21 days

There is an old adage that it takes 21 days to form a habit. Well, my son has put me to the following task and I thought it would be interesting to blog a few times as I go.

I am technically obese and have been since I was a small child. Not so small :-)

My BMI throughout lockdown has run just under 34 which puts me in the obese category. To get down to the overweight category I would have to have a BMI of below 30.

There has only been one time in my life I have achieved this and it was short-lived and related a lot to lifestyle. At the time I spent three and a half months in a campervan with my wife and 2 yr old, driving from Perth to Sydney round the coast with little money and 2 bikes. At the end of that trip when I flew back to the UK I had a BMI of 29.6 if memory serves. However, in this time I cycled every day with a child on my bike and had so small an existence I have to start drinking coffee for my afternoon snack as my wife told me there was nothing else :-(
We were actually, however vaguely following some sort of planned diet.

And so even when about 3 years ago I lost 17 kilos I have not managed to sustain this level for the longer term. I have never gone back that far though.

Roll forward to today and having had the same weight consistently throughout lockdown I am unable to blame the travelling for work that I do as part of my inability to lose weight. Even though when I travel I take my own food which I have done for years.

Then my son, who I have been teaching on and off about behavioural concepts and who has seen me taking visual data on other things on a whiteboard, asks me if I can do 21 days in a row without a day off.

Therefore even though I am in no way competitive, about most things, it is in line with my aims and values, in the past I habitually take a day off every so often.

Therefore as a person who is into working with public and private Behavioural events I know, I should be taking data. We are a few days in so back to the whiteboard, we go and "the game is afoot Watson"!