Something has been niggling in the back of my mind: a Labour party flyer that came through the door last week in the run up to the local elections which said “The Conservatives are giving tax breaks to the Rich” (or something like that).

So it occurred to me, that there should be a graph out there that, when all PAYE and National Insurance and Personal Allowances etc are added together, shows the total tax people pay by salary, and how that has changed from last year. I’m please to report that the internet did not let me down, and I found exactly that analysis already done here: 2012 – 2013 UK tax graphs for income tax and NI.

You can go and have a look at all the cool salary comparison graphs (*cough* if you’re sad like me *cough*) but the key one for me is this one, which shows the change in tax rate for last year:

That doesn’t look like tax breaks for the rich to me! Every earning below 40K paid less tax, and everyone above paid more, with a bump at £115K. Even this year’s changes, which are smaller compared to last years, have the rich paying more and the poor paying less. I think that old phrase should be restated:

There are Lies, Damn Lies and Politics.

I’ve not posted anything on this blog for a while, the reason is that I’ve just got back from a 3 week holiday in sunny South Africa, and a jolly good time it was too.

The primary reason for not posting about my holiday before now, is that has never struck me as particularly sensible to announce on this great interwebs that you’re going to be away from home. Of course we had someone looking after the house, but all the same.

In a nut shell, here are the highlights:

• Flew on the new double decker A380 from Paris to Johannesburg (Jo’burg)
• Surfed in the Indian ocean off Durban
• Dived in a shark pool
• Saw buffalo, rhino, elephant and a leopard on a game reserve
• Saw crocs and hippos from a boat
• Held a baby croc in a Crocodile Centre
• Drove a 4×4 in the Drakonsburg mountains
• Rode horses in the mountains
• Went shooting in the woods
• Saw rock paintings at Giant’s Castle
• Stroked a baby lion
• Visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg
• Visited the Cradle of Humankind
• Visited the Wonder Cave

Flights and the A380

Would you believe that it’s no longer and significantly cheaper to fly from Manchester to Jo’burg via Paris with Air France, than to fly direct from Heathrow. When I say cheaper, it’s £240 cheaper per ticket!

An unexpected plus was that Air France fly the new double decker A380 from Paris to Jo’burg. It’s a very impressive plane and no mistake. I particularly liked the webcam feed from the tail during take off and landing, and that there were nearly 100 films served up by Video On Demand to your personal screen.

Surfing in Durban

I’ve never tried surfing before but where best to try than in the permanently warm waters of the Indian ocean? A hour’s lesson was never going to be enough, but me and the nipper both managed to get up… if only briefly!

Shark Diving

Not quite as adventurous as it sounds, the shark diving experience at uShaka Marine World in Durban was exciting nonetheless, and very cold. Me and the nipper were put in a shark cage and roped into the centre of the pool, from where we could dive under water and see the several sharks that shared the pool.

There’s loads to do at uShaka including some awesome water slides and live entertainment and snorkelling and aquariums etc.

Umhalanga Game Reserve

Driving through a game reserve would always be an exciting an rewarding experience, but when you have a trained and very experienced game ranger (my very talented cousin) in the car with you, rewarding becomes exceptional, not just for knowing where to go and what to look for, but also for the background information.

Did you know for example that when spooked, all animals will run into the wind? So knowing which way the wind is blowing at all times, is rather important when walking out in a game trail.

Crocs and Hippos

Possibly a rather touristy move, but taking a guided tour boat ride on the 70km St Lucius lake was a very nice way to see mostly hippos and some crocodiles in their natural environment.

Most concerning though was the news the following day that there had been a fatal crocodile attack on the very stretch of lake we’d been on! It turns out that the crazy woman had been fishing in croc territory and had waded into the water to retrieve her caught fishing line. A croc grabbed her arm and pulled her under, drowning her. Unbelievable stupidity.

Baby Crocodiles

Another unexpected benefit of having a ranger as a cousin is that you get personal tours of the local crocodile centre by the owner and his family. Which included the opportunity to handle one of the baby crocs. Much like snakes are not slimy as people think, crocs are much softer than they appear, especially their underside and surprisingly under their feet, which is incredibly soft and supple. It was very cool to get to hold one.

