Excuse me if my German grammar is poor but what I meant is ‘the new deal – cycle two’.
Last week, as I write, I slipped past the end point of my self appointed first cycle of dietary change and enhanced exercise although in fact i’d already consciously started my second cycle in week 11 having done an interim weight at the end of week 10. According to at least one doctor i’m now at the point where most diet/exercise routines break down so it’s a critical time for me and essential that I change things for the second cycle. Moreover I completely changed in my thinking at that point and while glad that I had been mostly successful with one dietary change and the exercise that I was doing I realized that the bigger change had to be in the way I thought about food : in short that I had to change some long term established habits.
In this post I intend to lay out my plans for cycle two and talk about some of the thinking behind that so :
Before I begin though, a word to readers. This morning, during my second short walk of the day, I started to mentally write this post and my first thoughts were that what i’m writing about now might be the most important posts that iv’e ever written although perhaps the least viewed as anything written about diet and health are largely ignored by most. If you came here by accident or for my old sailing content then I apologize as iv’e had to give up sailing due to the series of minor strokes I had in 2024 and before. What i’m writing about in the Friday posts is my own attempts to reduce my visceral fat and therefore some fat weight while at the same time trying to get some useful muscle back and regain some level of cardio exercise – what I will call the sweet spot of cardiac health. These posts then are the direct result of a lot of reading, research and boots hitting the ground : I feel that they are so important that I have to fact check each one as best I can.
During both of my short walks so far today iv’e been trying to find an angle into this post rather it being just a rather tedious list of the things I intend to achieve in this cycle – essentially my plans for the next three months – and the angle is this :
Several years ago, just after Covid, we were at sea in my little centerboard cruising boat making the passage from Torbay harbor in south Devon (England) around Berry head and along the coast to put in at Dartmouth. It was an oddly blustery morning with an unusual wind direction that made the whole of Torbay a lee shore and particularly energetic and lumpy off Berry head itself. We were around the headland and occasionally surfing on the short and steep seas when we suddenly lost our mizzen mast – the boat being a small cat ketch with two freestanding masts. For a moment it went a bit quiet as I was mostly buried under canvas and I had to try and stay calm, work out what to do in which order and carefully brief my partner on what to next – all while steering the boat in a confused sea.
I’ll cut to the end of this scene and quickly move on : we saved the rig and in the meantime kept ourselves aboard the boat and heading towards Dartmouth where we anchored, had a brew and let the adrenaline bleed off a bit. In retrospect I think that what I should have done is cleared the cockpit of the string that was keeping the downed mast in place and then dumped the broken mast, it’s boom and sail all overboard. It was certainly going to be an insurance job anyway and I felt that getting a new tube for the mast, potentially a new boom and new sail was all a better solution than trying to mend a 40 year old alloy mast with clear metal fatigue.
The point that I am making here is that based on all of my previous sailing experience I did what I had learned to do by which I mean to act independently and with self reliance : my by word was to get us home safely and the boat home under it’s own (remaining) sail. Carrying this over into the subject of this post equates to me saying that my obvious weight gain and metabolic ill health are all my problem and only my problem : my major change of thinking now is that this idea could be completely awry and that rather being a case of willpower and self discipline it’s us and our bodies, defined by human evolution, versus a very clever and ultimately profit driven food/product industry. We know even now that there are teams of people working in labs all over the developed world to make food like product as tasty, palatable, easily digestible and calorie rich as possible and thus extremely addictive : sugar and most instant carbs act more like Heroin and Cocaine than anything else.
If you want a clear example as possible of product then go watch the short video of the McDonalds CEO taking a bite of one his corporation’s examples of product – his grimace is fleeting, so fleeting as to almost beat the eye – but a grimace followed by an instant wipe of lips all the same. If I had my way I would have all of the McD boar members locked on a sealed island for 6 months and made to live only on their corporation’s product : any bets on how many of them consume product of their own volition.
It’s a bit naughty of me to draw attention to just one easy target although I happen to think that they’re one of the worst. If I had to go down to the corner shop right now – lets say I needed some milk – then something like 90% of everything they sell is product in some way.
I’ll only rant for a moment but is it any real surprise that the rates of obesity, morbid obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes have skyrocketed in the last 50 years especially in the USA but with the UK a close second. Honestly folks, if you’re sick and/or overweight it’s mainly not your fault and certainly not just a matter of lack of willpower and discipline. If you live in the UK and aren’t already some deep revolutionary when it comes to food plus say you’re already in middle age then you are totally and absolutely screwed because when you get sick – I say when not if – then your GP is unlikely to see you and give you proper advice and your local A&E department is so rammed with other walking wounded that it will be at least 24 hours or more before you will be seen and medically assessed : in my case, I walked in with a stroke, I think it was 28 hours before I was admitted to a medical receiving unit. OK…Rant over
Let me begin more properly with exercise as that’s one of the first things iv’e been getting wrong and is the easiest to deal with in terms of how my exercise routine has already changed. The first thing to say is that iv’e completely changed my thinking – the part that contains exercise. I don’t now see exercise as being of primary importance in weight loss and neither do I see my long walks followed by long periods on the sofa, as being effective. I regard exercise now as being valuable although probably more so in other forms than longer walks and being important for things such as cardiac health and mental well being.
