The D-Word: delinking exercise.

A CCE can strike without warning!

Every morning I heave my tremendous bulk around the Heath for about an hour of brisk walking.

Up until recently I did this as part of my weight loss programme. The theory is sound, eat LESS calories, burn MORE calories LOSE more weight.

The trouble with this approach is that the moment you have a CCE (Catastrophic Cake Encounter) and gain weight you lose all incentive to continue to exercise. 'What's the point of dragging yourself round the circuit if you remain the same porky bastard as before?' 

The answer, according to the New Scientist, is that exercise is good for you regardless of whether you lose weight or not. In fact a fit fat person (not an oxymoron apparently) is better off than an unfit thin person - take that you skinny wretch!

But how can this be? I hear you cry. What follows is a summery of the summery of the research as outlined in New Scientist 25th August 2012 page 39.

The most robust evidence comes from the Exercise is Medicine Initiative pioneered by the American College of Sports Medicine. Their baseline for physical activity was 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity (brisk walking etc) or 75 minutes of vigorous activity (running, swimming etc) a week. That's 2 and a half hours a WEEK!

The reasons, the detail is in the article, is because exercise; flushes all manner of shit out of your system reducing the risk of heart attacks by 30-50%. It alters the structure of fatty triglyceride particles (bad for you) making it easier for the body to break them down. Lowers the chance of developing type 2 diabetes by 58% (by helping the body deal with glucose in various ways) and helps burn off excess sugar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exercise is good for you - we get it - so what?

 You have to de-link exercise from weight loss. The exercise is doing you a ton of good regardless of whether you shed a single kilo or not. Thus diet failure (and all diets like all political careers end in failure) is not an excuse to stop exercising. So now when I'm struggling up Kite Hill I no longer tell myself that I'm doing it to lose weight I tell myself I'm doing it so I can outlive those thin bastards who sit in front of the TV all day.

Two and half hours a week - please, I spent more time on twitter over the last two days than that.

The D-Word: That Terrible Thing That Happens About A Month In

Sooner or later you will eat a chocolate cake.

Sooner or later you slip up badly and wake up in an anonymous hotel room with sticky fingers, chocolate smeared around your mouth and no memory of how you came to be there.

You have fallen off the wagon, your diet and, by extension, your life is over. There is nothing more to look forward to now but public humiliation, pretending to be jolly and type II diabetes.

But before you fall into a slough of despair I want you to stop, take a deep breath and fucking pull yourself together! You may think what you have is an addiction but food is not the same as alcohol, gambling or heroin for the simple reason that if you abstain from drinking, the horses or shooting up you are not going to die. Abstinence, in the case of food, is contraindicated.

The first thing to remember is that, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, dieting is, like malaria and a lingering sense of injustice, for life. This is the longest of long term projects and the occasional 'lapse' is not only not important it isn't actually going to matter at all. I allow myself an indulgence once or twice a week and thus far I've stuck to the 1kg a week loss that I planned for(1).

The occasional midnight tryst with a chocolate cake is not what is going to break your diet the things that are going to break your diet are: a) creeping calorie count and b) lying to yourself.

As the first exciting bloom of your diet wears off and you find that despite your hard won loss of many kilograms your social life has failed to improve, staff in clothes shops still give you the look(2) and you still cringe when you see pictures of yourself, you'll find yourself cheating. Just a little bit something extra there, a wafer thin chocolate mint. full fat milk... what is not important it is the accumulative increase in daily calories that counts.

This is where your food diary helps, check your totals, make sure that 13 times out of 14 (or so) you stay under your calorie limit. The same applies to your weekly weigh-in, if you cease to lose weight or put it on for more two weeks running you are not retaining water or wearing heavy socks you are eating too much. From this you can see why lying to yourself is so damaging - if you can't monitor yourself you can't stop the calorie creep and you're fucked.

So say yes to the occasional binge but no to calorie creep and you too might go from having your own gravitational field to merely being designated bad guy in a Harry Potter film.


(1) That's right in a mere 52 weeks I will be merely morbidly obese.
(2) You know the look I'm talking about and if you don't then  you've never gone clothes shopping while fat. That's right - that look.