4×4 Mountain Driving

My cousin runs an educational facility in the Drakensburg mountains and on the first day staying with him, him tossed me the keys to one of his 4×4 “baccies” and said I should take the family on a drive up into the mountains, on our own no less. Driving a kind of car I’d never driven before, on a road surface I’d never driven on before (using the word “road” here is being rather generous), up a mountain I’d never been on before, without help or guidance, with an hour till nightfall… what could possibly go wrong?!?

As it turns out it was fine. Better than fine actually, it was a whole lot of fun and I grinned all the way up and down. It also gave me an insight into my cousin’s mindset as an educator. Whilst the perceived risk as I outlined above may have been high, the reality is that the actual risk was considerably lower; it allowed my family and I get the feeling of independent adventure, in a relatively managed and controlled way. A clever guy that cousin of mine.

Mountain Horse Riding

Horses (otherwise known as super strong masses of muscles that kick and bite) scare me. Well they did, they don’t any more.

I’m struggling to know where to start to describe the experience of riding horses that are generally free to roam a 30km x 170km fenceless stretch of the Drakensburg mountains, but choose to come home every night! The whole Natural Horsemanship (or Horse Gentling if you prefer) approach to training horses is in stark contrast to the traditional methods used to “break” a horse.

To put this into context, my 11 year old daughter who is virtually a total novice rider, rode a horse that had been declared “unrideable” by experienced riders after going through traditional training, and was going to be shot before my cousin rescued it and rehabilitated it using natural horsemanship techniques (he doesn’t like the term “horse whispering” as it mystifies something that isn’t a mystery).

Riding Western rather than English style, makes a lot more sense in the mountains too, if for no other reason than the saddles are a lot more comfortable. The whole experience of riding amazing horses, where it would be impossible to go in a vehicle (even with my new found 4×4 skillz!), in beautiful mountain scenery, was breath taking.

Shooting in the woods

Ok this was only with a 9mm semi-automatic Czech made pistol at targets stuck to trees, but coming from England, where all handguns, pistols and any rifle with calibre greater than .22 are completely banned, this was a rare opportunity.

I’ve only ever shot a proper gun once before, when I was a teenager, and was told I was pretty good for a first timer; I’m happy to report that I don’t appear to have lost my touch. This was 2 shots into a target 14m away for example.

Rock paintings at Giant’s Castle

Giant’s Castle is one of the Drakensberg Peaks where native South African Bushmen (or the San people) used to live, stretching back thousands of years. Apart from archaeological finds, the obvious evidence is in the hundreds of rock paintings depicting their lives and mythology, and places where smoke has stain the rock roofs for example.

It’s pretty humbling to drive some distance into the mountains, far from anything you could call civilisation, hike for over a mile into the peaks, and discover ancient rock art and places where people lived long before the Western world ever found them, and see their thoughts and experiences depicted in art drawn on rocks.

Baby Lions!

It’s impossible to go to Johannesburg and not visit the Lion Park.
It’s impossible to visit the Lion Park and not stoke lion cubs!
Here’s a picture of me, stroking a baby lion.
There’s nothing more to say here. Do it!

We also drove through the lion enclosures, which was pretty cool. Check out the surprise at 0:55:

The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg

How can you go to South Africa and not learn about Apartheid? Alarming, humbling and upsetting, the history of apartheid and Nelson Mandela engenders a broad spectrum of emotions and an insight into one of the most recent examples of the shame of mankind.

The Cradle of Humankind

The area to the North West of Johannesburg has produced about a third of the world’s hominid fossil finds, including Mrs Ples, who has been called the fabled Missing Link. She (or possibly He, if the male skeleton found nearby belongs to the skull) lived 2 million years ago is the most complete skull from Australopithecus Africanus ever found, which is believed to be the common ancestor of all humankind.

In the same Sterkfontein caves, Little Foot was also found only 15 years ago. Contrary to the name, this find is unique as it’s the only complete Australopithecus Africanus skeleton ever found. Little Foot refers to the fact they found a few bones from the foot first, and have had to chisel the rest of the skeleton out of solid rock. In fact this process is still ongoing as there’s about 5% of Little Foot’s skeleton left to retrieve.

