I gave up playing football when I was 33 years-old. Thinking back that was too early by a long way, but I was newly wed, had a child on the way and was not really liking it as much as previously.
At that time I was a somewhat lithe 172 lbs, but on my way to middle-age I managed to plump-up to around 287 lbs; a rise of more than 100 lbs in a tad over a decade.
What caused the weight gain? My eating habits for one thing, I adored chocolate and junk food and was somewhat unrestrained in my appetite. Add to that the fact that my career choice caused me to have a very static lifestyle – that’s right, sitting on my backside – and another element was that I am in excess of six feet high and decidely muscular, so I never really appeared all that heavy. At least not to my mind.
That said, by my mid-forties I was certainly not very mobile; struggling to extricate myself from chairs without an effort and happy to watch my slender and limber spouse lean forward and pick things up for me here and there. I well understood that I was clinically obese and that it was a difficulty that I needed to try to put right.
At that time I had an acquaintance who was something of a guru for a well known weight loss company and he prompted me to try their online system to count food intake. It wasn’t long before I too was a convert, I lost 30 pounds very quickly and couldn’t see why people found weight loss difficult.
That is, I didn’t before the diet plan got short-circuited by a touch of gastroenteritis. I lost 5lbs in about three days because I couldn’t consume food and when I got healthy again I decided that I could be allowed a fews days feasting to make up for the rapid reduction in weight. That was the death knell for that diet plan.
Thereafter it was at least a couple of years before I could gather the enthusiasm to try once more. After I did the end result was almost identical; good weight loss, followed by a a crash. The same thing happened two more times, before I realized that I needed to look at my tactics.
That is why I starting reading books by reknowned nutritionists (Patrick Holford being a favourite); people who actually read the research papers that come out of top universities and otherwise immerse themselves in the biological details of the human body and mind.
I learned an awful lot about the junk that I was consuming and how our bodies use them. I finally grasped a fuller knowledge of the many sugars and which carbohydrates release sugars the quickest and how that correlates to blood sugar increases and the resultant blood sugar dips.
By altering my food intake fairly substantially I quickly began to learn to control my blood sugar better, which reduced the cravings that I frequently had for sweet foods. The occasions when I would suffer glycemic overload became less frequent, the foods that I chose gained a more sustainable nutritional content and with some exercise added my weight has dropped away.
And the moral of this tale is as follows. The food industry is adding sugar to virtually everything that arrives in a packet these days and if it’s carbonized and comes in a can they are including quite a bit more.
Our governments are without funds and not interested, apparently, to set the food industry to rights. Were they to do so they would probably be obliged to take on big pharmaceutical companies and the agricultural mob as well. So it will not happen.
If weight is a problem for you, what you really should to do is shoulder the responsibility, like I did. Put some time aside to read-up. Write notes and persevere. I know it’s a drag and probably not your heart’s desire, but believe me, it’s interesting and you will be very glad of it in the long term.