My exercise, this cycle, will be based on the kind of short walks – around 1500 steps – that I used to do before starting my regular, twice a day. longer walks. On some of my longer routes I was just glad to get home and crash out on the sofa. Now…..I tend to go out for an early walk – before the taxis take over – a second one after my breakfast and then several more spaced out during the day and always after meals. I regard the post dinner walk as being particularly useful in blunting the likely insulin spike. I have an overall goal of 7500 steps per day but that folds into a larger plan of taking 45000 steps per week where the steps are mostly made in 6 days thus giving me a day off unless I have a lot of catching up to do. To help me with that I recently bought a secondhand ‘Smart’ phone to record my progress – I should really carry a phone when I am away from the house in case of a medical problem.
The second part of my exercise routine is to do a smaller number of squats per day, starting with just ten but increasing, and doing those while holding a 5 Kg plate to my chest. My plan is to do that every day but only slowly increase the number of reps. Once a day I intend to do a medium distance (3000 steps) exercise walk with a weighted rucksack where the carry weight matches my weight loss.
I want to try and finish each section of this post with an explanation of what my principles are so :
That exercise is clearly important yes, except that the way I exercised in the past was by having a long workout or a long and often exhausting walk followed by hours on the sofa, many mugs of coffee plus biscuits consumed. The way that the science of physiology works out is that our bodies naturally down regulate when exercise tired and/or calorie depleted with the end result being an overall reduction in physical work/effort completed – even though it feels as though we are doing something productive.
What i’m doing this cycle is taking a series of regular walks during the day and only one of them I treat as an exercise walk with a period of stage 2 cardio within it and carrying a small amount of extra weight to increase the workload. After one of those walks – I usually combine this (next) with a set of squats out on the back deck. Both exercises include a small amount of additional weight and both, in their own way become low end resistance exercise. An important principle in my day is to always take a short walk after eating as that is said to blunt, or flatten, the glucose/insulin spike.
The overall principle of accumulated exercise over a day is to make the cardiac sweet spot of 7500 steps per day although I now average it out to 45000 steps measured over 6 days.
Where everything gets squirrely is changing my diet.
Right at the start of the project I did one thing that I regard as having been right although the bigger picture is that I was still doing most things that I now consider harmful. At the outset I stopped eating biscuits totally and in fact I haven’t had a single one since late December last year. Jokingly, I gave up M&S Eccles cakes for Lent although it was more because the store stopped stocking them for a couple of weeks : nowadays I treat myself to one per week and that’s my only sweet treat as iv’e given up everything else which comes with added sugar *.
The first big change is that I have a breakfast that always includes protein and I have it later – usually around 10 am. I have that with a thick slice of ‘proper’ baked bread – at the moment I am experimenting with wholemeal – and have dumped my usual sliced white bread entirely. The other bread related change is that iv’e stopped having a late night snack of toasted fruit bread with a late coffee. Part of that is to give myself a longer fasting ‘window’ each day and the other part is to not have any coffee after 5pm as both the evening coffee and screen time was affecting my already poor sleep. I don’t know how much effect my coffee consumption was having on my prostatitis – which was miserable – but reducing it, especially late has reduced my prostatic signs (dysuria, frequency and urgency)
If my new diet plan has a simple takeaway then it’s to add protein and wholefoods but mostly to get away from the standard English diet that iv’e lived on for most of my life : seen in a slightly different way the only difference between my diet a couple of years back and how we eat now is that a lot of what we buy is still product – only slightly posher product and quite a bit more expensive. Perhaps the only way we can totally bypass product is to mostly not shop in the supermarket – or be highly selective there – or to find local greengrocers and farm shop stalls or maybe even grow our own real food and bake our own bread.
My dietary changes this cycle include a whole heap of detail, most of which i’m still working out but the overall idea is to give myself a smaller load of sugar/carbohydrate to deal with, especially with processed food, to stop eating food-like product (ultra processed food products) as entirely as I find feasible and to give myself a fasting window of around 16 hours. Within that i’m trying to go towards a more wholefood diet and preparing our food at home with the single ingredients that my grandparents generation would recognize as food.
By the end of cycle two I intend to be in a position that I can detail more of the dietary changes and what effect the sum total of my my different exercise goals and modified diet have been.
Best Wishes Y’awl.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 