Blog: Dry January – Clive Wright

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be issuing people’s experiences about their Dry January Challenge. Today Clive Wright, Chief Executive, gives us an update about his experience.

It was fascinating reading the blogs written by others also doing Dry January and learning about all the interesting things people are doing and how they are feeling. Although I don’t drink very much, there have been a few occasions when I did quite fancy a beer – my favourite tipple.

I have tried with good effect is drinking sparkling water, tonic water or non alcoholic mulled wine instead. I didn’t drink wine previously. I found that this fills the gap of being a change from water, tea or coffee as well as being more socially acceptable and avoids people thinking you might be ill.

My exercise programme is going well and, although I’m not exercising every day I’m controlling and increasing intensity and duration of exercise and it’s looking like I may not have needed to buy those slightly larger shirts in the sale!

I also watched a TV programme on eating habits and managing weight this week and learned some amazing things about how different peoples biochemistry cause them to over eat etc. I’m experimenting with what I suspect are my own eating characteristics and specifically I am trying fasting on 2 days of the week. On these days I eat less than 800 calories and the theory is that this causes your body to switch to fat burning rather than carbohydrate burning (you need to look the TV programme up if you are interested). I’ve managed to fast once so far and felt great, I failed on the second attempt due to fish and chips temptation. As a vegetarian (pescetarian – eats fish) who is reasonably health conscious I do tend to eat a lot of carbs so we will see where this diet takes me alongside Dry January.

Clive Wright, Chief Executive