Maropeng Museum is the place to go that brings the whole experience together. A practical hands on museum, it’s interesting, educational and great fun to visit. It’s by far the best presented facility of any we visited in South Africa. If I had to go back and could only do 1 thing, this is where I’d go.

The Wonder Cave at Kromdraai

Other than the archaeology, the above Sterkfontein caves are a fine example of how man can obliterate areas of natural beauty, as all the mineral formations have long been mined for their limestone and little remains to look at.

The Wonder Cave in the nearby Lion and Rhino reserve however is another matter entirely. At an estimated 2.2 billion years old(!) it’s full of amazing stalactites, stalagmites and columns, having only been partially mined 100+ years ago, before being abandoned and lost until the new land owner decided to walk his property tossing a rock onto every hole he found. Well worth a visit.

Summary

There were many other things we did, but those were the main highlights and points I’d recommend. Altogether a fine way to spend 3 weeks, and that’s not to mention the quality family time we got, including extended family too. The last time we went to South Africa was 12 years ago and I sincerely hope it’s not another 12 years before we get out again.

Having said all that, it’s always nice to get home and sleep in your own bed.

The CrossFit Games season is upon us again, but should you participate?

First off if you don’t know, CrossFit (is one of the fastest growing sports in America according to Forbes magazine) and the CrossFit Games are a worldwide open competition that anyone can enter, aimed at finding the Fittest on Earth. Here’s a quick history:

The latest figures show that CrossFit has 3,400 affiliated CrossFit Gyms worldwide now, a massive 60% jump from 2,100 last year, and yet entry for the open is just $20 in the US & Canada, or $10 everywhere else. What’s on offer, apart from the kudos, is $1M in prize money! The men’s and women’s individual winners each get $250,000 and the rest is spread out amongst 2nd and 3rd, the team events, masters divisions and regional heat winners.

Sign up for the Open and you’ll get 5 workouts over 5 weeks to do. They are issued on a Wednesday and have to be completed by the Sunday each week. Ideally they should be validated by a registered CrossFit Affiliated gym, or if you can’t make it to one, by video submission (but you run the risk of disqualification after the fact e.g if your form is bad or you miscounted etc).

That’s all well and good if you’re some major athlete, but the likes of little old me aren’t going to stand a chance of winning anything, so what’s the point? Well let me tell you that I’ve never entered the CrossFit games, but this year I’m seriously considering changing that stance, and here’s why:

1) Community Spirit – There’s nothing quite like working towards a common goal to bring people together. One of the major reasons CrossFit is such a success is because people love the community it engenders. If you’re wanting to make better friends with the people in your gym, entering a competition together will help do that.

2) Personal Gain – It’s useful to have a reason to train in terms of some personal goal, whether that be a sense of pride in performing to your ability, or not wanting a sense of guilt / embarrassment at not, it doesn’t matter. It’s long been known that publicly saying you’re going to do something, galvanises the mind and provides extra motivation to do it.

3) Benchmark Yourself – Last year some 25,000 people from every possible demographic competed in the games, this year there’ll be more. You’ll be able to see exactly how your fitness compares to that of your peers.

4) Mental Growth – The Games are designed to test the fitness of the fittest people on earth, and choosing to compete in that environment will put you outside your comfort zone. This is a good thing! Ambulating through life, always feeling cosy and snug and comfortable, is a slow way to dull life. Push yourself occasionally and marvel at your own ability to overcome.

So even if, like me, you don’t have any illusions of grandeur, there are still some very good personal and social reasons to participate. I’m off to sign up, how about you?

On the 3rd March, Tony Blauer himself is flying into London to give a Be Your Own Bodyguard 1 day seminar at Crossfit Central London. I’ll be there, along with many of the other Personal Defence Readiness (PDR) Coaches from around the UK and Ireland.

If you’ve never seen Tony teach his very unique brand of personal safety, I highly recommend you get your butt down to London in a month’s time and check it out. It’s no exaggeration to say that it will change for the better, the way you think about your safety for the rest of your life. People who attend the PDR Personal Safety courses that I run report a massive increase in confidence (double for women, +50% for men). How much better will it be to hear it from Tony Blauer directly?

