How I Got in Shape After Trying to Kill Myself With Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream
After my engagement fell apart I moved into a new apartment and tried to slowly kill myself via the medium of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
I had lost all hope in life, and Chocolate Fudge Brownie was my only joy.
I would go through a tub of it every night. Sometimes a tub and a half. And I’m talking about the big tubs, not the pussy little ones like you get at the cinema. 465ml of chocolatey oblivion.
I’m not even totally sure why I was doing it.
True, I was recovering from an incredibly stressful year where I had tried to maintain two essentially full-time jobs as well as a relationship. I could have probably handled two out of the three, but this heady combo of work, plus more work, plus fiancée (also work) pushed me over the edge.
After that, apparently I just needed to sit and stuff my face for about three years.
Then one day I decided to turn it around.
Or perhaps more accurately, it decided to turn me around.
Motivation is weird. There are forces at work deep inside of us that can either sabotage or inspire, and we don’t always seem to get the choice.
At some point, after seemingly hitting a secret inner wall of self-disgust, I let go of my confectionary-based death wish, and set off in the opposite direction.
As Bill Callahan once sang: No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around.
Lockdown definitely helped. It suddenly obliterated my career, inducing an existential panic that gave me a hefty ‘kick up the arse’, as we say in England.
Somewhere in there I decided to sign up to a local gym / CrossFit studio that had the advantage of being terrifically near my house.
I then found out they had moved to a location further away from my house, but by now I was already mentally committed.
I went to see a personal trainer there. Not my first. I’m slightly shocked to say I have had more personal trainers than girlfriends, and my fitness relationships seem to end much the same way as my romantic ones. I still love them as a person, but it’s not really going anywhere.
But this one was different. He seemed more enthusiastic, more professional, and a bit obsessive, like me. He actually showed up on time, didn’t cancel last minute, and didn’t drink in the middle of the week for no reason in her 30s…sorry, got my relationships confused again. Let’s stick to fitness.
I started doing one session a week. Mainly strength work. Building up my deadlift, improving my dips, pushing a weird sled along the ground. Just standard stuff you need for everyday life as an Inuit in parts of Alaska.
This was all good fun. I had some basic experience in weight lifting from the halcyon days of my teenage years, alone in my room with a York weight bench, listening to Eminem aggressively rap about stuff that in 2021 would get him sent to prison. Simpler times.
Since then I’d done bits and pieces here and there. Bit of running, some tennis, and hit-and-miss sessions with those nice but fairly useless trainers. Who to be fair were only useless because I couldn’t afford to go more than once a week.
This time I decided to go hard or go home (and I don’t mean due to nausea). So I upped it to two sessions a week. Of course I couldn’t afford it, but I figured while I was pushing beyond my physical comfort zone I may as well freak myself out financially as well.
I started walking on the off days to burn calories and build up some endurance by going fast up steep hills. Then I started running again, for the first time in years. When I say running, I mean running for a minute, getting a disturbing pain in my heart area, then walking again.
I built it up gradually like this until I could run like a normal human being.
At the same time, I was invited to join a weekly 5-a-side football match. I was in no way prepared for this. During the first game my heart rate reached 193, my feet bled, and afterwards I sat still for hours as my chest continued to pound, feeling weirdly depressed and ashamed of my performance.
After a week off football, maybe two, I went back and tried again, and was much better. I even scored a goal.
But it became clear my cardio needed a boost, so I upped the running to twice a week. Then a fellow member of the football team called Jules, whose intensity I admired, suggested I try three times a week. So I did. He later recommended I up it to four. Obviously I couldn’t back down, and immediately started running four times a week, around 3 miles / 5k each time.
So now, from a starting point of basically zero, I was doing two strength sessions, four runs, and an hour of football every week. I then started throwing in a home bodyweight workout I had learnt during lockdown at the peak of my crisis, except now it was way easier. I found I could do three rounds of this fairly intense circuit with no trouble.
That pretty much brings us up to date. My resting heart rate is down to 50. I actually enjoy running, and take a perverse pleasure in going out even in heavy rain storms. I’m scoring goals every week for the football team and have become a self-described ‘key player’. I can do three sets of about 16 dips, and one arm rows with 30kg (on some days).
I also have niggling ankle pains from running, other little strains from weight training, and a couple of weeks ago at football I cut my head open and hurt my wrist in a nasty collision. With the ground.
But I feel better than I have in ages, possibly ever. And my fitness is perhaps the best it’s ever been, or at least the most rounded.
All I’m aiming for now is to look like Logan Paul did for his recent fight against Floyd Mayweather.
Haters will say he’s over 6 foot, in his 20s, a natural athlete, and can afford a professional team of the best trainers, chefs, and nutritionists working around the clock to achieve that physique. I’m nearly 40, 5 foot 9 (and a half), and almost broke from paying for personal training.
Yet I believe I can do it. I simply have to approach my health and fitness with the same obsessive ferocity that I applied to my Ben & Jerry’s addiction.
In fact, I don’t even have to do it. It is already happening, through the mysterious force of motivation, and the inescapable laws of momentum.
If I was going to add an inspiring message to justify this piece, it would be simply this: start.
Although motivation is mercurial, you can put yourself in its orbit with an honest acknowledgement of where you are right now, and the decision to take the first steps to do something about it.
As soon as you do that, momentum will begin grinding and whirring into action, slowly at first, then like a runaway train heading to either shitsville or fitsville, depending on which direction you’re facing.
No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around.
Start today.
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