Weighty problems
RATHER like the novel I've been trying to write since my teens, losing weight is something I've very much failed to do for far too long.
I know this because I tried diets after a particularly grisly food tech lesson on "furring of the arteries" and on the back of a climb up the steps of York Minster left me on the verge of keeling over - even while 78-year-olds seemed to power up the 15th century tower.
I was off the spicy nik naks when I was first training to be a journalist, I'd denounced jammy dodgers after my (in) voluntary redundancy a decade ago and I was denying myself anything with sugar during the first lockdown.
Now and then I think I may have discovered the state-of-mind that will make the slimming stick.
Perhaps the twinge of fear that would accompany a bout of indigestion (is this in actual fact a heart attack), or worries about whether an overweight socialist was a contradiction in terms.
I would fret about the fact that one of the first things that people knew on meeting me was that I was big and that being big was still often linked with being lazy.
That assumption particularly bothered me, since while my weight undoubtedly precluded me from fell-running it didn't mean I didn't work hard generally. I was always proud of the fact I was well beyond 30 before I first called in sick for work.
Sometimes a desire to lose weight has felt part of a wider mission to make positive changes, on other occasions it's more of a single-minded desire to never have to repeat the indignity of the ironic cheer when I completed the 800 metres without having expired on the second lap of the track.
But if these nagging concerns may have launched a dozen diets they never led to a point where my BMI at last landed at a reassuring level. My weight has been arrested and pushed back on several occasions, which in itself is probably a good thing, but it's nothing like a final victory.
I've tried to convince myself that I'm not short of willpower, having turned my overnight vegetarianism into a 28 year project. And I've never been tempted to try most of the things that were the subject of very sober assemblies during the sixth-form (drink drinking nor indeed drinking on foot and certainly not pills with Bugs Bunny stamped on them etc).
And yet I have to accept I've not had a healthy relationship with food for most of my childhood and all of my adult life and in February I decided I wanted to draw a definitive line under that.
My efforts have been given an extra impetus by right wing libertarians, who tend to label efforts to tackle obesity as "nanny statism". In the Victorian era this attitude was known as laissez faire and was predicated on doing as little as possible to help people live better lives and call it freedom of choice.
So simply put if my laying off the Snickers bars enrages Jacob Rees-Mogg and his 19th century attitude to public health then it's well worth it.
The other arm of the "stay as you are" pincer movement are a growing cohort of social media influencers.
While body positive messages were probably once well-intentioned, when women were effectively being shamed into eating disorders and schoolkids suffered horrendous bullying, it feels it's now morphed into an attempt to normalise lifestyles which are not doing anyone any good.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a staunch believer that no-one should be made to feel uncomfortable about life choices that don't harm other people. If people have a problem with me preferring lemonade or painting little metal skeletons on Sunday afternoons that's very much their problem.
People who have made being well overweight "their thing" on Instagram - often making a fair amount of money into the bargain - would argue that body size is another issue where there is a danger of giving into "the haters".
But having knees that crackle like velcro when I bend down or getting palpitations if any flight of stairs has more than two stages doesn't feel like a ditch to die in.
I can only speak for myself, but being bigger than I should be has never felt empowering. It's made daily tasks harder, dented my confidence and in the long-run could make various health problems more likely.
Which is why I'm trying to put an end to it. That's not to say I haven't tried before - as mentioned above I have and I've failed - I'm just hoping that putting it down in black and white will give me extra incentive.
Almost four months in in I may have moved the dial in the direction of "out of condition" having been steadily approaching "out of commission" in the past 12 year or so.
For this I might blame the gnawing uncertainty of a career change and a dispute with the idiot living next door and my mum's health and unsettling world events. But ultimately these are easy excuses for - or convoluted ways of saying - an unhealthy appetite for Wensleydale.
At the minute I'm following the tried and tested method of cutting out the junk and trying to take a daily walk rather than any peculiar diets, intensive exercise regimes or courses of treatment that apparently owe a debt to the theory of the four humours. Anything that involves purging is probably just as bad for you as flaming hot Doritos and will have a rather less pleasant after-taste.
So slow and steady progress it is. Now I just need to think about the novel.
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