This blog may have gone a little quiet but when you have chickens it can sometimes be an ill omen to predict when they come home to roost. You get the drift.

Week four of ‘boot camp 2014’ is nearing it ends and with a near perfect (don’t ask) attendance record time to judge the results.

In truth the chickens have come home to roost since what Tim Megginson promised on the package (“lose a clothes size in four weeks or your money back”) has actually worked. I’m strutting around like an out of control peacock finding clothes from my wardrobe that have been a dim and distant memory. In fact the suit I’m wearing today was bought five years ago from a store in Aberdeen more in optimism than anything else and so it was a disappointment, but no surprise, to get it home and find it didn’t fit.

In the wardrobe it’s stayed – until last night when I snuck it out (for the fourth or fifth time in recent weeks) and the fulsome grin said it all. It fits. Looks good. I feel good and so further testament to what a regime of boot camp style exercises and diet can do for even the most hopeless of cases.

Yesterday’s boot camp early morning at Ely football club, which a month ago would have sent me scurrying back to the warmth of the car immediately, was both challenging and invigorating. The introduction of kettle bells to the proceedings was a bit of a challenge and invited by my team of three to go and pick ours up, I foolishly opted for a heavier set than perhaps I ought to have done. It was soon changed by a respectful colleague, and rightly so. You need to walk before you can run, and the latter anyway is not yet in sight!

But the overall effect of these past weeks has been revelatory, both to me personally and to discover the vast numbers – often up to 50- who regular participate..

It’s hard to work out quite what separates Tim from the others but perhaps its his vibrant nature and down to earth approach that produces results: on Wednesday, describing in detail one exercise, he emphasised the importance of getting it right “otherwise you’ll just be lying on your back. No point in that”.

The phrase though that will stay forever is “the burn” which, he insists, is where the real improvement to fitness is to be found. Quite simply no pain no gain is the mantra but the way he emphasises it almost makes you feel he’s sharing the pain whilst you exclusively are rewarded with the gain!

And if I needed any more proof of the pudding being in the eating, so to speak, then I can only thank my twitter follower Jane Fleming for her kind tweet when I changed my profile picture on Tuesday.

“Your avatar photo reveals a rejuvenated man!” she tweeted. “You’re looking good. “The boot camp worked then.”

Indeed it did and does, Jane.