Blog Intro Awesomeness from Daniel

Hi All, Daniel here. Since there's a great chance (based on simple majority-friend-count logic) that most of our visitors here will be Amber's friends who don't know me, I thought it would be vital to start with a quick introduction.

So I'm Daniel Butler, a Brit-born, Aussie-raised ruffian, responds to "Butler", and every now and again I'm even a nice guy.

I have no idea what Amber's intro is going to sound like, so let me lay down some truths about this little competition we've got going here.

Mrs Peel has been on a health-kick for a while now - I think the best part of ¾ of a year and probably more. Well, she calls it a "lifestyle choice" not a health-kick, but eh, potayto, potahto, right? And I think she's lost a fair chunk of weight. One day she is musing how she needs to lose xx amount of weight to meet her birthday goal, and I get to thinking "hey I could do with losing some weight, and that sounds like a good target." And funnily enough, our birthdays are just a few days apart so I mentioned this.

Both competitive by nature (Amber tells me it's because we're both very true to our Aquarius roots), it didn't take much discussion for this to turn into a battle, or a race even. After fighting venomously for about an hour on the details of this (don't worry, fight is par-for-the-course during our discussions) we settled on something simple - actually "settled" is my way of being nice. I was totally right and she TOTALLY caved! :)

Challenge - see who can lose the most weight before our next birthday(s).

Target - if we don't see a loss of 20 pounds (9kgs) before then, then nobody wins.

It's tough to gauge who's got the harder task. Amber's pitch is that it's a bigger accomplishment for her - she's already lost some weight, so each passing pound is harder to burn, she's got me by a few years, and she's a woman so by definition I've got a lot more to lose. But I think the jokes on her - my chiropractor tells me I have the body of a 40 year old, and I know I have to tired-laziness of a 60 year old, combined with the self-control of a 5 year old. So any losses on my end are going to be a massive achievement! So once I win, I can definitely say I had it tougher!

Whichever way you slice it though, you can't really fault the idea. It should be fun, competitive, and any excuse to lose a bit of weight and live a little healthier seems noble enough to me!

- Butler