Should I join a weight loss club?

So it has come to this.

I am actively mulling over joining a weight loss club.

But would it be an astute move or an admission of defeat?

Over the months there have been lots of people who have inspired, but none so much that I have fulfilled my pledge to shed this five stone of flab.

And here we are. Square One.

So maybe forking over a few quid a week to sit in a room full of people in the same predicament is the answer.

I’ve had a look around and, as you’d expect in a city this size, there are plenty of places I could go. It could be Scottish Slimmers (a firm which the paper I used to work for had a link with), or Weight Watchers, the grand daddy, if that is the term, of weight loss.

When you read all the fat man-thin stories in the paper these clubs clearly work, at least for some folk.

But hell’s bells, do I really need to pay to be told how to lose weight after all this time?

Surely I should just spend the same money on a gym membership?

So let’s do a checklist

PROs and CONs of joining a club (in no order)

PROs – Joining lots of people in the same boat will help me. This has to be the biggest plus; the mutual support a group can give. There comes a point when you are really very big when taking the bull by the horns and going to the gym/swimming pool/getting on your bike is embarrassing and uncomfortable (not physically, mentally). To shift the initial stone or two you want to be among people who are equally as horrified by their own condition. Diet clubs might be the way to do it.

CONs – Man up FFS. Why do I need to be among these losers? What if they drag me down with them? They are probably time wasters who do not have the will power to lose five stones. I do. I have proved it before and will do so again. Joining a slimmin club and getting fleeced for all their recipes costs cash I don’t have, time I can’t waste and, most importantly, I already have the support I need in the form of Shaun, the readers of this blog and lots of other people at the end of a phone. Get to the boxing gym, get on the rower, get in the pool, get on my bike. Enough excuses.

At the end of the day no matter how I cut it I can’t get past the cons – I accept that clubs will work for lots of people, and, while I accept that I haven’t done tremendously well on my own, I have enough of a conceit in my own abilities to believe that I will succeed.

What weight loss clubs do, at the end of the day, surely, is tell you what you know. And make you pay for the privelege.

Would it make me feel any better to see someone else feeling equally as bad?

No.

The trick is planning and execution. So it’s time to revive the food and training diaries (up on the top level of this nav bar) and get hold of my regime.

Now where is that rowing machine?