8 Week weight loss – the battle of the ‘but but’

8 Week weight loss – the battle of the ‘but but’

By Neil Perkins

Running Birmingham’s coolest gym is very hard work! I have come to the conclusion that I am a person who will never be satisfied. We are looking at putting a waiting list for new sign ups, classes are fully booked and our next white collar boxing show will be a sell-out. This business is like a duck and even though the duck is gliding effortlessly along the pond, underneath it is paddling like mad. Rather than putting our feet up, we are recruiting new staff, re-formatting classes, re-training our existing team, adding new kit and working through snagging as we evolve the gym.

For those of you who are new to a day in the life of Neil Perkins, you must be aware of my past – because the past is something I very much like to live in. I was once upon a time a lean, mean fighting machine. I accrued multiple amateur boxing titles, boxed to a national final and then as a professional was a sparring partner to no fewer than four world heavyweight champions. To most people’s surprise, for an inappropriate and crass heavyweight boxer, I also found English Literature one of my favourite subjects at school! For those of you who’ve already heard this story you can resume reading now.

Setting up Henrietta Street Gym has been an emotionally and physically draining task. Like any Company Director, the work life balance is something that has had little balance. With the hectic 12 months leading up to our launch and then the nightmare first 12 months bedding in, I have had a high workload, meaning my personal exercise has been thrown on the backburner. Couple this with the arrival of my first child 18 months ago, sleep is something of the past and it has been a challenging time.

It was my own child that instilled this latest comeback. I can say that my own mother still carries the scars of birthing a ‘big boy’. I was born at a bullish 9lb 2oz and been a month premature I was never a small child. With such a large baby in breach, a C section was the delivery method and like Macbeth, I was “untimely ripped” from my mother womb. I hear of C sections now been un-intrusive procedures and carrying little scars, but for whatever reasons surgeons in 1981 chose, I was taken out through a vertical scar that look like it was big enough to pull me out of sideways. To quote Macbeth quote she looked like she’d be cut “from the naïve to the chaps”

As you’ve probably gathered from the above that my mother has had to endure me long past that night in 1981. My daughter Jana shares many of my traits including the ability to wind someone up and joke and at someone else’s expense are two of them. I found it quite amusing when she witnessed my mum getting changed she named her belly ‘but but’ and continued to giggle at it. Like her dad, she never likes a joke to get old and then at any chance she gets she likes to lift up Grandmas top and shout ‘but but’ before laughing out loud at her own joke – for those of you who know me, the resemblance is uncanny.

Now having a giggle at my mum’s expense is highly amusing, until Jana was in the bathroom with me as I got out the shower. She pointed at my portly stomach that once house muscle definition and a lean torso and shouted the words ‘but but’ and then laughed. Slightly self-conscious I pulled the towel up so rather than hang from my waist where my slim 34” waist once lay, I pulled it up to chest height and covered up my bulge that now just about houses my ‘loose fit’ 38” waist jeans. The child like her father never knows when to let it lie and continued to stalk her pray into the bedroom. I now self-consciously slid my boxer shorts on underneath the towel like a shy teenage boy, as I did this clumsily, the towel fell down ‘Ha ha Pappa…. BUT BUT’ was the response followed by a fit of laughter. Not quite happy Jana continued to taunt me for the next few hours and pull my T-shirt up at every opportunity to the cry of ‘But But’ followed by a fit of laughter.

This was my wake-up call and Mondays fitness test, weigh in and body stat will start an 8 week journey to eliminate the ‘But But’

I will be putting the results of my fitness test tomorrow. It should make an amusing read.