It promises to be a very good course, get on down if you can possibly make it. I hope to see you there. Register here

What a good start to the New Year’s efforts to loose the Christmas flab! This morning saw me break the 1/2 stone (7 lbs / 3 kg) loss mark, since I started being good again on Tuesday 3rd Jan, which is 11 days ago at the time of writing.

What’s even better is that includes a cheat day last Saturday, and as it’s Saturday again today, that’s another cheat day. Excellent! To be clear here, that’s done without food restriction, without hunger, without low fat diet bars or shakes, and I’ve been eating 3+ times per day.

It’s one of the things that in some ways makes me wonder if it’s a good thing: eating mostly Paleo food, in Zone proportions, is such an effective way of losing weight, it can make you complacent. This happened to me last year, and after amazing losses over the first 3 weeks, I hit the dreaded plateaux. Fortunately it’s easy to over come that, but all that’s dealt with in my food diary from last year, which you can get on the How I Lost My Pot Belly post from last week, which includes details on handling cheat days.

It’s also the reason I have the weight to lose in the first place. Knowing that I can easily drop the pounds, with minimal effort, means that I don’t really care about not having what I want at Christmas. Whereas others may still be restrained, not wanting to balloon come Janurary, I know I can tuck into whatever I like (chocolate is my weakness, I must have eaten several large Toblerones all by myself!) and drop the excess without concern. To be honest, it’s probably not as healthy as just being good at Christmas… but where’s the fun in that!

Whilst it is a shocking affront to my delicate English sensibilities to post pictures of myself in my pants onto the net, in the circumstances, it seems like the right thing to do. For your reference, these series of photos were taken 3 months apart each, and so chart what’s possible over a 6 month period.

So if you’ve over indulged this Christmas, or are simply over weight and want to lose that beer belly or pot belly (or whatever it’s made of) I’m going to show you how I did it, step by step. You see many diet sites and books tell you what to eat and why, and give examples of stuff you could eat, but I took this a stage further by putting together a complete food diary that spans nearly 3 months:

• I carefully recorded everything I ate and drank.
• I took high resolution photos of every meal.
• I recorded every workout I did (not as many as you’d think).
• I weighed myself every day and compiled a detailed spreadsheet of stats.

It wasn’t the weight that I wasn’t happy with, it was how I looked

For reasons I won’t bore you with, I managed to pile on a load of weight in 2010 and ended the year weighing more than I had done in years and was not at all happy about it. However it wasn’t the weight that I wasn’t happy with, it was how I looked. Absolute weight for me is unimportant, but how you feel about yourself affects your personal confidence levels, which in turn affects every part of your life. Losing that belly had a big impact on my general feeling of well being and hence my outlook on life. What’s more, it’s not too hard, when you know how.

Now if you’ve been to this blog before, you’ll know I sporadically post about diet and exercise and have seen some major changes in my life. I could repeat all that here, but that would make this post ridiculously long so I’m not going to do that, instead I’m just going to highlight the salient points as I believe them, their explanations will have to wait for another day:

1. Almost everything you’ve been told about main stream dieting is wrong.
2. Fat is not the bad guy and for most people, calorie counting is an unsustainable answer.
3. Control your carbohydrate intake and you’ll control your weight.
4. The quality of your food is important.
5. The macro-nutrient balance of your food is important (that’s protein, carbs and fat).

Given the above, I eat what could be described as a “90% Paleo diet, in Zone proportions, + Dairy”. If you know what Paleo and Zone mean, you’re on the right track.  If you don’t, here’s a couple of quick definitions:

The Paleo Diet – don’t eat any food that was invented in the last 10,000 years!

The Zone Diet – balance your blood sugar levels (and hence your hormone levels like insulin) by eating a balance of protein, carbohydrates and fat, at *every* meal.

Dairy – Liquid stuff that comes from cows, duh!    I include dairy here as many pure Paleo eaters don’t believe in dairy products, I’m not one of them. I believe we were made to drink nothing but milk for the first 6+ months of our life, so I see no problem with dairy products.

Or you could use the CrossFit’s Diet definition, which is: “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.” 

The most common question I get asked is: What do you eat for breakfast then?

When I qualify all that by telling people I don’t eat bread or pasta or cereal or potatoes or rice, or any other primarily starchy carbohydrate, the most common question I get asked is: What do you eat for breakfast then? This is what I wanted to show people by putting together a 3 month food diary.  Exactly what you can eat and still lose weight at a respectable rate.

