Running In....

Running has always been a bug bear thing for me. I love the idea of slinging on jogging shoes and just getting on with it from your doorstep, contra driving via the gym', getting my cycling gear and bike in order or worse of them all maybe, driving and messing about with ski-prep in XC ski. I even quite enjoy the meditative nature of running. However running hates me.

How can people who are quite over weight, big boned or bitty-obese, tackle runninn and its high impact on your body ?

My own story is that i was a bit lazy and anti sport as a small kid and this had a long hangover into my teen years. Not only was I a bit overweight and unfit, I was also hindered by growing pains and small feet. About age 12 or 13 i got growing pains in my heels and my previously quite large feet grew it seems less than they should have done - i endes up with EU 45-GB10 at 6'2" which is decidely the smallest feet to height any of my tall peers had. I even squeezed into a pair of nine and a half heels a girlfriend had who was three inches shorter than me!  Coupled to unusually high arches, running has usually lead to injury and me giving it up having maybe built up to 3 or 4 mile jaunts.

In my late teens I took up cycling and the low impact on the body meant I could build up fitness over a couple of years and really enjoy the sport. By age 21 I was a lythe racing cyclist, had a resting heart rate of 38 and could cycle 120 miles at around 24 mph.

Cycling stayed with me as did that rotten appetite you develop, and of course need to cycle five six hour days. Pasta for supper and breakfast, eatiung when you aren't really hungry because otherwise you will go empty or have to eat more than a morcel underway and end up with stomach ache. These days I don't have the time for a lot of cycling and added to the time it takes to clothe up in our often chilly spring and autumn, I decided to try and crack running for the four months or so of the year which are my desirable or qeather enforced gaps between xc ski and cycling seasons.

Dag Otto Lauretzsen the former Tour de France rider, robbed of the world championship hoops by an idiot in Japan, says in his book "get in shape' he had a mate who was very unfit and quite overweight. Of course he decided to something about it, but unlike a lot of folk with a plan and determination, he set out with modest, step-wise goals. He used 'the lampost technique' in building up his running by combining it with walking and running between lamposts, builsing up the running distance one post at a time. That is probably max' a hundred yards in a residential neighbourhood.

I took a leaf from his book then, and decided to build up very gradually towards a five kilometer cross country run ( or jog for me)  at the end of May. Why only five clicks? I can ski 30 and could get on a bike right nownafter seven months off it and cycle 40! Running is just so much higher impact on your body and also for your or I the life long cyclist , the way it stretches the calve muscles and engages other muscles take adaptation. In the reverse situation, I had a friend who was a Royal Marine but when he started cycling, the whole MTB club left him on the first climb.

Starting low is a good idea if it is Tarmac you have outside your froint door. I live on a grove, or ring access road which is about 480m and very lightly traffic'd. The first day out was just that, a 480m half run-jog affair after once round walking. I doubled it pretty much straight away as I had no ill effects and am fairly fit from the xc ski season just behind us. 200m gentle jogging after 800m walking may be ideal for someone heavier and less fit. Since then I have been building it up by ten percent roughly every five days or so.

Also I have been careful on rest days. I try and be disciplined to run every other day. Rigoruous or challenging exercise will stress your body's systems and actually damage your muscles. And tha is a good thing. Your body learns that it needs to divert resources to repair this and also to prepare the body for the next session- it anticipates more exercise. Unlike cheetahs, we don't retain our musculature and  fitness without significant exercise. We have evolved in societies from the days of first agriculture or even before, where we did not always need to be physically prepared for survival, but rather could survive as a flock. There was maybe even a survival advantage in being lazy and putting on fat, in that we exposed our-ancient-selves to less risk, used less energy in building muscle when we didn't need to, while laying on a paunch for winter come harvest time. Harvest feasting and our positive feedback appetite loops on salty, fatty and sugary foods, rare and aought after in antiquity, couple to give us a horrible predisposition to become obese. A rest day to a fitness fanatic who runs xmas morning, may seem lazy, but it will allow your body to recover, repair and prepare so that you avoid injury and get lasting improvement over time. Furthermore, a lot of research shows that you lose the trajectory of improvement if you don't exercise within 48hrs of your last session.