The D-Word: Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Honey and Mustard Salad Dressing

This year I started my last ditch attempt to move from my current BMI of YOU PORKY BASTARD(1) to a BMI of YOU FAT SLOB(2) by the end of the year(3). To do this I'm combining everything I've learnt from 35 years of unsuccessful dieting and blogging about it because if I'm going to have to obsess about this subject I don't see why you guys should be let off the hook. Today I'm going to bore you talk about priorities especially when it comes to what you do and don't put in your gob(4).

I have already asserted that the way to lose weight is to eat less (and healthier), we all know this and yet find it really fucking hard to do. This is because all the tastiest most appealing food is very fattening. Now this is the point where some odiously thin person says words to the effect of "oh but I find carrots so much tastier than chocolate" and I say " well of course you fucking do that's why you're thin - duh!" And why are you reading this blog anyway you skinny little wretch come to gloat at the fatties have you?  You sods will be the first against the wall....

Moving on.

I suspect (and I'm hoping to prove to my personal satisfaction) that it is better to prioritise eating habits that will contribute to your goal of eating less (and healthier) overall rather than obsessing about every individual food stuff. Enter one bottle of Hellman's Honey and Mustard Salad Dressing.

According to the label each bottle contains 428 kcal which is a lot. Your dietician will counsel you to avoid such heinously fatty, salty, sugary, spawn-of-the-devil food and perhaps try the low fat, low calorie alternative. So what if it tastes vile, it's salad dressing isn't it? Maybe if you eat it for ten years you might start to get used to the taste. As the Russians say 'A man can get used to hanging if hangs long enough.' 

This is a perfect example of why most diets are doomed. In your dieticians mind the alternative to a lovely bowl of salad with delicious dressing is a lovely bowl of salad without dressing but we all know that the real alternative, over the long run, is a MARS BAR. Sad but true. So lets look at this rationally.

A bowl of salad composed of tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber and whatever else is good for you and, for all intents and purposes, calorie free. It would be good for me to eat one of these at least once a day. I'm very generous with the salad dressing I like to slop it all over so lets say I use a third each time that's 142 kcal. Now that's quite a lot of calories but if I throw in an egg or half a tin of tuna and maybe a slice of bread and I'm still bringing in a meal at less than 400 kcal(5). Most importantly it's a meal that I can look forward too, again and again over the long term.

Now I will be dealing with issues around making healthy food tastier in a later blog provisionally titled Your Nut Roast Is A Thing of Beauty But I'm Still Dying For a Big Mac so I don't want to hear about how much you've learnt to love salad without dressing - I don't care. I think this will work for me and probably a lot of other desperate fat people out there. We'll find out if I'm right some time in the mid 2030s.

Dieticians and health professionals like to hedge their bets. They know us well enough to know that if they give us any wriggle room we shall wriggle out of it. So they advise avoiding foods that are high in calories and fat across the board. Some of this advice is very useful, grill rather than fry, up your intake of green vegetables and don't stuff your face with cake. 

But in the long term it's going to be you making a hundred decisions a day for the rest of your life and there really is no point making it more difficult than it has to be. So if the price of choosing salad over a Mars Bar is 128 kcal of Honey and Mustard Salad Dressing then that's a good deal. Don't eat the Mars Bar have the salad with the dressing, the liver of your dietician and a nice chianti. Fefefefefe!

(1) Actually it's 54 which is almost off the scale of some calculators.
(2) 120 kg which will give me a BMI of 34.9 which still counts as obese.
(3) My healthy BMI weight is supposed to 84kg which is just silly, I've been a healthy weight, with muscle definition and everything and I didn't drop below 95kg to get there.
(4) Mouth.
(5) Remember I'm running a diet in which I disregard calories for non-starchy vegetables and fruit but aim at 1800 kcal a day so 400 kcal leaves me lots of wriggle room.

The D-Word

Ninety percent of what is written about diets is total bollocks. If you want to lose weight then you've got to eat less and exercise more. This diet tweeted to me recently is a case in point, miracle foods pah! I laugh at miracle foods, I pour scorn on your pseudo-scientific bollocks and I certainly ain't going to pay over the odds for them. For one thing one of the few immediate benefits of a diet is that you save money on food.

Tips for the friends and family of fat people...

