I need to lose weight. I want to, but I also need to. I’d like more hours in the day, too. I require them. But the laws of physics are immutable. That is to say, I will not be going to the gym anytime soon, either.

I had a pretty active childhood. I’d be outdoors a lot, exploring the open fields (now apartments) and cycling throughout town on my beat-up BMX like a street urchin should. In school we never sat still: football or basketball or tennis-ball squash (yard rules). In summer we’d swim, and jump and climb rocks on the seaside. I was pretty healthy, and I could put away a copious amount of junk food because invariably I’d burn it up by sundown.

As the book says – when I became a man, I put aside these childish things. I got a job in a windowless office, at a very narrow desk with a thick CRT monitor and a dimly flickering fluorescent light overhead. I sat there from morning often well into the night. In a bleak-weather winter I might not see the sun for days.

But the food never changed. Diner snacks and delivery dinners are finite in options, always with oil, heavy on bread or laden with cheese. You know the drill. We’ve all been there.

Fast forward a decade. I need to lose weight.

Like most people I walked into a gym. Like most people this lasted a very short spell. I liked the gym, I liked gearing up doing some preliminary warm-up and hitting the treadmills with my headphones on and a goal in mind. I felt I’d do well for a week or two and then something would break the pattern (usually a late one at the office), and starting over felt slow and unrewarding.

I picked a gym which had a proximity to home – it was not well equipped; all the best machines had a queue of people around them, usually toying with a dumbbell to kill time, staring at everyone else in a predatory manner. I wondered if there should be a protocol - like slapping 25c on the edge of the pool table in a bar to claim the next game.

I don’t like people at gyms. Every gym has an assortment of stereotypes. The disciplined, judgmental kind who just want to show off. The morbidly-obese guy who reminds everyone where their phone is in case they need to call an ambulance. The one guy who is terrible at hiding the fact that he’s looking at women bending over. The woman who makes sure everyone notices she’s bending over.

It feels like everyone is either competing against a nameless opponent, or desperately trying to avoid human contact – which, in a room whose air is saturated with BO, is a nigh- impossible task. I picked the nearest gym for another reason – I will not use a gym shower.

Yes, I’m one of ‘them’. This gym had a communal shower (segregated by gender, of course) and call me prudish but I had no interest in parading myself among the two bodybuilders and the three geriatric men, who seem to just find the prospect of dropping trousers a liberation and a source of amusement.

Every gym has stereotypes … the guy who can’t hide that he’s looking at women bending over, and the woman who wants to be noticed that she’s bending over

Even if they had private showers I can’t imagine any scenario where these would be sanitary. So, as soon as I finished what passed for a workout I would beeline for my car and rush home to drown in cold water. I let my membership expire.

I never did fall for the trap whereby I believe buying a piece of gym equipment at home would be a good idea. In any group of friends there are at least two people (poss-ibly yourself) who has a cheap treadmill or walker. “Look, it can just fold right under the bed,” I hear you marvel, mentally finishing the sentence with, “and that’s where I left it since.”

I know one person who has found the treadmill sidebars to be a good place to hang his shirts and another has arranged the adjustable dumbbell weights into a shoe stand. I’ve flirted with the idea of buying a machine, but I know that I’ll just be pouring money into a space-eating factory of guilt. So I bought a mountain bike instead (you fool!).

Honestly, I enjoy cycling. I don’t understand people who power-walk or jog, it seems so dull and mind-numbing. I like the idea that after a bit of an effort getting up a hill I am rewarded with a rush of speed going down. The landscape changes faster and the range of explor-ation gets bigger.

You can have a fixed route to maintain the discipline or you can just go run through the town’s back alleys and streets seeing areas you wouldn’t normally have driven through.

Carry a camera and pause to snap something interesting – make it a mission. You won’t see me in the full spandex and aerodynamic helmet kit, I’m just going to be in regular clothes capturing the kind of freedom I had as a child, where the world was just waiting to be discovered and all I had to do was pedal to the edges.

But I do have to go and walk the dog first.

After this TV show finishes.

Maybe.