Weight increasing; Sleep decreasing

I thought, as I'm doing this to get in better shape, it might be a good idea to keep tabs on my weight through the programme. Daily weight-taking is not really going to help as micro-increments are not at all inspiring and shortly after my first weigh in, my daughter flooded the bathroom and shorted out the scales.

Having taken the scales apart and fixed them with a blunt instrument, my next weigh in a few days ago gave me a bit of a shock. 3 lb weight gain. Now there were some mitigating factors. I wasn't weighing myself at the normal time, normal being first thing in the morning before I eat anything. It was in the evening after a particularly delicious steak pie - really-calorific-highly-saturated-fatty food and exactly what I should be avoiding. But I was hungry having been swimming the previous day.

And the scales could be lying, having been in pieces not 10 minutes earlier.

However, given that 2 days later, re-weighing showed me 2lbs lighter than this all time high, I think the scales are probably right.

My wife, D, tried to console me by saying that muscle is denser than fat, and that it might be down to a miraculous conversion of blubber to sinew. Pie to blubber is closer to fact.

I had thought that I might just try to keep everything else normal, like diet, whilst I get the basic fitness and stamina bits sorted out, but I don't think that it can work this way. The more effort I put in, the more hungry I'm going to get and the more I need to watch the type of food I ingest.

It's not like I'm a big biscuit (aka cookie across the pond) and chocolate eater. I've still got half of that Toblerone left from Easter. OK, it was a yard long Toblerone, but still that's well less than one chunk every two days. The chunk-rate has been accelerating a bit recently though.

So, on the eats side, we are planning less meat, more fruit, less sweet stuff.

On the sleep side, things have got a bit strange. Fitful is probably the best way of describing it, certainly not proper restive sleep for around half the nights over the past ten days. I'm not sure if this is a result of exercise, work or a touch of a head cold. So, I'll keep an eye on this and see if I can relate it to anything in particular. It might be all the chorine ingested in the local swimming pool keeping me awake.

As for the calf muscle, things have definitely improved. And thanks for all the kind words and wishes attached to previous posts. Just great.

It's not 100% yet and I can still feel the point of injury when I stretch, but just keeping at it with stretching a few times a day and the anti-inflamitory gel have done wonders. All being well I can re-start running later this coming week, with a revised plan.

May get the bike out of the shed in the meantime....

Mr Stumble.