Introduction
I am a fat bloke, and about eight months ago I started trying to get less fat.
I was surprised to find that even in the vast expanses of the Information
Superhighway, there was hardly any useful information for someone like me.
Sure, there's loads of diet information out there; but almost all
of it seems to be aimed at girls or women who are trying to make the
transition from merely skinny, to becoming a genuine emaciated living skeleton.
This is my guide to help other fat blokes to become less fat.
Please note a couple of things before reading it: they're
quite important. Firstly, this is not a guide to getting thin, or
getting healthy, or getting fit. Less fat is what I said, and
that's what I meant: I for one really can't be bothered with all the fuss
of becoming actually thin. Secondly, I have absolutely no qualifications
in nutrition or exercise: this is purely from my own experience. But let's
be honest here: anyone who's stupid enough to take health advice from a random
web page without applying some healthy skepticism, probably deserves to die
of malnutrition anyway.
Me
I don't weigh myself, so I've gone by my waist measurement instead.
I'm five foot ten, and from my teens to my early twenties I always had
a waist measurement of 32 inches. After that it started growing.
Eight months ago, by the age of twenty-eight it had gone up to 42 inches,
according to the guy measuring me for a suit. I took some action,
and it's now down to 34 inches.
This is not an amazing success story, especially by the
high standards of the amazing success stories that are used to promote
pretty much any diet plan going. That's the point, really. I'm an
ordinary, fairly lazy, bloke who doesn't really care about being
superfit. All I want is to be able to fit into my older clothes, and
to be able to run for a bus and still say "seventy please" when I board
it, without holding up the queue for five minutes while my wheezing
subsides enough for me to speak.
How to do it
Regular exercise and a calorie controlled diet. What the hell were you
expecting? Those are the only ways to lose weight, and yes, you need to
do them both. Doing only one will not work: here's why.
You might think that you can lose weight by just exercising,
especially if you believe the calorie burning readouts on a gym machine.
Unfortunately, they're all lies. In real life you'll might burn off 200
calories in a hour... but then you'll just drink a beer, which
will put 200 calories back in your system. To burn off a significant number
of calories you need to already be super-fit in order to sustain the
burn. And you're not super-fit. You're a fat bloke.
If you talk to women about it, you'll get the impression that
you can lose weight just by dieting, without doing any exercise at all. No,
that doesn't work either. Once you've been on a diet for a little while,
your metabolism slows down, so you aren't burning as many calories. Your
weight loss then slows down. About this time you get bored and give up the
diet. Your metabolism is still slow, so you put on even more weight than you
lost in the first place. Many women spend their whole lives going through
this cycle again and again: you've probably noticed it already.
The only answer is to both exercise and diet. Exercise
has the effect of speeding up your metabolism, so the diet will actually
have a chance to work. You'll also burn up a few extra calories, and as
you get a bit fitter you'll become able to burn a few more.
Dieting
Yes, you have to count the calories, Calories are tricky little buggers:
you might think you can forget about a few, but they will come back to
haunt you. Keeping count is the only way you can keep them under control.
An average bloke uses up about 2500 calories in a day. This includes a bit of
exercise, but if you do an extra hour or so every day, you can use up a
couple of hundred more.
If you eat more calories than you use, you'll get fatter. If
you eat less than you use, you'll get thinner. Either way, it's an
incredibly slow process. You've probably noticed yourself getting slowly
fatter and fatter over the years: that's because you're eating more calories
than you're burning. You may have been kidding yourself that at some point
your weight is going to stabilise at a new level. It isn't. Unless you take
some action you're just going to get fatter and fatter until you end up a
gigantic, hideous, corpulent blob; too monstrously bloated to even leave
the house.
Unfortunately, losing weight is an equally slow process. If you
eat 500 less calories a day than you burn, you will still lose only a pound
a week. Losing two stone (28 pounds) will take you about six months. It hurts
to hear that, doesn't it? But it's still an alternative to turning into Jabba
the Hutt. The thing is, skinny women trying to get skinnier have a big
advantage over us fat blokes trying to get less fat. The skinny women only
have a few pounds to lose, so they can go on incredibly severe diets for
a short time, and lose their few pounds quickly. We can't go on diets as
strict as that, because we'd have to stay on them for far too long: they only
harm their health a bit, but we'd actually die. More likely we'd give up
first though: it would take superhuman dedication to stay on a diet like that
for long.
It's recommended that a sensible diet involves eating 500 to
1000 less calories per day than you consume. This will lead to losing one
to two pounds per week.
How to eat fewer calories
First, a note for any scienticians out there. For some reason in the
weight loss world the word calorie actually means a kilocalorie.
Technically it's supposed to be capitalised to identify it as a
kilocalorie. In real life, most people don't bother. I've gone with
the flow and used the same thing here. On a label you'll see it as kcal.
In practice, you have to be
pretty stupid to get the two confused, since whether you call it a Calorie,
a kilocalorie or a kcal it's the only unit used in the real world.
You really do have to actually count the calories you eat
every day. Right now, you may well be thinking that's impossible. How
can you possibly reckon up every single can of coke, chocolate bar, bag
of crisps, biscuit (cookie), chocolate cake and doughnut that you eat
in a day? The answer may be dawning on you already. It's easier than you
think, since you won't be eating so much.
