Time to face that fear of the gym and all its machines

Tales from the scales If there comes a time when the needle on those scales simply won't budge for days on end, there's only one thing for it.

If there comes a time when the needle on those scales simply won't budge for days on end, there's only one thing for it. You have to step up your exercise rate. So it was for me anyway. After losing four kilograms in about nine weeks, absolutely nothing was happening and I was beginning to get disheartened. In fact, I ducked out of my fortnightly appointment at Dubai Weight Care Clinic because I thought I had nothing to show for my pains. What I really couldn't understand was that my clothes were so much looser that I've had to have some of them taken in. How could I feel thinner and actually be thinner without it registering on the scales?

I found myself slipping into my bad old dieting ways, skipping meals, eating a bowl of popcorn to fill myself up and drinking loads of fruit juices. If it wasn't for a phone call from Dr Rita Nawar at the clinic I'd probably still be doing that. She insisted that I reschedule the appointment so we could work out what was going wrong. Two heads are definitely better than one in these situations. It had been three weeks since I'd stepped on the dreaded InBody machine that analyses so much more than your weight. It also tells you what the ratio of fat to muscle in your body is and where the weight is coming off. It calculates how much you should lose according to your height, age and current weight.

As soon as it printed out my latest statistics, all was clear. I had in fact lost another 1.5kg but I seem to have developed two more kilos of muscle. The fat content in my body, 38.5 per cent at the beginning of my diet, was down to 30 per cent. The normal fat content range for me is supposed to be between 20 per cent and 29 per cent so I'm not far off it. It was quite a relief and cheered me up enormously. I told Dr Rita what I had been eating and drinking and she immediately jumped all over the fruit juices. I hadn't realised they should be limited to two glasses a day for now. Dr Rita suggested flavoured waters instead. I'm sipping on Masafi Touch of Mint & Lemon as I write.

I was doing very well on the diet plus a little swimming and golf but if I really wanted to accelerate the weight loss I should go to the gym, she told me. I knew it had to happen sooner or later and I had been putting it off because I absolutely hate it. The last time I joined a gym was a couple of years ago in the UK during a previous fitness and diet attempt and I found it was a real struggle motivating myself to get there. There always seemed to be something better to do and I found it easy to find an excuse to put it off. The real reason is, of course, that in my heart I know that I don't intend to adopt it as a way of life.

The machines always seem like alien contraptions out to humiliate me. I can never quite work out either how to work them or what I need to be doing. It seems to me that everyone else in the gym can just hop on, press a few buttons and get moving. Everywhere I look there's some skinny female prancing around in beautifully co-ordinated Lycra, plugged into her iPod and hot to trot. "Like she really needs to be here," I used to think to myself viciously as I pumped away on the cross trainer.

That's the kind of mood I was in when I tentatively stuck my head into the gym at my golf club. As it happened, it was empty except for the supervisor who very kindly spent some time showing me around. I told him I wanted to work on my midriff and he suggested a basic routine: warm up on the running machines and cross trainer plus a circuit of weightlifting. It really wasn't so bad in the end so I may even do it again.

The best time for me is going to be early in the morning. I had no idea that gyms opened at 6am but in Dubai that's the perfect time. It's light and not too hot and I've begun to realise you can get a lot of other stuff done if you get up an hour earlier, something it has only taken me fiftysomething years to work out. I'm not setting the hurdles too high just now. Maybe twice a week to begin with will do. I'm also telling myself it's not going to be forever. And as for Lycra, forget it. @Email:[e-mail]