Our Daily Bread

"What...erm...love you sweetie...but...erm...what the Hell ya doin'?"

I was breathing. Slowly.

"I'm breathing...slowly," I said, doing a slow-motion bicep-curl.

"Are you...erm...finding the curls difficult honey?" she said, eyeing my tiny 1.5 pound dumb-bells with a combination of Disney-cute compassion and held-in-check contempt.

"Nono," I said. "The instructions said to do them slowly, and not to rush them," I said, breathing out dramatically, like the Karate Kid. Hey man, I was In The Zone.

d giggled, hiding the height of her humour behind her hand.
"Oh sweetie," she said. "They mean don't go mad and injure your elbows or pull anything. But you can pump them out...one, two, three, four..." she said, showing me the rhythm.
"Ohhhh," I said, blinking. "Really?"
"Really," she promised, and blew me a kiss before she buggered off to work. I pumped them out, and utterly refused to do the sit-ups, on the significantly wuss-ass justification that my left ass-cheek was really bitching, and d had done me the faour of mentioning sciatica, so I felt like I had a note to excuse me.
Got to Kensington, and the lines at both the places I could have gone to get some breakfast were insane, so I ignored them both and walked up the High Street, breakfastless.

It's really at lunch today that the story kicks off. I had soup and bread. Came home tonight and had beans...on toast. Yesterday for dinner, I also had beans on toast, but for breakfast, I had...erm...soup and bread.

It's at this point that the advice I got a few weeks ago from my pal Sally-Anne resonates round my brain - "With blokes, it tends to be all about the bread - you cut out the bread and you're likely to lose..."

Thing is....I love bread. White bread, brown bread, bread with bits in. If you don't fuck it up trying to make it too damned interesting, you really can't go wrong offering me a bit of bread. It occurs to me that Sally-Anne, and indeed d, who said pretty much the same thing when I got home tonight, is absolutely right, but here's the thing - there's been an unending parade of things that I don't do any more (had the weirdest craving on the way home for what I would traditionally have thought of as 'a proper bowl of cereal' - something the size of an eight-year-old's haircut, filled to the brim and beyond with assorted cereals). Bread, I suppose, is probably the next thing to go, but while I feel I can, I'm enjoying the yeasty wonder of my daily bread.

Bottom line, I'm working on the principle that doing the walking, and the curling, and the biking, reduces the calories that 'count' in the day, whether they come from proteins or carbs, and eating less overall - like today's accidental "two meals instead of three" shenanigan, reduces the number of likely calories going into my system in the first place...sooooo bite me!

Nevertheless, after all this thought about bread, it's wonder and it's potential drag-anchoring, I think I might pop onto the scales in the morning, just to see what's what...