So there was some science with a dash of heavy ethology - specially for the creationists amongst you. I like the lampost method - my step-up increment being 10% - that is what feels right in my legs and feet.  I tried to really push up with a warm up of 960m and interval training totalling  2.8km , with a short warm down two weeks ago and was out of action for six days with acheing achilles, arches and calves. It was too far, too hard and way too soon on Tarmac and hard forrest trails at least. Your body will tell you - small aches and twinges in you muscles and cardiovascular system are to be expected, and next time out you may still feel a little tender and want to hold to the same distance and intensity as the previous session, or even reduce it a bit. "No Pain, No Gain" is true in as far as that description I just gave , whereas for the quite unfit or those taking a major step-up in intensity, uncomfortable, hundering pain in your legs, joints and feet and especially chest pains or radial shooting pains anywhere on your body, severe dizziness and so on is your body saying STOP. Disclaimer, disclsimer, you should consult your doctore before embarking on an exercise programme or experiencing discomfort during or after training - phew.

As the head strong thirty something I was a wee while ago now, I often forgot that in cycling too, each season or when recovering from i njury, it went softly-softly-catch-monkey when I was younger. I remember with the lighter evenings of March, getting out for just 20 mins, then 30, 40, 50, an hour before building up to the two hour sessions which in Scotland were always challenging for headwinds and hills. As a man with longer working hours I used to expect to be able to do three times one hour sessions a week and get really fit. But I had previously built up to 8-12 hours a week over two spring months, and you really get so much fitter doing two hour or longer sessions on a bike. You too maybe were a marathon runner even in your late teens, and find getting back into running really painful and unrewarding. Step it down a few notches and listen to your body.

Goals, Patience, Bad Habits

I have actually lost around a stone since i started my focus on 2 hour duration exercise sessions in january, ie almost 7kg. That is then above average loss compared to the big diet study i linked to in the last blog, almost double. My goal is then 18kg in one year, so I am about a third of the way in with almost two thirds of the time gone.

To make me feel guilty i have had three weekends of over-beer ration in a row and I have not been careful with extras and portion control the last week, with disrupted days. Some days are very good though with a low appetite compared to my previous gluttony for extras and high calorie travel meals.

Now i have to return to the slog as it seems sometimes, but already i can see the benefits on the scales and in the mirror. This time though i am not resting on my laurels and tightened stomach muscles. Muscle is heavier than fat, but also holds a good stone of fat around my middle in better in the mirror. So i mustnt kid myself on, it is all there as it was when I was ten years younger before i got really bloated. For a long time I looked like a sporty guy on either end with a couch potatoe in the middle, and I just held myself in. Then my weight stabalised miraculously at 118kg, 19 stone uk, given how many extras i considered were par for the course. 99 kg is my target btw. 112 was achieved, may have slipped back a little with the beers?

So dont kid yourself that this approach is quick nor that you can just stop the discipline when you can suck and pucker your stomach in : let it hang out, pinch those love handles, fondle those boobs.

In the long term the diet is a life diet, while the exercise is then reduced although i think i will keep up one long session a week.

By determination i got six and a little hours last week quality training before the surprise monsoon conditions sat it. Now I am looking at doing one three hour session, two two hour sessions and a one hour harder session before the autumn sets in with its dank mists and grey days come along.

I thought I had hit peak weight loss but that was a dip from doing sessions which stretched out more than 2 hours and from being very strict, surpassing my extras prohibition! However I do get that tank empty feeling at around 1 hr 45 on my bike so every minute after that is effectively fat burning, and if I avoid sugary replenishment then fat burning continues until the next meal.

Hidden Calories

Today I came upon a trap which you should be aware of.

I train like I sai in my last blog, a little at the top end of the fat burning bpm zone and into the conditioning zone because I have the luxury of middle of the day hours to put in, while I spend evenings and weekends with the family. So the last two times I have been out on the longest cycle route I like to do, I have gone empty and hit the wall about 6km from finishing. Those last six kilometers are hard. The body has exhausted all its carbohydrate stores, and I probably have had the runner's wall, a big imbalance in salts.

After exercising I then allowed myself a small can of italien tuna and some nuts, with a quite low calorie sports drink before hand. I also bought a frappe cappucino. Last time I read the label of these rather delicisous little treats from our national dairy producer, Tine, I saw that they contained about 3 spoonfuls of sugar. Wrong, They are actually 62 kcal per 100g. That confuses it more: is coffee heavier or lighter than water?  So it now means this is nearly 200 kcal.

Thus you can be fooled into thinking a snack is a non event in the calorie count. It could be a drink or a small cake or a sports bar. Dont skim read to the calories. Remember to do this also when you are doing your cathartic calorie count of all your extras in life. Be honest about what you take as treats, luxuries, beer and larger or repeat portions of dinner. Weigh some items if you are not sure, and compare a few different calorie counting web sites to see what they mean by a portion.

