Let’s Talk About Weight

A brief insight into a life struggling with weight issues.

I haven’t always been overweight.

There is a story my mother tells, that my father and her were so worried about my weight as a toddler they took me to the local hospital. If you look at me now it’s a glowing endorsement of the UK's National Health Service!

My struggles started when I was about 12 years old, whilst most of my friends were hitting puberty, I was starting to encounter the perils of obesity.

I was very active, football, cricket, riding my bike to the park and spending summer evenings trudging around an old abandoned sandstone quarry. However, I now had the means and sometimes monies to decide most of my daily calorie intake.

My weight rapidly increased through my teenage years. I still played sports almost relentlessly, alas I had yet to make the connection between late-night confectionery and increased waist size.

Fortunately, a byproduct of this was I never had any issues with girlfriends as I never really had any.

Instead for my more svelt friends, I became a portly Cyrano de Bergerac, which was both frustrating and bemusingly satisfactory at the same time. My smugness being largely down to me not always giving the best advice… I had to have some way of levelling the playing field.

As I moved into my early twenties, playing football three or four times a week was only outdone by my more frequent visits to both the pub and subsequent late-night takeaways.

My weight was not surprisingly still an issue.

Any relationships were short-lived, my inner concerns that perhaps I was the make weight until a skinnier option came along, ironically weighed heavily on my mind.

Then I had an epiphany, I had made myself look quite foolish in the pursuit of a romantic interest. So I decided I would try to lose some weight, get fit and see if that helped me improve my chances with the opposite sex.

Men, we are so predictable!

So months of using weights, walking, less drinking, and an improved diet enabled me to lose 48lbs (21 Kgs). I felt better, I wore clothes I liked and I became more of an interest to girls who hadn't taken much notice of me previously. Success!

Well not so much, I am not sure how much happier I was, it was hard work to keep the weight off. I did keep the weight away for about 5 or 6 years, let’s be clear I was not skinny, but I was by no means overweight. It was a battle.

After marriage, my weight ballooned again, such an apt turn of phrase. This time with the help of my competitive edge and a colleague who had an equally competitive nature, we competed against each other and the scales to get our weight down. It worked I was the slimmest and fittest I had ever been, running, with a good diet and fitting into clothes I wanted to wear.

Again this lasted a couple of years, in fact, I even had people tell me I had lost too much weight. I hadn’t and it was something that hurt me at the time. I had put in all this effort, hard work and misery to be told perhaps I should not have gone so far. It didn't last and a couple of years later my weight was back up enabling me to model the latest line in XL sweatshirts.

Another period of self-loathing, eating and more self-loathing meant this albeit familiar story, was becoming as predictable as a Star Wars ending. Before I knew it my weight was climbing back up.

I had the idea this time to enter into a Tough Mudder event. I gave up drinking for 5 months trained hard, ate healthily, and got my weight under control.

I completed the event and it was for charity which made me feel even better.

There are days and weeks when I feel like I will never be happy with my weight, and when I get like this ironically it makes me prone to eating, which then makes me more unhappy, which makes me eat and so the circle goes on.

I don’t buy new clothes in these phases, I tend to wear a lot of sweatshirts and my mood dips remarkably, my wife and children have the patience of saints in these episodes.

And now today I sit typing this brief insight into my yoyoing weight gains and losses about to get changed for the gym to work on getting my weight back under control

It isn't helped by a pandemic, a brief bout of unemployment and my mindset that all this can be helped by a few trips to the biscuit tin, and a couple of slices of toast.

I am paranoid about my children having these issues, and spend my time encouraging them to exercise, watch their food choices and over-analyze their weight. Neither of them is anywhere near the weight or shape I was as a teenager, so my worries are quite unfounded.

I will work it out, it’s getting harder to shift the weight the older I get, that’s for sure.

Perhaps the key isn’t for us to fluctuate between the perfect weight and obesity but to find that in-between stage, where fitting in the clothes that we like is the target and not daily visits to the gym alongside kale smoothies. Perish the thought!

Maybe I need to find a happy balance, maybe we all do?

In the meantime, it could just be that I need to buy a lock for the biscuit tin! The fight continues and I’m hoping that the spoils do not go to the victor…well unless its a few carrot sticks and some sushi!