Happy New Year to you all. I wish you a safe, healthy and happy 2021.
2020 was a fuck of a year for most of us. We all know that and I don’t want this post to focus on it. I want to focus on one of the good things which I managed to achieve and hopefully, that’ll help one of you who would like to do something similar.
Don’t worry, there will be no before and after photos on this post…I hate photos of me, so wouldn’t expect anyone else to put up with them.
First, a wee story that kickstarted it all.
We both like cycling, but our bikes were in a dreadful condition. We’d been talking about replacing them for years but never got around to it. So, in late 2019, we replaced them using some money that an Aunt had given us as a gift. We bought them from a shop in Inverness, which is nearly 40 miles from us.
The problem, was getting the bikes home. We changed our car in 2019, and now have a Nissan Qashqai. Unfortunately, the usual “over the tailgate” bike racks don’t work on those, and we needed a tow-bar to get the correct one. We don’t have a tow-bar.
The shop didn’t deliver bikes and there was no way I was trusting (or paying) a courier to get them to us. Who knows what state they’d have been in!?
Eventually, when lockdown hit in 2020 and the shop became desperate to be rid of the bikes, the manager said he’d personally deliver them. YAY! We had our new bikes.
We wanted to send a photo of us with the bikes to the Aunt who’d gifted us the money. So, I took a photo of my wife with hers and she took one of me with mine. Then, I saw the photo of me with the bike…
…O M F G!
That COULDN’T be me. I see myself every single day and hadn’t noticed that I’d become rotund and looked more like a beer barrel than a bloke.
We’ll pick this up later on…
Weight, calories and stuff
A few terms you’ll all be familiar with, but explained anyway:
Diet — If you ask anyone what “diet” means, they’ll say “restricting what you eat” or words to that effect. But diet also means the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats. So, “diet” (for the purposes of this post) is your food intake and does not relate to a restriction of any description.
Calories — You know this one, maybe. Technically, a “calorie” is a unit equal to the amount of heat required to increase the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. However, it is also the unit used in measuring the amount of energy food provides when eaten and digested. The latter is what you’ll be aware of and is accurate for the purposes of this post.
BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) — This is the number of calories you need in order to keep your body functioning at rest. This is different for men and women and is determined by calculation. According to Diabetes.co.uk:
For men, the calculation is 66.47 + (13.75 x weight [kg]) + (5.003 x height [cm]) − (6.755 x age [years])
For women, the calculation is 655.1 + (9.563 x weight [kg]) + (1.85 x height [cm]) − (4.676 x age [years])
…and yes, that is 655.1 at the beginning of the women calculation.
However, saving yourself messing around with a calculator, there are many online BMR calculators available. The aforementioned Diabetes.co.uk site has one.
If we use me as the example, I’m a 53 year old male, 5' 10" (178cm) in height, weighing 15st 4lbs (214lbs/97kg), the calculator above tells me that I need 1,941 calories to just maintain my body’s functions at rest.
**Note: The online calculators will vary by some tens of calories, but this is largely irrelevant; it depends on whether they use exactly the same figures in their calculation (e.g. 655 instead of 655.1, etc.). When you realise that the number of calories in a pound of bodyweight is approximated as 3,500, you can see that even a variance of anywhere up to 100 calories in this calculation doesn’t make an appreciable difference.
That takes no account of physical activity of any description. Let’s round that number up (for the purposes of the post) to 2,000. Again, this difference of about 60 calories is irrelevant.
Again, for the purposes of this post, we won’t be getting picky about the fact that the physical acts of eating and digestion themselves burn calories. We’ll consider those null for this.
Your calorie (or caloric) intake comes from eating food (even liquid food like milk).
Your calorie burning (also known as caloric expenditure or expending calories) comes from physical activity (anything done when you are not at rest).
So, it’s a simple calculation regarding how you control your weight. If your caloric intake is more than your body’s energy requirements (including any exercise done), you’ll gain weight. If it’s less, you’ll lose weight. Easy-peasy.
You can lose weight by keeping your caloric intake at a static level and exercising more. You can lose weight by reducing calories and not exercising. If you do both, you’ll lose weight faster.
The trick is to not go crazy with it. That’s where the whole “couch to whatever…” concept came in. You start small and build up from there.
…picking back up from that photo from earlier.
It gave me a fright. I knew I was overweight, but I had no idea quite how much. I made a decision there and then that this HAD to change.
So I started my “journey”. I weighed in at 18st 5lb (257lbs or approx. 117kg). My story (probably the same as many) was that I used to go to the gym once or twice per week and used to swim once or twice per week (proper lap-swimming). I loved that, but work got busier and I got more tired and couldn’t pull my arse out of bed early enough in the morning to work out. However, it was the eating that got me. Just because I wasn’t working out, didn’t mean that I adjusted how much I was eating.