Calories are difficult but also there is a really easy rule. Here's why:

Calorific value is calculated by literally burning the foodstuff in pure oxygen, and then measuring a volume of water around the glass bubble the burning happens in, to attain how many kilojoules it has used in rising the water temperature per gram of food. However the body does not digest all foods as well, nor does it metabolise some as effectively as burning in pure O2. Nuts and sweetcorn are notorious undigested left overs in your faeces. So is a lot of longer fibre carbohydrates or those bound up tightly in whole grain foods. You shit out calories. This muddies the waters a bit, but let us not follow that debate.

The easy part as the alternative  then is that anything with a high sugar content and particularily a high sugar and fat content  is going to be high on the hit list of cutting right back on, rationing down to say 150 kcal a couple of times a week. Also crisps and ground nuts which are high simple chain starch based and have a lot of oils and fats in them. Other nuts like hazel nuts are not so bad, but I would say limit total intake of nuts and crisps to between 50 g and 100g PER WEEK. That is not a lot, a small portion. Also then limit cakes or buns to ONE A WEEK, and check that it is under 400kcal. Alternatively cut it up or buy small sized cakes but be disiplined to 350 kcal per week.

There is or has been recently a lot of research going on about training on a very low carbo diet, and I am not an advocate of a high fat, high meat diet. In any case a lot of low carbo recipies in the books or web sites are actually very healthy, for example salmon with asparagus or broccoli. Ketosis, catabolising fat, is not a normal, sustainable form of energy provision in western humans. Ikinuits had a shorrt life expectancy before western medcine came to them. So I am a critic of the long term high fat, low carbo diet, while I can see that reducing starchy calories can help. Training on low carbo is a painful affair I found and due to this and the high colestrol intake, I fell off the Atkins wagon. 

I am proposing that we simply match what the human body is meant to do> go on a long hunting trip , burn up sugars and then wander back home with the kill while burning fat reserves. I say that you have to go out and hit the glycogen wall , sometimes like me today, consciously in order for the body to start catabolising its fat reserves. The low carbo diets make the short cut or starving your body of anything which can make glycogen and forcing the fat system on. I dont believe this is natural or sustainable in the long term, but could agree that sedentary candidates who are in a danger zone for obesity could benefit from this instead of exercise in the short term weight loss phase.

Some research seems contradictory, but the medical establishment knows that a low quality diet of sugars, refined starches and saturated fats is what is on the menu of the majority of western patients who have heart attacks, even if they arre not very overweight at all. It is most likely the combination of the western super carbo consumer life style which  is so dangerous, although I suspect that long term high fat low carbo diets are going to prove dangerous to mortality and later life morbidity. I stand to be proven wrong of course.

The consumer snack and soft drinks  industry stands in line at every retail food outlet to pump you with high sugar, high refined starch, high fat products and hides a good deal of deadly palm oil in innocious products like even raisins. The drinks industry has been better to respond to consumer demand for low calorie options of course since the 1970s dieting fad. However the snack industry is currently wrapping a whole load of quite unhealthy bars up as ' sports' oriented products and this not good. Read the label about the kcal inhold, and see how much it all weights.

I found the best snack trade off right now is the chocolate Alpen  bar, at 167kcal. less than half a comparable sized chocolate bar, and with mixed whole grains.

The mantra is limit snacks, subsitute in fruit, and avoid super sizing drinks and meal times.

Sporty and Little Thinner. Pre Weigh In Chat

I am a little excited about my weigh in but really I shouldnt be. For any sporty fatty who wants to lose maybe 2 stone tops, it is better to take it off two pounds at a time. In metric, that is 12kg and 1 kg per month, so that makes a nice round year.

I have been suddenly going down at a kilo a week, and in the holiday month I managed a kilo, so I am pretty anxious about the weekly weigh in tommorrow, but actually that is just going against my own philosophy ! Go slow , stay off for good, change for ever.

I have a little higher a figure 18kg which is around 3 stone to lose. Also I am being a house husband for a while so I can train a little harder during the day. This means that I am up in the top range on some of my cycling tours, pushing 75 / 85 % max bpm during a good proportion of my daytime tours between house work and picking up the kids. For people in full time jobs who feel quite fatigued, it is best to be in the lower segment of fat burning bpm, around 50% to 65% as this will tire you out less and require less concentration. It may seem like a lot of work, and sonme weeks  you may not make 7 hours, but if you can do 5 by stretching out sessions, and squeezing more time somewhere, then you will get the benefit of life changes. If you keep to 7 hours a week, then you will probably see a faster weight loss at some point  in your six months to a year programme.

light is at the end of the tunnel. Like a year out to do an MBA or become a firefighter, the investment in time and the discipline with extras should be very worth while in the long term. After the weight loss period the maintainance period means you can go back  to  a more typical varied training calender, but remember that you can never go back to all those extras again, 22 000 Kcal / month in my case.

