Since the start
of 2019 I have lost two stone (13kg) in weight.
Yeah, don’t get
too excited. According to my BMI I am still technically obese. There was a week
or so when I thought I had got down to being simply overweight. I was over the
moon.
Then I measured
my height and found I was 2cm shorter than I thought I was and suddenly I was
obese again. But what a fortnight of living the charmed life of the merely overweight.
The things I saw.
I am 52, which
means when I meet someone I haven’t seen for a while I sometimes see a flicker
of concern – have I got some terrible debilitating illness? When I emphasise
that I am feeling really well, they generally ask me, “You’ve lost so much
weight! What’s the secret?” As if science had been struggling for years to
ascertain what it is that makes people’s tummies get rounder of flatter. Don’t
they remember Euripedes’ shouting Eureka when he was eating a Flake in the bath
and realised that he was now wedged in? Or when Isaac Newton had his packet of
Monster Munch knocked out of his hand by a falling apple, scattering them into
the dirt and giving him no option but to eat the fruit? Or Einstein’s Theory of
Relativity, “A minute on the lips, a life-time on the hips”?
I don’t want to
give out any spoilers, but the secret is out. If you don’t want to know the
secret then look away now…
For me at least,
the secret is that I have stopped drinking alcohol and eating chocolate and started
taking the dog on longer walks…. Yeah.. Suddenly people aren’t so keen to know
the secret when I tell them what it is. What they want is to be allowed to live
the exact same lifestyle, but also lose weight. Having their cake and eating it
and then not having to go to the gym.
“You should
write a diet book,” people tell me.
The problem is
that the “secret” of losing weight is quite hard to stretch out to the length
of a paperback. I am struggling to make it fill an 850-word newspaper column
given the secret is four words long. “Eat less, move more.”
To be fair,
that’s not entirely it. It’s possible to lose weight by eating a lot less and not bothering with the moving
bit or eating more and moving much
more. Basically the “secret” is if you burn up more calories than you consume
you’ll basically lose weight and if you consume more calories than you burn up
you’ll put on weight.
Still not a book
though is it. Not unless I put in a lot of pictures.
No one needs a
diet book. You already know how to lose weight, you just have to work out if
you actually want to. It’s totally fine if you don’t. No diet book tells you
that because making you feel bad about yourself is their whole chocolate-coated
raison d’etre. Personally I decided
that I’d like to give myself a better chance of seeing my young children reach
adulthood. To me that seemed more important than the limited pleasure I was
getting from pouring a family pack of Giant Chocolate Buttons down my neck
every afternoon.
I didn’t need a
book. I just worked out what I still wanted (a Solero a day, it turns out) and
what I didn’t.
If you think about it, if diet
books worked there wouldn’t be any diet books. Maybe just one. The one that
worked.
There are thousands of diet books
and it doesn’t seem like people are getting thinner. I am thinking that maybe
the diet books are the problem. In
medieval times nearly everyone was skinny, apart from Henry VIII and looking at
the amount of chicken legs he ate, I think he might have been on Atkins.
Diets make you think there is a
secret, when there is only the bloody obvious. They make you think that they
know what’s good and bad for you, when only you know that. They want to make
you feel like you should be unhappy and only they can make you happy. But only
you can make you happy.
I am not saying that I won’t slip
back into the old ways – experience tells me that I will. Yet this time I have
aimed to make changes for life, rather than a part time regime of dietary
insanity. It’s just about finding that balance in your eating and moving life
and then maintaining it. That’s actually the tricky bit.
It’s something I plan to explore in
my new diet book, “You Don’t Need a Diet Book” which I confidently predict will
destroy the diet book industry and become the only available diet book (because
it’s the only one that works). And then be unavailable because no one will need
to diet anymore because they will have accepted who they are or what they need
to do to be the person they want to be.
But what do I know? I’m obese (but
happy).
This week I’ve been watching
“The Day Shall Come” Chris Morris’ new film about the FBI
funding and encouraging crackpot, though harmless, potential terrorists in
order to further their careers. It’s funny and depressing and weird in
equal measure. That it is based on true stories would be jaw-dropping if the
world hadn’t clearly gone so crazy in recent years. Marchánt Davis is all too
believable as Moses Al Shabaz, but most enjoyable is the wrestle with morality
undertaken by Anna Kendrick’s character. Does morality win? I mean it’s 2019,
so that might give you a clue.
I’ve been listening to
“The Irish Passport” podcast. With many UK citizens
reclaiming their Irish roots and the citizenship of their grandparents, this
podcast is a thorough, sobering and entertaining examination of Ireland past
and present. Perhaps if UK schools had
taught us as much as Naomi O’Leary
and Tim Mc Inerney do in every
episode, then we might have been more prepared for the ramifications of that
jolly referendum thing we had a few years back.
I’ve been doing
Park Run. I have always enjoyed
running, but never fancied taking part in this weekly event where all kinds of
people all round the UK, congregate in public spaces on Saturday mornings to
run 5 kilometres. I started going back in June and now I am hooked. I recently
attempted the deadly Woolacombe beach course which isn’t in a park, is scarcely
in Woolacombe and has bits so steep that you can’t run. It was exhilarating.