Fast forward to April 2020, when lockdown #1 hit. Because of an underlying condition, I was advised to shield. All gyms and pools were closed and so that was that.
However, we do live on a farm in the Scottish Highlands, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
So, I decided that I was going to walk every day. It didn’t matter how far, it was more than I’d been doing and in my view, anything was better than nothing. Where we live is very picturesque and, although there are some challenging parts to walk (if you’re overweight and out of condition), that wouldn’t be a problem. Also, because it’s not a busy farm, I would see virtually nobody, so shielding could continue with no issue.
My walk out and back turned out to be 2 miles (more by luck, than judgement) and that was good. The views were excellent too! I walked every weekday, five days straight, and had weekends off. I did this for about six weeks before I decided that I’d try to jog certain parts of the route (parts which wouldn’t be too taxing, given my unfit state). That led to jogging more and more of the route, until I was finally jogging all of the route. Then, jogging became running. That’s where I’m at now; running the route. I also extended the route to be 4K, which I think is a decent distance on a daily basis (for me). Listening to my body, I now do this every other weekday. However, I also take the opportunity to go open-water swimming when I can (even through winter) and that adds to the exercise and enjoyment.
The things I learned from this
Consistency is KEY — I cannot emphasise this enough. Starting and then doing something for a couple of days before deciding that it “isn’t working” is not gonna cut it. To get fitter and slimmer (depending on where in that journey you’re starting from) is gonna take time. But it’s time WELL-SPENT. I did five days per week, spending maybe an hour on a 2 mile walk and built that up to spending 25 minutes or so on a 4K run every other weekday.
Eat responsibly, appropriately and honestly to your goal — I love chocolate (most people do) and I happily eat it whenever I can. However, I love food too, and back then, I could have eaten for Scotland, in some eating tournament…easily! But (and this isn’t a lecture on food) not eating the right things in the right amount or kidding yourself about what you’re eating, is not going to end well. You’ll either not achieve your goal, or it will take you much longer to do so, and that could tar any future attempts negatively.
“Listen” to your body and adapt — The best thing is to start slow and build from there. As an example, if you’re 100% sedentary (i.e. you do no exercise at all), get out for a walk for 10 or 15 minutes ONCE this week. Then, up that to two walks next week. You can see where this is going.
Exercise should, in the first place, be at least a little taxing. It should increase your heart rate a fair bit and make your breathing faster. If two walks per week feels like a hardship, stick with it for a few weeks. It’ll soon become easier and you can then up that to three walks per week.
One thing you’re “listening” for, is aches, pains and other signals, which will let you know whether you need to adapt what you’re doing. With me, the five days per week of running started to play havoc with my ankles and lower legs. I was in pretty bad pain. Turned out that I needed to have a better pair of shoes (I was using a pair of ordinary and probably too well-worn “trainers”) for the terrain on which I’m running. I also dropped the frequency of runs to give my body more time to recover.
But you’re also “listening” (or “watching”) for improvements, as this is a signal that you can do more. For example, when something you’ve been doing, that used to cause you difficulty, no longer does so (whether that is breathlessness or an an inability to do many reps with a particular weight), it’s time to up the tempo, distance, weight/reps. You then repeat the cycle of listening and adapting.
(the two paragraphs above were edited on 15 Jan 2021 to be more detailed)
There is way too much about the subject of listening to your body than I can write in this post, but it is something you really need to do, regardless of age or physical condition.
Off-days are going to happen — There will be days when you’re too tired, not feeling great and just cannot find the will to exercise. Don’t beat yourself up about it; take the time to “recover” from whatever is ailing you and get back to your exercise when you’re ready. Obviously, the more time you take away from exercise, the harder it will be to slot back into where you left off, so you need to bear that in mind. Not every ache and pain requires downtime. For example, if your exercise of choice is running, your leg muscles might be sore from a previous run, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t still exercise (depending on the level of the pain, obviously). Maybe do something lighter than normal. Shorten the distance or slow the speed or change the course to be less demanding. The bottom line is; we all have off-days — do what you need to get through them and then get back on track.
Don’t “watch” the scales! — Picture the scene: Your goal is to lose weight. You’ve taken your starting weight and marked it down somewhere. Off you go. You begin exercising and eating healthier. You’re feeling great! Then you go and look at the scales, only to find that you’ve either not lost much (if anything) or even actually gained weight!
That kind of thing can kill enthusiasm big-time. But you must understand what happens to your body before you go off the deep end and ditch what you’re doing.
In the second (and last) in this series of posts, I continue explaining what I discovered during this journey and hopefully, how this can help you. You can find that post here.
