Well, I failed to write a blog entry yesterday, because we had visitors. However, I managed to stay on the programme. That surprised me - most diet and exercise regimes just don't go with playing host. This fit seamlessly. The cold bath happens at my normal bathtime. The exercise fits with the housework to prepare for guests, and with a gentle game of badminton in the back garden. The food restrictions are fine as long as I plan the menu to allow me to fill my plate with allowed food so I won't look as though I'm denying myself. I blew up balloons for my children and their visitors so they could play with them.
Skinny dipping
The cold bath has been the most interesting part of the OMG plan. Originally I found it very hard indeed, but this weekend it has seemed much less daunting. In fact today, I almost enjoyed it! Of course, a big part of the reason for this is that I've managed to actually brave the bath for 15 minutes as required every day, and have even managed to wash my hair during those baths, so I feel a tremendous sense of achievement.
Immersing my torso (and head) has been a lot harder than my legs, but I've developed a trick - I imagine my children's lives are at risk. I've got to get the bath water higher or something terrible will happen. This is silly and should not work, but it does. I can suspend disbelief for long enough to grab the sides of the bath and push myself further down, until eventually I'm fully immersed. Once I'm there, it's not so bad - I get used to the cold water fairly quickly.
Another trick that has helped me get going is to put things that I like around the bath - nice-smelling bath scrub, expensive shampoo, a sparkly rubber duck, and a wooden handled back scrubber. The idea of getting into a cold bath has filled me with dread, but these things have made the "ritual" of getting ready a great deal easier to face.
Yesterday I had a very deep bath and raised the temperature by about half a degree centigrade. Today I went for a smaller bath and raised it a whole degree. I wondered how many calories I was burning on raising the bath temperature?
Science interlude
So this morning I measured the depth of the water, and the width and length a bit below the fill line (the sides of the bath slope a bit, so I took a midway point to try to get the estimate more accurate). The dimensions: 25cm x 46cm x 130cm. Multiply those and you get 149,500 cubic centimeters of water.
Conveniently, a calorie is defined as the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one cubic centimeter (actually, it's 1 gram, but the two are in fact the same thing) of water by 1 degree centigrade. That means that it must have taken 149,500 calories of energy to increase my bath water's temperature today. When we talk about calories in food, we really mean kilo-calories - i.e. 1000s of calories. So to get the calories I must have burned in dietary terms, I divide by 1000. That means that my body used about 150 calories during the 15 minutes involved just to warm up my bath. That's equivalent to around 30 minutes of walking at my weight, so in terms of calorie burn, it's pretty efficient in calories burned per unit of time. Given that I have a busy life, I find that a very appealing statistic.
Black coffee and green tea
I've got more used to hot drinks without milk (or in my case, soya milk). Although I've decided to allow myself to put soya milk in my drinks, I figured I would do without when I could. In fact, I've gone without all weekend, without really trying.
In short, at the end of my first weekend, I'm feeling remarkably positive about this weight loss plan. And of course feeling positive is meant to be good for your brain! I've been at it for nearly a week, and if it's going to carry on like this, I'm sure I can manage to carry on for the full six weeks.
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