Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Diet and weight control are lately one of the most important subjects to me. I had a few worries in this regard for my trip to Russia. It’s difficult to maintain a diet, but it’s almost impossible to do so while travelling constantly over a foreign (yes, foreign) country. With family. Meeting people who I haven’t seen in almost 10 years.

I have to say that I did good.

For the first week, I managed to not eat at least 4 hours before sleep. I hardly had any alcohol. A pint of beer in Moscow on the first Sunday, and two pints at the birthday party on the second Sunday - that’s about it. I had a lot of ice cream though, but the ice cream in Russia is very different from the ice cream in Cyprus. Russian ice cream has much less sugar and is made of much skinnier milk. Low fat.

The second week was much worse in terms of diet. I had loads of fat food, plenty of alcohol (beer and vodka), and I usually finished eating by going to bed. The big No-No.

The strange thing was that I didn’t feel that I was getting any heavier or bigger. I thought that I was, but just I couldn’t feel or measure it properly. I was surprised to find out for sure that I wasn’t.

One day before my departure from Cyprus I measured my weight. It was 109.2 kg before the gym session. When I came back to the gym today, I clocked at 109.5 kg. Not bad.

After thinking about it, I guess the compensating factors were stress and flights. Any travel is a lot of stress, but mine was more than usual. Cultural shock, relatives, places from my childhood memories, etc, etc, etc. And I had a lot of flights. Flights are very dehydrating. And without water, it’s difficult for the body to build any fat. Good.

Now that things are getting back to normal, and we are seeing the best weather for weight loss (hot hot heat), I am sure I’ll continue my way down the weight ladder.