The halfway blog in my grand health project and working out how to play the second half of the match.
Halfway and it’s Autumn 2026. In blog time – mid September – we’re back from our early Autumn break, Jackie is about to start treatment (chemotherapy)and iv’e had a back injury at camp so I can’t do what I know I should be doing but instead i’m taking a break to plan what I intend to do with the second half of this twenty month match of me vs my weight/visceral fat. If it was say a football game and it was half time I would now be the bad tempered and shouty manager ranting at his team because they’re a couple of goals down and playing like idiot sandwiches as chef Ramsey would say ; he’s a bit of a shouter too.
Taking stock : what exactly have I achieved in the first half (ten months) ?
If I was giving myself an end of term report it wouldn’t be all bad but I haven’t quite made my goals for this first half : Steven has done quite well this term but could try harder kind of thing. Given that I started at a tad over 110 Kg and finished the first half at somewhere around 95 plus whatever water retention I have after our holiday it’s not a bad result although not a great one. Where I hoped to be right now was to be sitting pretty at 90 Kg prior to surgery but I seem to be stuck hard aground on the unmarked and unshifting mud bank of a weight loss plateau.
For two months during the summer heat I was convinced that my failure to lose weight was simply down to water retention as when I did my normal fast and lost quite a lot of fluid in doing so I always came out 1.5 Kg lower than my usual weight. At the same time I was largely guessing at my actual dry weight being somewhere between my measured minimum (dry weight) and my weight just before commencing a fast. Anyway : iv’e now slowly come to realize that my actual weight is what I see on the scale when i’m not artificially dry after the fast. Lets call it 95 Kg actual and be done with the guesswork !
Somewhere along the line I decided to take more notice of what my waist circumference was doing as my everyday belt was slowly coming in notch by notch and iv’e measured myself for a new starting point as 44″ actual around the wide bit so that’s where I start from next term (next half). What I never managed to organize was either a DXA (Dexa) scan or single slice abdominal MRI scan to get an accurate measurement of percentage visceral fat : I just couldn’t convince my GP that it was necessary or even useful and the only way I could have got it done was by going private and paying for it myself : what I would have done with the numbers I had no idea as I was pretty well maxed out with what I was doing anyway.
On the measurement front I had my regular bloods taken and all was fine, I was also having to omit one of my anti hypertensive medicines and am now self managing what I take. Strangely enough I seem to be having higher daily spikes again nut i’m much more on the ball with managing it – it helps too to refer to nurse Jackie when i’m not quite sure to take of an evening. The last thing i’d like to say about the positive changes in my health is that a year ago I had an uncomfortable bout of prostatitis and now I don’t. The change happened at the 7% weight reduction and changed at thay point inside of a week. I can’t say that the reduction of an inflammatory condition was only associated with my weight loss at that point but I have no other explanation for it and the physiology of visceral fat and inflammatory factors is there if you search for it.
As for my exercise routine : in ten months iv’e no idea how many steps iv’e walked to help me achieve that but I guess somewhere north of 2,5 million. Up until this week I walked several times a day every day and that’s been for 10 months so no wonder that my knee is complaining about it’s workload. Most of the time iv’e averaged well over 10.000 steps per day but this week i’m taking a break having totally ding’d my back at camp with a classically back wrecking move while exiting the low entrance of our current tent.
My problem with what I do for exercise is that iv’e hit the cardiac sweet spot of 7500 steps per day but am probably now getting less actual effect as iv’e become a lighter and more efficient walker again. Although highly subjective my thighs and calves feel a lot firmer and I guess they’re fully loaded with muscle mitochondria again and are probably storing a big wodge of glycogen except when i’m fasted – which might explain some of the weight swing.
Although disappointed that I haven’t got down to 90 Kg i’m surprisingly chipper about having run aground with a weight loss plateau. What it means, at least in my mind, is that my model of dietary change based mainly on reducing sugar in my diet and adding a bit of protein has worked to the extent of a 35 pound weight loss but now needs a different approach, The last thing i’d like to say regarding my self review is that i’m well aware that I became insufferably smug about succeeding with natural weight loss without resorting to what I see as the trap of using a GLP-1 agonist. Hitting a stall has changed that, I have no intention of starting on a GLP agonist but it’s my basic attitude to dietary ideas that has changed : i’ll say more in my plans of what to do next.
