March 16, 2012
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Amsterdam, Netherlands
I've been talking about some lifestyle changes I've made since the start of the year on this blog this week, and this is yet another one. The picture shows a pass that I bought in Zuiderbad on Wednesday and that gives me 50 times entrance to the swimming pool. I used it for the first time tonight. 49 times to go after today. The pool on Friday nights is wonderfully quiet, especially after 7pm, when sometimes you can have a whole section to yourself. Typically I do some ten extra laps on Fridays... just for that extra bit of exercise.
And I'm not done yet with this lifestyle change! There's not just the exercising side of it, I've also started a bit of dieting. My colleague and friend Sean lost a lot of weight at the end of last year, and when I asked him how he had done that, he said that he was on a low-carb diet. A what? "Well, basically it means you can't eat anything that has a lot of carbohydrates in it, such as pasta, rice, potatoes or bread. But you can eat as many vegetables, fruit, meat and fish as you like, because that's low-carb. It's amazing, the kilograms just flew away when I started that diet," he said, just as we were having a definitely-not-low-carb dinner in a restaurant in Amsterdam.
So, when I was doing my Tuesday night swim, I decided that, after the pool, I would go to the supermarket, and buy a variation of veggies and fruit, and that from then on I would cut out potatoes, pasta, rice and bread as much as possible from my diet. So right now my fridge is filled with a complete vegetable store, and for lunch in the office I fill up a box with all kinds of salad ingredients. No more bread rolls, no more sandwiches, and quite frankly, I love it! It's a surprisingly easy change in diet. In the evenings I have fish or meat (such as a trout in the oven tonight) with generous quantities of vegetables... but no rice. We'll see how this diet goes, but I actually feel very good about it. Time will tell.
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