Just been to Fitness First House of Horrors in Uptown Mirdif. That’s not how they advertise it but that’s how me and anyone else in the kebab queue describes it, especially after today.

Today’s session was nothing more than filling in some forms then getting that clod, wet fish called reality slapped across my face. I didn’t need to stand barefoot on a bloody miniature Metal-Mickey to know that I’ve put weight on. I used to look like Karen Carpenter!

The machine seems to do very little, pretty much like those fake computers on kids TV shows in the eighties that make funny toot-toot noises, shake around a little then spit out a piece of paper. I stood there, lightly gripping two handles whilst my little robot friend piped tinny classical music at me. The screen lit up with graphs and numbers. some were shocking, some not so. I swear I watched the body-fat bar as it made it’s way across the graph thinking it was going to break out of the side of the machine and just keep going.

After both Geordiebird (sickeningly perfect) and I had finished, we sat down with Hisham and he went through the figures. I recorded mine for posterity. Not because I think I will actually complete this 10km run but more because I think one day I’ll probably be even fatter and I can listen back and say “That’s when I was in shape, before I needed the bed-crane”.

You can hear the results delivered by Hisham HERE (I love the way he prefaces my tremendous weight with “I’m only telling you what’s on the sheet”!)

One thing Hisham did say that I firmly believed even before (slowly) walking into the gym today is that today is the beginning. If I was already a health nut and a fine physical specimen (a) there’d be no point in me doing this and (b) Men’s Fitness wouldn’t have asked me to be there token fat-bloke in the magazine every month. I’ll show them, though. Give me a few months and I’ll be on that sodding cover… Shirt off, greased up, draped in bikini-clad women.

Just you wait.