Firstly, apologies to you guys that have been looking for a new post from me and not seen one in a while. Secondly, here is the excuse:

As you may have read in my post before last I joined a gym. It is now one month since I joined. Since I started I have gone from seeing a personal trainer once per week to twice per week and other than my week back home in Costa Rica and Panama, I have been every night except two.

I have lost an inch from my capacious waste, 5lbs in weight and more importantly gone from 27.4% body fat to 20% fat. This equates to a lard change from 55lb to 40lb. After work I saw my nutritionist who gave me the second interesting piece of information in the space of two weeks; the first being that you should only eat carbs early in the day as the body cant do anything with them late in the day, as the day's work or workout has already been done and so all any fat you eat can be instantly laid down to expand the waistline while you burn the small number of carbs between the last meal and bedtime; the second is that for health reasons, one should eat about a gram of protein for every kilogram of bodyweight.

For every 30 grams of chicken, beef or fish you eat, you only get about 8 grams of protein, a cup of peanuts will give you 37 grams of protein. All this stuff is available online so I won't continue to bore you with it. If you have a heavy workout schedule, you need to up the protein by another 40%. So at the advice of my nutritionist, I have started using protein and calcium supplements.

After a month of getting me used to the right movements and technique, my trainer Simon switched me for the first time on to serious weights. This time last month I had difficulty managing three sets of 20 repetitions on a leg press machine with no weights on it. Today he loaded 6 weights the size of truck wheels on to it. I managed the same number of repetitions. It hurt though. He pulled the same trick on a bunch of other machines and started me on a punishing bench press regime.

After an hour of tortuous training with weights and resistance machines I died and was reincarnated on an exercise bicycle. Forty minutes later I was wondering how my whole body had been turned to jelly in one hundred precious minutes.

After hobbling back to the locker room I had a cleansing sweat in the steam room for 15 minutes, went home, ate a salad and then met Kevin and Nora down the pub to undo some of the good work.

I fear my fondness for six packs may prevent me from developing one.

I have much more to tell you about Panama and a recent visit to a dark, old German mansion house in downtown Toronto that is now a restaurant called Carman's where the waiters point a flashlight at your steak so that you can ensure it is cooked to your liking when you cut into it. But I will save all this for another time.

I would however like to take this opportunity to wish you a happy Easter. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of Easter, it is named after the Saxon mother goddess of spring and fertility Eostre. Easter is the time of the spring equinox, when the first flowers appear in Northern Europe and the time of the rebirth of the world after the darkness and cold of winter, which is why it is associated with eggs and that most procreative of creatures, the rabbit. I think the Christians reappropriated it for something, but I can't remember for what.

Blessed be!