meal ideas were not good ideas considering my weekend meals.

Weekends (or any time away from the norm) is usually a time where we can relax the diet or have a few extra treats without guilt. We should never feel bad about a little over indulgence from time to time. But it is important to attempt to readdress the balance when we can. My go to food on a weekday lunch time is quinoa and mackerel. It takes minutes to prepare and I can quickly eat it and continue my work. But my brain kept taking me to all of the weekend food I’d been having!

I was determined. Down came the tin of mixed beans from the cupboard. These are another staple in my diet. And to my delight, right at the back of the cupboard was a can of corned beef. Now, it’s not an exaggeration to say that it is not something me or my family eat. In fact, I can’t remember eating it since I was a kid and my mum rustled up a corned beef hash. But there it was saying,’Pick me! Pick me!’

So I did.

A bowl of mixed beans and a few slices of corned beef would do the trick. It was a compromise. I had the healthy stuff in there mixed with a can of processed cow meat resembling dog food.

‘But what’s this?’ I thought as I held the can aloft like the FA Cup. It was a key to open it up. Had I been transported back to the 80’s? Had it been in the cupboard so long that it actually WAS from the 1980’s?! Surely we have tin openers or ring pulls for this sort of thing these days. Reluctantly but feeling a bit Hangry by this stage I began to use the key. I wanted that processed meat and this bloody key wasn’t going to stop me.

I got to the half way mark of opening the can. It was a slow process. At one point I tried squeezing the can to see if the meat would slop out at the open end. It didn’t. It remained solid. But now the bulged can became so much harder to open. Eventually, I had managed to open it without any cuts or too much swearing. I could have my mixed bean and corned beef lunch at last.

Corned beef is processed of course and it isn’t the type of food you should be eating too much of for it’s quality protein value or it’s vitamins, but there’s worse things that I could have gone for. It satisfied my mind when what I had given my body for the past 48 hours was white bread, oil and fat. Corned beef was actually a better option! And I had to start somewhere.

For the past 15 years I have carefully planned my eating habits to include the type of foods that experts and headlines say that we should avoid. It’s not just the gym goals or the aesthetics that are at stake, but we must consider our overall health. I know that I can’t live off poor nutritional foods for this reason, but I also know that I can balance the occasional poor nutritional food choices with the foods that are considered highly nutritious.

I want an occasional beer without running to the scales. I want to enjoy a family meal with cake for dessert. I live in Scarborough. The locals would hunt me down if I banned fish and chips! These meals can be enjoyed with the right attitude and a healthy relationship with your food. Sometimes we are so busy trying to fix our physical issues that we forget how to work with our mental issues. And yet if we can beat our anxieties around food I know that the physical issues are so much easier to fix too.

It might be another 30 years until I have to go through the trauma of opening up a can of corned beef again, but at that moment it scratched an itch that had been left behind from the weekend. Now I can move on!