Looking at my assertion ; that it can be done, from the perspective of things that might make it supremely difficult or functionally impossible – and the things that might cause it to fall on it’s face and fail.
Note to readers ; while I worked on and edited my post ‘It Can Be Done’ several times whilst aiming for the greatest simplicity I could that still had some granular detail, I deliberately haven’t done that for it’s follow up post (this one), rather I went out for my usual after dinner walk and made a mental note of every objection or reality check that I could so when I got home I just sat at the keyboard and blurted it out so :
My basic assertions, and/or principles are that losing visceral fat, rather than weight, is the primary goal. To do that what I committed to was firstly removing sugar from my diet almost totally and secondly going for walks around the lanes of the village in east Cornwall where I live. I kept it that simple as I needed a very low starting threshold and I needed that to be successful : so lets begin by challenging or questioning my first principles. However and whatever ; lets start by considering cause,reason and/or motivation :
If you’ve come across the men’s health section of my blog then you’ll know that my starting motivation was that of having had a series of ‘minor’ strokes plus hypertension and with my end goal being fit enough to have surgery again. As I write I almost certainly need a revision of my knee replacement and the best way of giving that the best chance to function well for the next ten years is to be as light as possible. While iv’e said that I don’t consider overall weight to be as important as actual visceral fat percentage it is of crucial importance when it comes to knee/orthopaedic problems : even now i’m putting some 8-9 Kg less load through each joint when I walk.
So maybe my first point is that there has to be good cause and good motivation to commit to serious weight loss and significant change of the way we go about life. Mere good intention, for example in the case of a New Year resolution is only going to last 13 days on average so it’s not a quick and easy fix ; my plan allows for at least 20 months of slow change , mostly using simple changes of daily habit. Again, if a quick fix is what you need then slow weight loss using natural methods isn’t going to work for you.
Your biggest problem might not be desire, will power and motivation although they are all finite resources ; instead your big problem could well be the sugar in your diet. We know that sugar is one of the most commonly available substances that is legal and enormously addictive ; it has the same action on the brain as does cocaine – which is to say a Dopamine hit with every dose which is one main reason why mobile phones and other such devices are also such a problem. The consumption of sugar is a very hard habit to break and is the one main reason that all of my previous attempts to diet and get fit have been failures in the past ; I never dealt with my sugar addiction until December 2025.
My most important message is that to make diet successful we have to develop an entirely new relationship with food – if we can’t do that then probably the only way to go if reducing weight is the goal, is to look to the medical approach – the GLP-1 Agonists being the only genuinely appetite suppressing medicines that I know of. If you chose to take that route, and many have done, there’s also a whole load of things that you need knowledge about and actions that you must take to avoid ending up in the GLP-1 trap ; once again, as many already have done. My choice was to not suppress my natural hunger, as GLP-1 Agonists do, but to continue to enjoy food by eating well and by not consuming the one thing (sugar) that made me continuously hungry.
While I could quote physiology textbooks like there’s no tomorrow, I won’t because so many people – especially video creators – do a much better job than I can. I have said, and stick to, a core concept that what’s needed here is to take primary responsibility for ones own body and health, what that needs is to to either read or go watch a few relevant videos. If that’s a problem – for instance you might say that you can’t be bothered with that kind of effort and/or focus then how much effort does it take so sit through a ten minute video ?. It might be that even that much is too much ; we all have limits as to how much information we can take in and put into practice. Too much information was almost my failure mode a few months ago and my way of coping with that was to go back to the basic stuff I was already doing (a mostly sugar free/low carbohydrate diet and simple walking as exercise) rather than trying to watch and learn from several new videos each week.
Where I think there is a valid objection is with food. Iv’e never stated this explicitly but we spend an increasing amount on food, food prices have risen far more than government inflation figures would have you believe such that our normal food bill is something like 30-50 % higher than it was even five years ago. If I had a self question now it would be how could we do what we do (with food) on a tight budget ?.
There might be an argument that sugar isn’t the metabolic poison that I think that it is. Rather than point out it’s effect in other people where high sugar and high carbohydrate consumption is easily shown as having a strong association with type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and morbid obesity. It might be that we’re at the same point now with sugar and highly refined food like products as we were with cigarettes and the tobacco industry in the 1970’s ; their argument then was that it hadn’t been proven that cigarette smoking caused, rather than being associated with, lung disease, heart disease and several forms of cancer.
I can’t say what sugar does to everyone out there but I can talk about the things that it seems to be responsible for in my own life. Sugar makes me hungry ; in the days I used to eat a couple of biscuits before breakfast I was immediately hungry for more carbohydrates and tended to stay that way all day. I didn’t even escape at night because I used to have either a couple of biscuits or rounds of toasted sweet fruit bread as a snack. Weirdly, it’s only now when I don’t eat biscuits at all that I don’t experience continuous nagging hunger and even back then there was no need for hunger as I could always eat to satisfaction. I’m pretty sure that I only survived my sugar/biscuit habit without developing diabetes by storing that sugar as visceral fat and my Triglycerides were always high until I gave them up. It’s maybe unfair to associate my sugar consumption with my hypertension, my series of strokes and high percentage of visceral fat but that has always seemed the simplest explanation to me.
But anyway, to continue about real food being so expensive – my answer would be to eat and spend as I had to many years ago at the time I was a student nurse and somewhat into physical training. Then, as with now, it would be the luxuries that would have to go first ; today that would be having an expensive phone and TV contract – they are luxuries rather than necessities and maybe even nor running a car – although even now it’s my working partner that runs a car. In other words I would have to prioritize my life and spending just as I did when I was a student/newly qualified and poor, nurse in the 1980’s.
But why walking ? and in my case why only walking ?
Well, if you’re already exercising then good for you – however you’re doing it – in my case though walking is just about all I can do aside from a few squats so I specified walking as it has a very low point of entry, it’s usually low stress and it can be done in small chunks. I used to aim for 7500 steps per day but have recently had to cut that back a ways due to a pair of dodgy knees – one of which needs a replacement revision and having to use a pair of crutches when I walk. I do wear a pedometer all day now and what I include in my daily total step count is all the steps I take when doing jobs/projects around the place and when we go into town. Some people refer to that as NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis) and a busy day can amount to a whole load of steps taken without leaving the back yard.
Perhaps, one of the things I should have said is that a failure might be more likely, not because we lack information or knowledge, but because we have more things that we are addicted to and which demand our attention ; not just sugar but also our mobile phones, vehicles and all of the luxury goods that we buy and which then eat into our attention while giving short lived Dopamine rushes in return for pseudo (and real) addiction.
So, do people need more knowledge and/or more information ?. I would say not as we’re already overloaded with information ; in my case iv’e already blocked myself from certain Youtube video creators because I find the fire hose like delivery of more things to think about every few days, too much to take in and act on. My answer would be that it can be done with very little knowledge of physiology just as an example, and that what it needs is consistent application of simple principles such as deleting sugar from our diet and going for several walks a day – if that’s still too much then just ignore me.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 