Note this is not some unsustainable crash diet.  It’s not a “30 day challenge” or some similar typically unsustainable approach to weight loss.  In fact my food diary includes a cheat day every 7 days, when I could and did eat what I wanted. How do you fancy things like:

• All butter popcorn
• Prawn crackers
• Piles of fruit and double cream
• Bags of cinema pick & mix sweets
• Chinese take aways
• Nandos platters
• Sticky toffee pudding
• … I could go on

I was very sceptical of the cheat day idea when I first came across it

I was very sceptical of the cheat day idea when I first came across it, but in fact there’s some credence to the argument that a sustained reduction of energy intake alters your base metabolism  to compensate, so sporadic cheat days keeps your metabolism high. (I don’t like the word “metabolism” as I think it’s over used and regularly abused, but I’ll use it herefor the purposes of brevity.)

Certainly I found that it didn’t affect my weight loss when averaged over a week and it’s always nice to look forward to your cheat day as a reward for all your hard work in the week. It also gets over the psychological barrier of thinking: “What, you mean I can never eat XYZ food again?!?” if you can, at the next weekly cheat day. So in summary then I’m prepared to share:

• Nearly 3 months worth of food diary.
• Every single thing I ate and drank, every day.
• High resolution pictures of the meals.
• Full commentary on what and why I ate what I ate it
• How much weight was lost each day as a result.
• Details of every workout I did and what times I got and weights I used.
• How I completely removed my pot belly in just a few months

I’m going to be sending this out by email, so to get it you just need to pop your name and email address in below and day 1 will be sent to you in minutes:

It gets my goat that politicians still haven’t answered the most basic of planning questions: how many people should this country contain? I firmly believe that until you decide how many people you want in the country, you can’t possibly have a sensible conversation about anything to do with the country’s infrastructure. If you don’t know how many people there are going to be, how can you decide for example:

• How many hospitals we need?
• How many teachers there should be?
• How many roads to build and how wide they should be?
• How many power stations we need to build?
• How many people should we let into the country every year?
• How much to invest in the train system?

I could go on… For so many years talk of over population has been a taboo subject, for the simple reason that if you accept the fact that there may be too many people, then you must accept that the logical conclusion is to somehow control the population, and that’s something that most people instinctively rail against. Only the Optimum Population Trust (rebranded as Population Matters) seems to be talking about it openly.

Slowly however the tide is starting to turn. Tools like the BBC’s What’s You Number tool that calculates what person you are in the world. I’m around the 3.8Bn out of 7Bn mark, which means that since I was born, the world’s population has nearly doubled… that’s staggering, and not in a good way! That’s why a few years ago I wrote a rather ranty post about why IVF should be banned I realise posts like that are never going to make me any more friends, but that’s the kind of thinking that stops people talking about what needs to be talked about.

So it was a refreshing change to see a serious engineer and scientist (despite what you might remember of him from the Great Egg Race) as Professor Heinz Wolff starting to talk about the difficult issues over population brings. This is what he said (my emphasis):

“But the critical subject we have to face worldwide is overpopulation. We have to be schizophrenic about the benefits of medicine and health. Overpopulation is down, to some extent, to the fact that even elementary medicine – anit-malaria treatments, anit-parasites, clean water – all reduce death rates.

“Somebody at some stage has to have the courage to ask questions about issues such as how we react to famine? To do this you have to think the unthinkable, which you can only do in your own mind because this often gives rise to opinions that would put you in a great deal of trouble – even with one’s own conscience.”

Whilst I accept it’s only hinting, I’ll take it. I firmly believe that over population, and hence population control, will become the defining political issue of our life time.

Further to my very popular recent article on why calorie counting is flawed, I just received this link by email from a friend, which exposes the fact that the calorie values on food are all wrong, because they’re based on the raw ingredients of food. Whereas in fact as soon as you cook / process food, the available energy is increased, so the calorific value should increase too. (It also contains disturbing stories about eating raw monkey meat and a video of mice eating live albatrosses!)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/

Here’s the short video if you’re feeling gruesome:

What’s surprising to me about that article is that it’s surprising to the author! I thought it was common knowledge that energy from cooked / processed food was more easily accessible than uncooked / unprocessed food. That’s part of what the Glycemic Index charts are all about.

