For most of my thirties and forties I was fat. Fat. There is no point dressing this up with euphemisms. Overweight sounds ambiguous; obese sounds like a medical condition in its own right. Certainly being fat is the cause of a lot of medical problems, but when we talk about obesity it sounds like a factor beyond our control, a health problem in its own right requiring treatment. A person “suffering from obesity” is less responsible for their condition than another who acknowledges they are fat.
I will write about this more in due course, but the important point to highlight right now is that I am no longer fat. After so many years I was able to take control of my diet and lose that extra weight I had been carrying. In total I lost eighteen kilos. That is forty pounds; or two stone, twelve pounds. I lost the weight in two and a half months. To be precise, it took just 76 days.
I would like you to think about that for a moment. If you are more comfortable with metric weights, that is 237 grams a day; if you prefer imperial measurements, a shade over half a pound a day. Whatever your preference, that is rapid weight loss.
At no point during the process did I suffer hunger pangs, nor did I feel that I was depriving myself. I was healthy, well-motivated and more energetic than I had been for years. I believe I was eating well. The result was a great success. I have gained two things: I have lost the weight and I have overcome the demon that was a blight on my life for too many years.
I should tell you a little about myself. I am forty-seven, married and I have four children. Two are away at university and two are still at school. I have been leading a life which is more or less sedentary. I have never been particularly sporty. I enjoy my food and drink. These are the factors which resulted in me becoming fat.
This brief paragraph tells you I am rather typical of a great number of people in the UK working in the service sector who have benefited from the relatively easy lives we all have the luxury of leading in the early part of the twenty-first century.
Many of you will start to protest at that last comment; I should qualify it. Saying our lives are easy is an over simplification. We all have a great many concerns: job security; bills to pay; debts to repay; mortgages to secure; children to put through university. All of these things are sources of stress and worry. There is one big thing we do not have to worry about and that is getting an adequate supply of food to keep us going. This is the problem that we in the UK – I will widen that to say we in the developed world – have effectively eliminated. We have only managed to achieve this for ourselves. Millions throughout the world still struggle to get an adequate diet to keep themselves and their families alive and well.
It is easy to forget that for the greater part of human history getting enough to eat was the primary preoccupation. We watch wildlife programmes and see the ingenious lengths wild animals must go to in order to get food. We also see what happens to the ones which are unsuccessful. Human beings faced these same challenges for thousands of years and even as we started to live settled lives in diverse economies, famine and hunger remained a serious difficulty for all or parts of society at one time or another. The advanced nations of the world only really overcame this challenge in recent times. The very success of our food economies has laid the foundations of the current dietary crisis: ill health through overeating.
It took me a long time to come to grips with the excess weight I amassed and finally rid myself of it. I am surprised by the relative ease I had losing the pounds when I eventually focussed myself on the task. Losing the weight was, in the end, not the most difficult part of the process. Plucking up the courage to take on the challenge was far harder. Next I had to find a method to achieve the objective I set myself. I also had to decide what that objective really was. Then I had to do it.
I like to think of myself as a thorough person. The reality is I am not. I do like to cover all the variables and understand what I am intending to do, whatever task I am taking on. This can also be an excuse for inaction. I will research a problem, spend ages searching the internet for information on a subject. I still go to the public library, as I did before the internet brought so much information to me. I buy books and then embark on a quest for information that could go on forever. This is partly a genuine attempt to comprehensively plan how I will achieve my goal. It is however a quest that does not need to end. I could drag the research out forever, always tracking down new references, more recent reports. The objective becomes delay: while there are facts out there to acquire, I have an excuse to put off starting on the plan. Many schemes have fizzled out while I have dragged out the preparation. The longer the planning goes on, the more obstacles can be revealed. Instead of preparing myself for the project, I have been able to talk myself out of ever starting by uncovering the pitfalls and downsides to the plan.
There are all sorts of half-baked plans which should rightly be abandoned. We need to look into things and when there are too many negatives, it is right to drop an idea. Nevertheless, there are some thoughts, like losing weight, that are inherently good.
My intention here is to recount my progress from fat to normal. If I tell you what I did and how I did it, you might see a solution to your own weight problems and save yourself some time and effort as I have done the legwork for you. I will describe the causes of weight problems and tell you about some of the options out there. I will recount my own thoughts on those plans, why I think they do or do not work, and I will explain to you the solution I chose to follow to rid myself of the fat. I must acknowledge straight away that I have taken ideas from others and I give credit where it is due. I have found a solution that has worked fantastically well for me. I do not believe I am so different from other people, so my solution could well be yours.
I will take you through my understanding of the plan I followed, tell you how to use it and how to stay on track to achieve the same rapid weight loss I managed. In the future I hope to offer guidance on how to keep the weight off. This is important because there is no point going through the process of shedding the excess fat only to pile it back on again. There are some interesting ideas on why this is a particularly risky consequence.
I want to tell you some of the consequences of losing a lot of weight. There are a number of things that will change for you, some more important than others. I will say now that I have not found anything that was negative, but I have had to make changes in my life to take account of unexpected changes.
I am also presenting this from my perspective; that of a man. Most information about diets is aimed at women. That’s fair enough since women have always represented a larger market for the diet industry. Women take better care of themselves that men and are more likely to worry about their weight. It is a fact that women are more likely than men to be judged on appearances and so they have had to pay more attention to this. Men are no longer as free from this concern as they once were. Men are waking up to the realities of their health and fitness. Male grooming is a booming business.
If you do decide to try something similar, please refer back to this to see if there is something else you can take on board which might help you. At the very least I have done the research and prevarication already. Even if you go a different way, I will have saved you a lot of work, and perhaps a few excuses. I hope my experience helps.
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