What do I want to achieve next ? and how do I plan to go about it.
Up until today iv’e been a bit vague about my end goal but now I have an idea what to aim for in the next ten months and some idea of how to go about doing it : as with my previous half term I think of this as having two separate aspects – what I do about diet and what I need to do in terms of exercise so…..
My end goal aim for what i’m calling the second half of this match is to get below 85 kg. That means that I have to lose ten KG’s in ten months or neatly 1 Kg per month and I think that’s an achievable goal as long as I get some basic things right. I do have it in mind that if I get to 84 Kg say in that time then it’s certain that i’ll really try to get to 80 and so on almost ad infinitum but there will come a point that it gets a lot harder and maybe a bit self defeating. For now though it’s still my main goal and No 1 project so here goes with my plans : nothing happens straight away as i’m taking a much needed break due mainly to my back/knee/wrist problems.
A SMART-ER plan.
Diet – My diet will have to change once again. Not only had I relaxed a bit and allowed sweet treats to become a regular thing again but iv’e still been basing our main meals on the same calorie dense foods as I always did. Up until my weight loss stall I didn’t regard the calories and food quality with much interest but will be doing from now on ; it’s possible that i’ll lean towards a keto induction or low carb diet at first to give my body a bit of a wake up call.
While I don’t have an actual plan in place yet and therefore not a weekly food shopping list either I have an idea that it’s going to be high on protein and low on carbohydrates – especially the kind of calorie dense foods that iv’e gravitated towards recently. Overall the thing I keep in mind is what Dr Peter Attia said about the levers (controls) that we can pull on to alter our diets. He says that there are three : calorie load, food quality (macro nutrients) and food timing. He adds that we need to pull on two of the levers to get results. I’m already working with food timing as I only eat now during a daily food window but I have rather been snacking a lot so that’s the first thing that has to go. Even reducing the relatively low calorie load of frequent snacks should put me into a slight deficit which is what I need.
Exercise – The best experience and the best results I ever achieved with my weight and my overall health & fitness came about due to a minor accident sustained,a muscle tear, when I started a walk on a cold winter morning. After the necessary physio and rehabilitation I took to training with free weights under the direction of a personal trainer. I experienced the same kind of weight loss as iv’e had recently when I gave up most forms of sugar and started walking regularly again. The difference between the two times is that I started to put on muscle mass with my free weight training and the plateau’s I met were in terms of how much weight I could squat, press or deadlift that month rather than stalled weight loss. For some reason I really enjoyed the process too and I only gave up, I thought at first temporarily, when I had a back injury and things in my job got a bit weird and stressful. Had I carried on with my free weights I would have coped with the weirdness and management BS far better than I did without going to the gym regularly to have it out with a loaded barbell.
It looks as though my main emphasis of exercise will have to be the gym again except with the low intensity exercise (walking) still in play at my now normal 7500 steps per day and that will still be around the lanes here because of the hill work which gives me a useful cardio workout. One of the reasons for joining and using a gym again is because of Jackie’s long chemotherapy sessions just about to start and that there are 2 gyms I could use just across the road from the hospital. The one I used to use is now ridiculously expensive and requires a years commitment – pretty pointless when my own surgery is due in a matter of weeks after which i’ll need an extended break.
We have to be at the hospital once a week for the next 2 months so I may as well use that time well by going to the community gym there and maybe even having a swim. With one or two gym sessions per week I can back that up at home by designing myself a free weights workout at home with the few pieces of kit I have here. The nit and grit of an actual plan won’t be in place until I have a look around whichever gym is use but i’m already planning something like a 5 x 5 sets/reps routine over 5 exercises each main session ; i’ll almost certainly have less choice of exercises at home as my available kit is limited.
