There’s only four letters difference between my diary and the considerably more famous one of Bridget Jones. Her first entry in the wonderful modern-day classic book by Helen Fielding – much better than the film – started like this: “January – an exceptionally bad start. 129 lbs. (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 14 (but effectively covers 2 days as 4 hours of party was on New Year’s Day), cigarettes 22, calories 5424.”
She then went on to set out what had comprised those 5,424 calories which included “12 Milk Tray to get rid of the Christmas confectionary to a make a fresh start tomorrow”, 13 cocktail sticks securing cheese and pineapple, two packets of emmental cheese slices and eight gallons of whipped cream.
Fitbit KPIs
Thanks to my wonderful Fitbit Versa Lite – more about this in future blogs – I too have a diary of life Key Performance Indicators that hits my inbox every Monday. Summarised below are my stats, targets and how I did against them.
| Measures | Targets | wc Dec 30 | Result |
| Steps | 100,000 | 99,896 | 114 |
| Daily Calories | 3,000 | 2,903 | 97 |
| Active minutes | 600 | 603 | + 3 |
| Sleep | 6 hours 30 mins | 6.57 | + 27 |
| Resting Heart | 68 | 65 | 3 |
| Overweight | 11st 13lb | 12 st 4lb | + 5lb |
I tried counting my calories which you can do with Fitbit – scanning in/searching for what you’ve eaten – but it’s just too much hassle, I guess my weight gives me a sense of how that’s going. Not a bad performance for the week including New Year, I would say.
Like Bridget I also have some other measures to keep me on track and test my health. So far I am sticking to DryJanuary – despite a couple of stressful evenings and a trip to a pub – and have managed a broadly on target 20 km of running.
My new health target though is my much loved morning wood which, without doubt, is one of the best things about being a man. Since I’ve got fitter, lost a bit of weight the glorious frequency of this strange phenomenon which I thought was the province of a younger man has increased. Great news for me and for Mrs Jones!
Us men, we’re constantly bombarded with information about women’s health – HRT, menopause, periods, special women’s wellness units in hospitals – and it’s about time we fought back with talk of morning wood!
It’s a wonderful thing which I’ve learned is usually a sign that your body is healthy. Also known as nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT), it has nothing to do with feeling sexually aroused or having a sex dream.
It’s actually just a normal function of our reproductive system. If you’re waking up with regular erections, then that’s a sign that your nerves and blood supply are healthy.
In fact, if you’re not waking up with an erection regularly, that’s when you should start to worry. Because not having regular NPT can be indicative of a health issue like erectile dysfunction, hormonal imbalance or poor blood supply.
The NHS says that a healthy man has up to five erections during the night, with each one lasting 25-35 minutes. Whatever their cause, most doctors agree that night-time erections are a sign that everything is in working order which is great news at nearly 60!