Tag Archives: exercise

Weightless

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I have kept to a regime of diet and exercise since the start of May 2011. In that time I have gone from about 220 pounds and a 40″ waist down to 160 pounds and a 30″ waist. I have replaced all of the clothes in my wardrobe more than once and gone through two belts. I couldn’t have imagined 5 years ago that I might have achieved this sort of weight loss. I think I’ve weighed more or less 210+ pounds for the last decade. I probably weigh as little now as I did 20 years ago when I finished my degree course at the University of Huddersfield.

How did I lose so much weight? Willpower and green tea, I think. Effectively, I cut my calorie intake down to 3/4 than 1/2, hitting a low of around 1000 – 1200 calories at times. I would eat 300 calories of high fibre cereal and a coffee for breakfast, something warm and filling like soup and a fibre-rich yoghurt for lunch, then a fairly standard dinner, with restrained portion size. I cut out cake, biscuits, chocolate and other treats. I switched from tea and coffee with milk during the day to leaf green tea. I also snacked on small portions of vegetables and fruit during the day when I got hungry, alternately with cups of green tea or water to keep my stomach busy and avoiding hunger pangs. I never needed to eat more than cup of soup and a yoghurt for lunch because I never really got hungry – and by the end of the day a light dinner would be all I needed.

I balanced out a whole new diet with exercise, too. I took to riding a stationary bicycle for 20 or 30 minutes a day with some light aerobic exercise to warm up and cool down. More recently I have added weights to the equation along with stretches for my stomach and butt to try shaping up the bits where I have lost my weight. When the weather got too cold for a workout in the garage on the bike, I took to using a workout package on the PlayStation instead, using wrist weights or a resistance band to raise the difficulty of the exercises.

I passed my 40th birthday this month and, like I said, I now weigh as much as I did when I was 20. I had a health check five years ago and another a fortnight ago. I have gone from an obese BMI rating down to a healthy one, and my blood pressure has gone from worrying to acceptable. I eat plenty of fruit and veg, drink plenty of water, and can walk up a couple of flights of stairs without losing my breath (something I couldn’t have said last May).

I got through the process with willpower – and I guarantee without medical intervention you’ll need some of the same. At times I would face a challenge – and willpower saw me through. I would see doughnut, a slice of pizza, or a chocolate bar and my willpower would allow me to walk away or get myself a cup of green tea instead. Now, I can walk into a bakery or supermarket and not worry – I simply don’t feel the call of temptation anymore. I suspect science involved somewhere in the form of dopamine management. Dopamine levels in the brain handle the reward system of the body, so when you eat chocolate or cake you can favourable sensations, but next time you might not get so much unless you eat more or opt for a glazed doughnut instead of a sugar one. Yes, I’m simplifying the concepts and process, but dopamine works somewhere along those lines. I seem to have managed my dopamine delivery system so that simply seeing something sweet and sticky doesn’t kick off a tsunami of pleasurable feelings that must end with cake. I have built up my willpower levels to not only abstain, but actually not feeling bothered at all.

I might feel tempted to write-up more about what I’ve done to lose almost 5 stones over the last year if anyone might get some benefit out of it themselves. I certainly feel a great sense of achievement. Eating healthy and exercise have now become a part of my life that doesn’t feel like a chore. I eat well and exercise because I want to and I enjoy it. By keeping to my diet and exercise, I can feel better as a person and do more. I can run to the end of the street without puffing and panting for the next 10 minutes in recovery. I can try on something size M or even S, and look in the mirror without squirming. It feels good to feel good.

The Write Diet

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I wonder whether there might be a diet suited to writing.

I have pursued a regime of exercise and weight loss for the last 8 months, and my key approach to both activities has revolved around eating the right food. If I want to exercise with maximum energy levels, I eat the right sort of thing – like nuts or something whole-wheat. To lose weight, I keep off the refined sugars and fatty foods, keeping to those that allow me to feel full and thrive without massive calorific intake. I have carefully watched the calories, though never with such an eagle eye as to make the process uncomfortable or oppressive. I consciously decided that losing weight and improving my health should feel like a chore. I wanted to feel like everything I did changed for a good reason. Eating well meant feeling better about me and having the energy to do more.

