Day one. I’ve just completed my first cardio session, which lasted a whole ten minutes, and believe me, that was enough for now. It wasn’t very intensive cardio either, but hey, got to start somewhere. It consisted of five minutes on the exercise bike and five minutes of light aerobics (don’t laugh, I needed something gentle to start off with and this stuff fits the bill).

At this point, it’s almost a rehab programme rather than a fitness regime. Still, we all have to start somewhere and for me, right now, that starting point is very low. It’s not where you start, it’s where you end up, right?

Here’s my planned cardio programme for the first six weeks. I intend to do this three times a week. I’ll be doing weights on the alternate days to maintain strength – and possibly trying to fit a short walk in on those days too, just for a bit of extra exercise. Sunday is a rest day. 

After that, I’ll start increasing the intensity – maybe by starting to replace the light aerobics with something more strenuous – and once I’ve made the workout more intense, then I’ll further increase the time. But for now, building up to 20 minutes of light cardio is the very first step.

The other thing I started today was, of course, the diet. As with the cardio, I’m starting light. My target calorie intake for today, and for every day this week, is 3000. Yes, that’s still quite a lot, and no, I won’t lose weight at that, but it’s a starting point for a gradual downwards adjustment. I know from experience that if I try to cut the calories too far, too fast, I’ll just be bloody hungry, and that’s a recipe for failure. So 3000 a day it is for this week, as a starting point to get myself back into the habit of calorie counting. Next week it will be 2750. The eventual target is 1800 per day, and I’ll most definitely be losing weight when I get to that point.  

Finally, I decided to do a bit of a ‘detox’ too. I’m slightly sceptical as to how beneficial these things actually are, and I won’t be going so far as the green tea, lemon juice and all that jazz. But I’m going to aim to drink a full gallon of water per day for the next three days. Hopefully it will flush the old system out a little. No doubt it will make me pee a lot too, but hey, that’s kind of how ‘flushing out’ works, right? And no beer for a few days….