One Week

In the immortal words of the Barenaked Ladies, 'it's been one week'. Time for the first weigh in.

Starting Weight: 25 stone, 13 pounds.
Previous Weight: 25 stone, 13 pounds.
New Weight: 25 stone. 5.3 pounds.
This Week's Loss: 7.7 pounds.
Total Weight Loss: 7.7 pounds.

I am a natural sceptic and my first reaction this morning was that this figure cannot possibly be correct. But since I have no other reason to believe otherwise, I'll leave those thoughts there for now.
This has exceeded my wildest expectations. I thought I'd had a good but not flawless week on the dietary front. I'm trying to establish a routine during the week. Porridge (or porridge equivalent) in the morning with a coffee for breakfast, rice or pasta with vegetables for lunch, chicken/salmon/something of that ilk with vegetables for dinner. With as little snacking as possible in the interim although I've occasionally been having chicken satay and sushi, which strike me as being not the worst options in the world.

The weekends will be trickier with more time on my hands and more time for my compulsive habits to creep back in, but I'll have to look at how to manage that. I went to the gym for the first time in six weeks yesterday for an hour and am intending to do another hour later today. I'm going to try and gradually build up to doing more and we'll see how we go. But obviously this is a very positive start, I'm sleeping well and feeling better. Although I am still drinking too much Pepsi Max. Less than I have previously, but still too much.

In other news, I've taken in my first cinema trip of the year/decade and went to see Jojo Rabbit. I had a certain amount of trepidation, as it has received both scathing one star reviews and five star acclaim. The film concerns Johannes "Jojo" Betzler, a young boy and Hitler fanatic (Roman Griffin Davies) who sees the Fuhrer as an imaginary friend (Taika Waititi, who also directs). When it emerges that his mother (Scarlett Johansson) is harbouring a young Jewish woman named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), Jojo begins to question his beliefs.

I came out largely confused as to why the film had proved so divisive. There are things to enjoy in it, such as the endearing sweetness and silliness of Johansson's performance. But the relationship between Jojo and Elsa is the heart of the film, McKenzie conveying both a sense of impish mischief and quiet intensity.

There are a handful of laughs and Stephen Merchant nearly steals the film with a cameo as a Gestapo officer but Waititi's Hitler caricature results in diminishing returns. More broadly, the attempt to blend humour with the horrors of the Third Reich feels heavy handed and is ultimately unsuccessful. Anyway, it is neither a one star or a five star movie in my view. Mark Kermode's measured review for The Guardian is probably closest to the truth of the matter.

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