The Problem of Weight

A ‘heavy’ post about my strokes and abdominal pattern obesity or : (the tldr)

My life as a fat bastard and what i’m doing about it.

Since I had a series of ‘minor’ strokes in 2024 my exercise has plummeted and given that it was exercise that was keeping my weight in check that also broke down with the end result that my weight crept up and up. When I gave myself a good talking to recently and embraced the suck by going for walks every day I found it hard going at first as every route from here bar one goes up a steep and narrow lane.

My walking is made significantly worse by the lanes around here being only one car width and at certain times of the day we suffer the delights of a whole convoy of impatient and pushy taxi drivers that act as though they own the roads : they have a very bad habit of creeping up behind me (several drive electric cars) and when I don’t move out of the way instantly start to shout at me or push past with an angry stare. Iv’e taken to either shouting back or telling them to use their horn for what it’s intended for rather than the angry blast of the average BMW/Audi/Merc or white van man replete with low intelligence, high anger and total road rage when they are maybe held up for a few seconds out of their self important lives.

Having talked so much about plans recently I can say that a fine part of the granular detail of specificity is that I don’t go out at special school start time and especially not at throwing out time as both times turn into an angry version of rush hour. This place even has it’s own version of the highway code such that the taxi drivers are the last ones to ever give way or concede space : as a mere pedestrian I seem to be treated as the very bottom of the shit pile.

You wouldn’t know it from the start of my post but i’m actually not here to have an angry rant about drivers, rather i’m here to talk about my ever expanding belly fat and what I intend to do about it.

A huge amount of people over indulge with calorie dense food over the Christmas period and almost always regret that excess immediately afterwards. Those that then make a resolution at New Year to lose some weight and/or get fit are instantly on a losing streak. Former Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink says that the average survival time of such a resolution is a mere thirteen days : this is also what I saw when I was in the years when I was training hard. I never had weight loss in mind when I started pressing with free weights : I went into it with a near normal BMI but kinda soft and squishy. What I learned almost straight away was that it was best to eat soon after i’d finished training and only then did I start to gain some muscle mass : after the first three months I was a tiny bit heavier but I looked completely different as my body fat percentage had dropped quite a bit – I also felt great on the training and even enjoyed it when I was doing it.

Now, many years down the line, iv’e had a quite unexpected result only six weeks after starting my walking exercise program : the ‘what I didn’t expect’ is that i’m faster around my circuit by as much as ten minutes – my expected time being 45 minutes and I just timed myself (accidentally) at 35 from door to door. I have no idea about any change in weight as I am purposefully not weighing myself but might start to do so in my next training cycle : the problem I find with using weight as the primary metric is that it can bounce all over the place inside any week and only seems to have value if weigh ins are spaced at monthly intervals or even less. What i’m keeping a sense of is how my clothes feel, especially my waist and what notch my belt fits at – it’s pretty bad at the moment.

When it comes to the problem of weight gain and health I could, and already have, created a semi S.M.A.R.T plan to deal with it – a plan which has the two obvious sides of diet and exercise. I say semi smart because i’m not applying the obvious metric – weight, as a simple measure of success or failure. What iv’e done so far is that i’m now 6 or 7 weeks into a slowly progressing walk exercise program, at the same time iv’e successfully made my first month of being completely biscuit free and i’m in the first couple of weeks of reducing sugar and carbs by also going mostly cake free, jam free and with a large reduction in my bread intake.

My immediate plan for the second month is to stay with 10 walking sessions per week but up the pace slightly so that I get a cardio workout on the hills. Having just found out that my circuit time is now down to half an hour rather than 45 minutes I will most likely increase the distance on one of the sessions each day. Doing ten sessions per week rather than trying to stick to two sessions a day every day gives me a little bit of wriggle room to have harder days or easier ones – maybe even the odd rest day.

I’m just not sure that it will be enough to meet my goals which I loosely determine as losing twenty kilos of actual weight over the same number of months and slowly dropping abdominal girth. I am, weirdly, stupidly resistant to weighing myself because I think I will be shocked at the result.**

I wouldn’t say that i’m making a maximum effort although I am making a consistent and doable one which has the wriggle room to allow me to make progress. In my diet iv’e almost completely given up on the main obvious culprits : the most obvious things that I suspect were causing weight gain, In a way I don’t know at this stage what I would do next if, in a few months, my weight is static.

In my own model of defining goals and creating plans this now has the highest priority and I am applying deep though about what to do if I fail although (as some say) failure isn’t an option.