Week Three…in which I try a treadmill and freeze my arse off.

Another tough week from a healthy eating point of view. I spent most of the week as a guest of McKinsey & Co in Kitzbuhel, Austria. Their ‘Alpine University’ is actually the former Grand Hotel and they give 5 star service to every McKinsey consultant and client that stays there.

But this meant 3 amazing meals a day and a constant supply of every kind of energy giving, carbohydrate loaded snack known to man – I think McKinsey would call it brain food.

But I was good. Really good.

Food I didn’t eat…

And the food I did..

And I kept up an average of 8000 steps a day  – not easy when you’re sequestered in a hotel sitting in 9 hours of lectures every day (at one point my Fitbit actually said ‘its step o’clock’ *sigh*). But they had a gym (which I used) and a climbing wall (which I didn’t).

My first ever treadmill experience was a mixed bag. It was 5.30am at the McKinsey gym (simply couldn’t face doing it with actual people watching). First up I had to ‘programme’ the thing; speed, incline, distance, time, calories, pace – oh for fucks sake, I JUST WANT TO WALK! Then it asked me to log my age and weight. Apparently the last person to log in on this particular treadmill was 25 years old and weighed 50 kilos….so I decided to skip this bit for fear of the machine screaming ‘get the fuck off me right now’. Afterwards the machine delivered the results. I’d walked 1.66 km in 20 minutes working up a slight sweat and an average heartbeat of 133 bpm (nope, not a clue). I felt quite good about it, until I saw that I had burned precisely 79 calories. 79 CALORIES!!!!! FOR 20 MINUTES OF TORTURE?? I console myself with the thought that I can now have a quarter of an ounce of honey on my muesli.

Couple of other things I learnt this week…

• Going on the back of skidoo at the top of a 100 foot sheer drop, in the dark, in minus 10 degrees is not advisable without brandy.
• I’m informed by husband that the act of running or even jogging requires both feet to leave the ground at the same time. WTF? The very thought of both my feet leaving the ground and thus rendering my body suspended, albeit momentary, in mid-air strikes me as so funny I nearly choke. There really is a reason why elephants can’t jump.
• You know those curly queue things they do at airports that control the crowd by making you walk around ropes to get to through security? Well, it takes 340 steps to cover what would be 10 steps as the crow flies. I will forever more see them as beneficial to my health instead of a complete pain in the arse.
• In Europe you can dry your hair in the bathroom. But there are rarely chairs in hotel bathrooms. So, if you step from side to side you can clock up 250 steps while you blow dry.

OUTCOME: I lost 1 pound. Which seriously pissed me off.  Husband said ‘your body has carried your weight for twenty years, and it’s going to do everything it can not to give it up’. Right. Rather more helpfully my daughter googled ‘flying + fluid retention’ and turns out the two go together like salt n vinegar crisps and me (I love my family). So, I’m never flying again. Except to Australia in a couple of weeks’ time – at which point I’m anticipating an increase of about a stone in water retention.