For those of you who have known me over a few years you may have noticed that I suffer from the problem effecting many Australian blokes – gaining weight. I had put on about 30kg from 1988 to 2008. This has caused all sorts of niggling problems such as joint pain, insulin resistance, sleep apnoea and increased heart rate and has encouraged all manner of health professionals to test me and to extract copious amounts of blood for all manner of mysterious tests. As if I didn't have enough hassles with the symptoms already.
Anyway, I have tried to reverse the situation by doing various courses, dieting, increasing my fitness …etc. These have been of mixed success but since February 2008 my weight has been slowly coming down. In mid-July Jane and I decided to refocus on the weight loss program and this has lead to greater success for me and I am pleased to say depending on various calculations of BMI either today or tomorrow I will become unmorbid.
I cannot really lecture to anyone about how to do this as there is obviously more work for me to do before I reach a weight I am happy with (I am about half way taking off the weight I put on since 1988). However there are some things I wanted to note.
Alistair requires walking and so we walk for about 30-45min per day with Alistair, this is very enjoyable and moreover it is exercise we all benefit from. We don't have to do “boot camp” style exercise we get enough from our daily walks and it is more enjoyable.
Jane and I go to a gym (Lets Get Fit) and our trainer Lil Bull is a trained exercise physiologist and guides us through the exercises and mentors us rather than doing all the screaming of the TV Trainers.
Simone Launt-Peters our dietician has really helped in educating us about what we eat and keeping us honest by weighing us.
We did a course called “Change Your Thinking” by Sarah Edelman (based on her book) that really helped me change how I thought about implementing dietary change (among other things).
Jane suggested putting the cheese in the spare fridge and this has effectively stopped my spontaneous snacking on cheese. I ate allot of cheese.
I thought about various alternatives to dieting such as the popular stomach stapling. But when you look into the alternatives they also requires extensive diet change. The stomach stapling for example requires massive diet change in order for it to work as does hormone therapy. So I felt it changing my diet was inevitable. Looking at Simone's meal plan and using Sarah Edelman’s techniques I got my head into a space where I could really make the changes to my eating patterns and stick with them.
I am sure others will find different routes but for me I have to report that I am unmorbid.