I do include “processed” whereas his article is more about cooked, because even raw foods have an increased GI from processing, for example oranges’ glycemic index (44) is 18% higher when it’s processed into orange juice (52), see the GI chart on the Southbeach Diet Site. That’s why any kind of fruit juice is bad from a weightloss perspective, due to the breaking down of the plant cell walls during juicing. It’s far better (and a whole lot more satisfying I’d say) to eat the fruit just as nature intended.

Either way, it’s all more fuel to the fire that counting calories is a simply flawed approach to diet and weightloss. Even Weight Watchers have recently ditched their calorie based points system, admitting that they’ve been getting it wrong for decades!

If you’re a regular to my blog (there are several thousand of you) you will have seen me sporadically post about my shoulder injury. I won’t bore you with the sordid details again, as I’ve already done into details about my SLAP tear, MRI + Arthrogram scan, and how I did it doing CrossFit’s butterfly pullups.

Just to bring things up to the current day, I was booked in to have my surgery, a biceps tenodesis, this Thursday the 8th December. However the consultant suggested that I may want to think twice. I’ve since been to a Physiotherapist who told me that should wouldn’t recommend surgery; I’ve spoken to a 2nd shoulder Consultant over the phone who told me not to have the surgery, and I’ve exchanged emails with a 3rd shoulder Consultant who also said that I shouldn’t have the surgery. Guess what… I’m not having the surgery!! This is what they were going to do (in summary, cut off my biceps tendon from my shoulder, drill a hole in my Humerus (upper arm bone) and stuff it in there):

To summarise all their advice, the common theme is this: shoulder surgeries are not to be taken lightly. They carry not insignificant risks of failure (of various forms) in addition to possible long term problems like pain, stiffness and weakness. So the advice boils down to this: if you think you can live with your shoulder as it is, don’t have the op, and if there’s any suggestion that your shoulder is improving, like mine is, don’t have the op.

To be clear, when I first injured my shoulder back in February, I couldn’t even scratch my head with my left hand and it did not make much improvement for several months. Once I’d stopped sulking however (lol!) and started going back down the gym, focusing on what I could do instead of what I couldn’t do, things started to improve rapidly. Fast forward to November and I was doing the following, all without pain:

- Shoulder press: 5 x 45kg
- Snatch: 40kg
- Clean & Jerk: 60kg
- Pull ups (kipping): sets of 5, slowly
- Hand stands: multiple reps, holding for 10 seconds
- Front squat: 5 x 100kg

In fact the only thing that hurt, and then just a bit, was wall balls. But I managed to manage this by using a lighter ball and favouring my right arm on the catch (the bit where it hurt). I’ve yet to try things like Thrusters and Push Press etc. In fact I’d already decided not to have the op at this point.

It was only when I hurt my shoulder again (a PDR Self Defence session with a fellow PDR Coach Chris Worrall) that made me think twice about the op again. This time however, after just 2 weeks my shoulder felt as good as had taken 6 months previously. Cracking a rib wasn’t part of the bargain mind, but that’s another story!

So it’s left like this: I’m to get my butt back down the gym and see what I can do, or rather what my shoulder can do. Time will tell if this is the way it’s to stay forever.

My apologies if you were unable to access this site in the last 24 hours, getting this rather sparse error message:

As you can see it’s fixed now; who knew a GigeByte a day wouldn’t be enough! Only last month I posted that this site had tipped over 25,000 unique monthly visitors for the first time. Well it seems that November blew that out of the water with a massive 40% increase to nearly 35,000!!

The reason was bonfire night, as my Remember, Remember, the 5th of November Poem post got 8,073 visitors, which is obviously a seasonal spike (see the bump in the graph above). Not only does that post give the full poem, including the bit about burning the Pope in a tub of tar(!) but it also has a healthy and sometimes fervent discussion about censorship and at what age it’s appropriate to teach children real, unfettered history. It’s worth a read if you have 5 minutes.

Anyway, I’ve increased the bandwidth by 50% so we should be good for a while to come, and now I have to fire off a support ticket to my host to find out why I didn’t get an email warning me that I was getting close to my bandwidth limit, grrrr…