Having achieved the target of losing 4 stone, I want to target something else now for improvement, something I can both develop and enjoy. Writing seems to fit the bill, as I know I can improve and the actual act of writing does fulfil me. Now, I have gone through the process of losing weight and realised the value of supporting the process through life changes, so I have the same perspective on writing. Can I improve my writing, or my approach to improving my writing, by living better? Does eating a certain type of food make a difference? Can I get better results if I write in the morning or evening? Does it matter if I write directly after I get up or at the end of a day when I’ve turned my brain into goo?

Diet-wise, I feel that something has to help. I wonder whether the same high energy approach taken with exercise might make a difference if I’m engaging in a fixed period of writing. If I want to exercise, I have a handful of nuts or peanut butter on whole-wheat toast a short while before I get down on the mat to burn some calories. If I do the same before I write, will I benefit from that extra reservoir of energy? Or, does writing need a different fuel? Do I need to drive up alertness with a dose of caffeine or a solid night of uninterrupted sleep? Can I eat something that will excite and energize the creative right side of my brain and make the process of writing so much more productive?

I’m prepared to read around the subject and, perhaps, experiment. I created a diet and exercise regime based on my own research before the fact, so I can certainly do the same here. I’m loath to indulge in techniques with trademarks, just as I avoid the same thing with diets. I understand the principle of support when you need to exert some willpower, but I’m not keen on the idea of spending money on anything unnecessarily. If I can do this through my own effort alone, all the better.

However, if anyone has suggestions or thoughts on the right diet for good writing, by all means comment!

Climbing at Awesome Walls, Stockport

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I spent part of yesterday evening hanging off a wall. My fingers ached, and my palms felt rough and sweaty. My thighs and calves complained in equal measure. By the end of an hour, my toes burned – and when I took my shoes off I found that I had split my left little toenail down the middle, blood smearing the skin.

This is my second week trying out climbing – or at least bouldering – as a form of entertainment and exercise.

My choice of exercise might seem a little odd. I have, for the longest time, had a fear of falling. I’m reasonably certain the prospect of pain at the end of a fast descent provides the source of my discomfort. Once I might have said a fear of heights, but in the analysis that description doesn’t quite fit. I definitely fear the possibilities of an uncontrolled descent ending in pain. As a result of this fear, I tend to cling and struggle to get up and down a ladder into the loft.

You can understand why climbing doesn’t quite fit the profile as a viable form of exercise for me.

On the other hand, bouldering doesn’t involve a lot of height. I favour traversing at the moment, as that doesn’t involve any height. Moving horizontally from knobbly lump to knobbly lump, grasping and clawing for grip means I get a work out while never more than about a foot off the floor. I have tried some of the puzzle climbing, where you choose a colour of handhold and seek to work up from the ground to wall top. I struggle with the height a bit, but have tried to reassure myself that what waits at the bottom happens to be quite padded and forgiving.

My prospects for injury come from the inability not to loosen up enough and flex, allowing myself to fall easily without scraping and scrabbling at the surface of the wall. I scraped the skin off one of my knuckles last night because I kept too close to the wall. When I dropped a short distance, I should have pushed away, but instead I desperately tried to find something to cling to.

I managed to complete several metres of traversing last night that I didn’t manage last week. I rented a pair of proper climbing shoes and got a proper feel for the wall. I have learned that I need to trust in my ability to balance and hold my weight without necessarily engaging all my limbs at once. I know that I need to develop my upper body strength. I can’t even manage one decent pull up at the moment, performing a rise but once, with arms going from straight to 90 degrees, for a fleeting instant. To effectively climb, or just traverse, I need to know that I can rely on every muscle of arms and legs without doubt or question.

I don’t have to achieve any Zen connectivity with the wall just yet. Just getting in touch with myself would seem a very necessary first step.