A lot of the time, you can find out how many calories are
in something by looking at the packet. If not, there are various
resources around. The web one I used has now gone, but here's another
calorie counter.
Once you're counting, the problem is actually finding
foods you can eat. Beware of soft drinks like lemonade and coke:
sugary drinks have loads of calories. Alcoholic drinks are nearly as
bad. Cakes, chocolate, anything fried: bad. Pretty much anything nice
is bad really. Bread, rice, potatoes are all pretty much OK, though
you still need to count them, like you count anything. The best thing
to do is to eat lots of bread, rice, potatoes and noodles. That way
you won't be so hungry. If you need a snack, fruit is pretty much OK
too.
The biggest problem is that sometimes you'll get an
unbearable craving for something unhealthy. It takes a huge amount
of willpower to ignore a craving like that. So, the best solution is
to give in to it, but within your calorie allowance. Cut down on the
quantity: any food is allowable in a small enough portion.
Exercise
Some people will tell you at great length how much they enjoy going to the
gym, how much of a rush they get and what a terrific high exercise is. Some
people also enjoy being tied up in bizarre rubber costumes and locked in
cupboards. In both cases, it's because they're loonies. Exercise is deeply
boring, always tiring and occasionally painful. You'll just have to grit
your teeth and do it anyway.
If you enjoy doing sports (darts and pool don't count), do them
as much as possible. If you've let yourself become a fat bloke, though,
the chances are that you never enjoyed them that much anyway. This leaves
you with the options of doing the exercises that are the least hassle.
Basically, do exercises that don't require any special
equipment, or travelling to any particular place. The problem with those
exercises is that it's far too easy for anyone with an ounce of imagination
to find an excuse to avoid them. It's incredibly easy to find an excuse to
avoid going to the gym: it's harder to find a plausible excuse not to do
20 situps with the TV on.
Running is one of the best exercises there is. If you're too
fat to run, as I was, walking is the next best thing. The good thing about
walking is that the fatter you are, the more calories you burn off while
doing it. You have the advantage here: lugging that enormous fat carcass of
yours around burns off a lot more energy than a skinny runt would use.
Another big advantage of walking is that you don't have to admit to anyone
that you're doing exercise. If you use public transport, you can get off
a few stops early and walk briskly the rest of the way, making sure that
you look at your watch often, so it looks as if you're just late for
something. Eventually though, you will have to start running instead. When
you can walk quickly for a couple of miles without working that your
heart is going to explode out of your chest, its time to start running.
To minimise embarrassment, you can do this after dark, or very early in
the morning. If you're really embarrassed, try doing it in normal casual
clothes, still looking at your watch as if you're late for something. A
word of warning though: choose your underpants wisely. With those
massive balloon-like thighs of yours, the wrong underwear can leave the
inside of your legs looking like mincemeat.
If you really can't face leaving the house to exercise, then
you can exercise at home. One plan that's been popular for a couple of
decades is the
5BX plan, more widely known as the Canadian Air Force
exercises. Don't panic: they're not the same exercises as flight crew
do. Essentially the Canadian Air Force commissioned research into the
cheapest, easiest and quickest exercise plan that could keep their desk
jockeys from getting too unfit. This plan takes 11 minutes a day, requires
no special equipment and can be done in a small room. Unfortunately, after
ten million copies the book is now out of print, but it's the one I used
for a while.
Motivation
I'm going out on a limb here. The only way I found to motivate myself
was by doing the exact opposite of what every other guide says you
should do to motivate yourself. This might well be because I'm just weird.
However, like most weirdos I prefer to think of myself as normal and
everyone else as weird, so I've adopted the following theory. Most exercise
guides are written by weirdly go-getting, enthusiastic types: the sort of
people who, say, decide a good way to make lots of money is to make up an
exercise guide and then go for it. In other words, the sort of
person who runs management seminars in Dilbert cartoons.
What motivates this sort of person
is not necessarily what motivates me.
The usual advice is to weigh yourself regularly so you can
see how you're achieving your goals, so naturally I don't weigh myself at
all. If you do want to weigh yourself, remember that you'll probably be
losing one or two pounds a week, but a pint of water weighs about a pound.
So, you could go down the pub, drink three pints, and be three pounds
heavier; then go for a piss and be three pounds lighter. You can see
therefore there's not much point weighing yourself really often: the
number isn't going to mean much.
Instead, I found the best way is to concentrate on the process.
Just stick to exercising every day and not eating too many calories. That
way you can't get depressed and abandon everything as soon as you fail
to meet some pointless over-ambitious goal that you shouldn't have set in
the first place.
Occasionally it's inevitable that you fall off the wagon. You'll
give in to temptation and gorge yourself on a huge fry-up, followed by a
massive pudding. If so, just forget about it and go on with the plan as
normal. There's no point in trying to catch up by doing more exercise and
eating even less: all that will do is make you unnaturally hungry and make
the task even harder. Above all, remember
Kipling's famous lines:
If you can meet with triumph, and disaster,
And treat those two imposters just the same;
Then you will
eventually become quite a lot thinner without getting all stressed out over
it, man.
![]](images/rt_edge3.gif){kind=small}
![[XML]](images/rssblue.gif){kind=small}
![[P]](images/print3.gif){kind=small}