1) If you think that a fat person goes through life blissfully unaware of their weight - think again. Every time we don't fit into a seat, get short of breath going up some stairs, get called a fat cunt by a random stranger is a reminder. Every little public humiliation at turnstiles, narrow doorways and mirrors reminds us that we are fat(1). Do not feel you have to remind us every time you see us how much porkier we've got, we know, and if you keep doing it we're going to start avoiding you (just like we do mirrors).

2) If you really want to help ask your fat friend what help they need and then give it. The only way to lose weight is to make a sustained change in lifestyle, you cannot force someone to do that you can only help at the margins. If you feel the words "we need to make an intervention" appearing on your lips I cordially invite you to put a sensitive part of your anatomy in a mangle and turn the handle.

Tips for fat people.

Note I'm talking to fat people here not you smug bastards with your "oh I've got a roll of fat on my belly I've just put so much weight". The basic resting state for a first world human being is plump live with it.

1) You're going to have to change what you eat - sorry.

2) Lose weight for yourself not for other people. Use whatever method works for you over the long term.

3) As far as I know the best way to lose weight is to keep a daily food diary (see psychological tricks).

4) Eat some fruit and some vegetables every day, avoid chocolate and sweets.

5) I really mean it about the chocolate and sweets.

6) Weigh yourself once a week and make sure you record it accurately but don't feel you have to share this information (see 7)

7) It is much easier to lie to other people than it is to yourself (think about it). It's always tempting to hive off the responsibility for keeping yourself on the straight and narrow to a friend or family member. Then you lie to them about your weight and... I don't need to tell you what happens you've probably done this already - probably more than once.

8) Some people put on weight easier than other people. What can I say? Life's unfair. Other people's eating habits are not your responsibility (unless you're a parent of course).

Psychological Tricks

1) Blame, guilt, shame - none of these are helpful.

2) Decide roughly what kind of weight would suit you, be honest about it. I'm currently 186 kg and for me anything under 120 kg would be gravy. Now I may change my mind when I get there but merely being fat rather than unable to fly economy class in an airplane is my current goal.

3) Do it for yourself - tell everyone else to shut the fuck up.

4) Find the worst offender - ie: chocolate, cake, deep fried Mars Bars - and stop eating it.

5) I don't count calories on fruit or vegetables because I don't eat enough of them as it is. That gives me one less thing to worry about and an incentive to eat healthily.

6) The food diary is for you and you alone. If people try to step in and regulate your diary tell them to fuck off. Your body, your decisions, your diet.

In Summery

These women would be considered too porky for a lead TV role!

1. Do not measure yourself by the people you see on the TV, they are professionals who are paid to sustain an arduous and ultimately unhealthy lifestyle in order to create the illusion that the normal state for a human being is just this side of famished. Think of it as stunt work, it looks impressive but you wouldn't want to try it at home.

2. There are health problems associated with being fat, Type 2 diabetes, an increased risk of this that and the other and you become more attractive to members of the big cat family(2). If you are fat than you will probably face some of these problems and you need to factor that into your decision. However nobody I know has ever scared themselves thin.

3. It's unfair but the food industry is working really hard to make you as fat as possible. Most of easily available tasty stuff is hideously fatty, sugary and god-knows-what-elsey. I hope this will change one day but until it does you should behave as if the food industry has embarked on a conspiracy to make you morbidly obese. They haven't of course, you're far to insignificant for that, but the behavioural outcome is the same.

4. Eat less overall. Eat fruit and vegetables. Avoid chocolate and sweets.

5. Do some exercise - even if it's just half an hour's walk each day.

6. Did I mention that you need to eat less food? Right - moving on.

7. Find what works for you - stick to it.

8. Do not try to hive off responsibility for monitoring your food or weight to other people. You're going to have to be doing this for the rest of your life so you have to take responsibility for it yourself. Besides are you a grown up or not?

9. Human beings live complicated interconnected lives and we cannot control a great deal of what happens to us but sure as fuck most of us can control what gets put in our mouth. Take control of your life, if you want to be fatter eat more, if you want to be less fat then eat less.

10. Everybody knows all this really - it's just a bugger to put into practise.

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(1) By the way if none of this applies to you - you're either not fat or are living in such an enviable state of cosmic bliss that I wouldn't want you to change on my behalf.
(2) As food dummy.