I got on the scales on Monday morning, and winced when I saw 83.0kg. Ouch, that hurt.
All week I've been looking at myself in the mirror and thinking "you're getting fat, what are you going to do?" and getting myself more and more depressed about it.
This time last year, my weight was 77.0kg. For the past few years, the average has been somewhere between 76.0 and 80.0. I'm just over 6 feet, or 184 cm, so that's OK. Whenever my weight went over 80.0, I did something about it, watched what I ate for a month, lost a couple of kilos, got comfortable with myself again, and moved on. If it dropped below 76.0 I made a conscious effort to eat more. But since I gave up smoking at the beginning of July, it's getting harder. When you smoke, you say no to the second helping, or the chocolate bar, and you light up a cigarette. When you've stopped, that option has disappeared.
OK, 6kg in a year may seem a lot, but I was in a bad state a year ago, in pain every minute of the day and taking an awful lot of codeine, which does have the effect of slowing down your whole digestive system and make you eat less. I guess if I'm honest, my average for the last five years or so has been around the 79.0kg mark.
Here's a brief potted history of my relationship with my weight and related factors:
0-6 years normal small child
6-12 years growing fatter. 2 stone overweight at 12 years old. BMI 27
12-13 years lost the 2 stone in 2 months at boarding school, BMI 21
13-16 years put it all back on again and more. BMI 29
16-18 years went to college, lost it all again. BMI 22
19-28 years stayed stable around BMI 22
28-34 years gradual increase, accelerated as I stopped smoking BMI 26
34-42 years regular gym, running, swimming 83kg, BMI 24 but very fit
42-44 years moved to London, less gym went up to 90kg, BMI 26, but relatively fit
44-52 years France, started smoking again, static around 78kg BMI 22-23 getting less fit
52-53 years moved to Somerset, eating more convenience food, up to 81kg BMI 24
53 years stopped smoking, trying to stay 81-82kg, not very fit at all.
OK , so there's nothing drastic in any of that. It's not like I've ever been obese, I've never been in the "disabled by food" category. And hey, I've given up smoking! To be honest, at a BMI of 22, I probably did look a bit too thin. But there is this fixation in my head about it, which is very difficult to shift.
The image that we have of ourselves can change, whether we have actually changed or not. That's something that I've learned in this life. And there's something really interesting which I've learned from the stopping smoking programme - that this is all about the subconscious.
When I realised that the reason we feel compelled to smoke comes from our subconscious mind - which wins out even though our intelligent, conscious mind tells us repeatedly that continually poisoning yourself is pretty stupid - it opened up a whole new avenue of speculation. I thought: well maybe my thoughts about weight are a bit exaggerated. Where does it all come from? But looking at that little summary I just spelt out, I think I can see very easily where it comes from. It comes from that bit from 13 to 16 years old. I reckon that is the most formative part of your life, particularly for your subconscious. Depending on what happens during that period, I think you will either be:
extrovert / introvert
confident / shy
smoker / non-smoker
dependent / independent
well-adjusted / prone to depression etc
Why? Because this is the period where we really begin to grow outside of our families. Up to the age of maybe 12, provided we're not rejected by our own flesh and blood, we're pretty much living within the family, our emotional sustenance comes from within the family group. From the age of 13, when the hormones and the ultimate goal of independence start to course through our veins, that's when we start looking for verification elsewhere, we start to push out into the world as ourselves, and a lot of our reactions and basic ideas are formed. Up until that age, you probably didn't come up against a lot of conflict - but from here on, people are interacting with you for reasons other than family ties. Now it's about choice. The ball you're playing with gets harder, but the rewards seem to get better too. You don't really notice beauty until you reach your teens, you don't notice what might be called ugliness either. Up until that point, kids focus on obvious things - big/small; old/young - from the moment the teenage years arrive, then the focus gets more discerning, or should that be discriminating? That's when you really start to make up your mind on things.
If you start to smoke when you're 14, then it's probably because you want to seem older than you are, you want to fit in with a crowd of people who are already doing it. That's exactly what happened to me and I don't think it's much different forty years on. In the same way, if you're fat when you're 14, it's a reason to be discriminated against, and it can lead to a huge psychological complex.
When I was 14, I was - in my own eyes - fat and getting fatter. That made me different to everyone else. I hated the feeling of being fat, being slower at running than the others, people talking about me and describing me as fat. Hearing people say I really ought to eat less, believe me, I tried! In my head, fat and ugly went into the same box. I saw my physical form as something which had been visited on me, and my wildest dream was to wake up one morning and find that all the fat had disappeared, that I was "normal" like everyone else. Because back in those days, a kid with a BMI of 29 wasn't normal. In my year at school, there were maybe two boys who were overweight, and I was one of them. That made me one of a two percent minority, and I was only in the overweight, not the obese category. Today, 14% of kids are overweight and another 19% are clinically obese. So my 2% in the seventies has changed to 33% today. I guess if you are an overweight kid in school now, you're normal, it's not going to damage you so much.
Did I say damage? I guess I did. If I think back now, I can't imagine what it might have been like to pass my teenage years feeling like I was the same as everyone else. But I didn't, I felt like my teens passed under a shadow of fat, and one result of that has been my obsession about it ever since.
I can see, very easily, how people could descend into anorexia. If I was female - and I only say that because girls and young women are more susceptible to eating disorders than boys or young men - then I probably would have been close to being anorexic. If my subconscious mind picked up the idea in my teens that smoking was a good idea, then it will most certainly have picked up the deep-rooted belief that fat is the worst thing that can possibly happen.
I think that my subconscious has been programmed by my experiences as a teenager to despise fat in all its forms. And my feeling of self-worth, my level of happiness, my willingness to be me, all change for the worse if I feel myself putting on weight. Not only that, but having mostly "exorcised" the evil of fat in my own body, I view others with the same critical standard as I view myself, which brings its own problems.
Maybe I can work out a way to educate my subconscious on this one too?
Or maybe what I need is to teach my subconscious to remind me is that it's worth getting up and getting some exercise rather than sitting in front of this computer for hours on end...
Update - 5th May 2014
Well, in the end it took a while, but by the end of February, I'd got it down to 78kgs. That was just keeping my daily intake down to an aveage of 2,000 calories, and I've been on a stabilisation phase since then, trying to work out exactly how much I need to eat to stay at the same weight. And putting on the 501s with the 33 inch waist makes me feel a whole lot more like me again.
The only downside is that I seem to have become ather obsessed with the whole thing. Given I have now been recording everything I have eaten for the past six months, it seems a shame to stop and not have all that information any more.
Somewhere along the line I have calculated that I use up 550 calories over my base level every day on average. So in order for me to keep my weight constant, I need to eat just about 2,400 calories a day. So I will...
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