I feel my appetite is under control, although you have to be weary.

queue next blog

Main Meals vs Extras : The Sporty-Fatty Diet

Let me delve a little bit more into why my approach to losing weight by physical training and slashing the amount of extras, luxuries and treats you eat, is a sensible and even logical way of going about it.

Most calorie controlled diets focus on starving the body so that it burns fat reserves. Many of the diets which people follow today are commercial, some of them very good, but they want to make money of course.

The ones which have food products associated to their brand,  wage war on main meal times, and sell you a substitute. This is no terrible way of going about things because it makes it easy for you to comply to the calorie controlled diet. A shake for lunch. A bar for breakfast. However for you and I dear sporty but chubby, and for most other overweight people in western countries it is extras outside meal times plus extra portions or extra large super sizing junk food meals which are the culprit, not main meals.

Take a good old British worst in class. Fish n' chips - the fish supper north of the border. A fat and carbo bomb? Well if you take the average portion apparently it is indeed a wacking great big 848 kcal. However even if you eat this for lunch and dinner you may not get very fat at all because that would then be 1700 kcal ,or what a very slightly built, sedentary adult woman needs in calories for a day.  Also, as Dr Atkins pointed out, it is not high fat in diet which makes people fat ,it is high carbos and especially simple sugars and refined starches which cause the insulin response each time you overload the body with blood glucose, and leads to fat deposition when you get too much in a short space of time.

So now take with the fish n' chip dinner,  your  sugary drink and your bar of chocolate which you the Geordie or Scot or Ulsterman consume and you are up to over 1200 kcal for said supper, and you are overloading your blood glucose for a good time as first the sugar hits and then the starch in the chips is broken down to blood sugar by digestion.

Another deamon of the fast food is the quarter pounder cheese burger with large fries. That in itself is between 800kcal and 950kcal. Again no huge issue compared to daily required intakes pf around 2500kcal for adult males, 2k for women. But a large cola adds several hundred calories of the hyperglycaemic type.

On the other side, take a healthy meal high in the trendy omega 3 fatty acids: salmon with spuds and broccoli. This clocks in at an unsurprising 500 calories. Add sugary drinks if it is a bit heavily salted or you are thirsty from training: a typical british or scandinavian well known blackcurrent squash : 220 kcal per half litre thirsty mans glass. How many glasses did you drink when you made a big jug for the family?

European breakfasts tend to be a carbo bomb, which atkins dieters avoid by the trusty egg. But the biggest bomb is in having a large portion of cereal or museli and then having several glasses of orange juice. Given one of these luxury treat yourself breakfasts , a favourite of mine is mini shredded wheat with fruits in them, and just two glasses of orange juice then you are up at 450 calories. An extra portion of that yummy self spoiling treat and you are up at 650 kcal possibly.

Lunch cometh. Often a rushed affair so the sarnie or packed lunch suffices and that is allegedly on average around 300-350kcal, the apple with it is around 60-70kcal. But add a sugary  drink and crisps and you can be up at 700kcal.

Okay so you see that core meals really no matter what you eat in terms of a single portion of that meal add up as follows:
Breakfast ( inc 1 x orange juice)  350kcal
Lunch : sandwich and a fruit 450kcal
Dinner . Main course ,          900 kcal

That adds up to a mere 1600 kcal per day : so if you eat completely normal core meals, even with an unhealthy 900kcal  dinner, then by avoiding sugary things and extras you would be on a really calorie starving diet.

So forget counting core meal calories if you know you eat normal sized portions. It is the sugary drinks, sugary desserts and high calorie per gram extras like crisps, buscuits and cakes which are the real bad guys.

Add then 10 beers after the rugby match at apprx 200 kcal per pint and you see where you have been and where the beer gut came from: once a week binge session with 8 beersx, about what i could down in a big evening for me, and you are at the same calorific intake as from all your meals of that day. Luckily i have never been much of a kebab on the way home man. But that is usually an additional 600-1000 kcal. Okay you are up late on a cold night in Manchester, you need maybe another 500kcal to keep the body going but your net intake is a bit mad. Even if you give up on the taxi rank and walk home at 600kcal an hour on a miserable winter night, then your net intake of a usual saturday night out is well over a thousand kcal. Times that by four for a month and you have put on weight : half a kilo from a typical once a week sporty lad or lass night out on the town.

Half a kilo from sweets and cakes, half a kilo from Sugary drinks ,half a kilo from extra portions of dinner.........
This is why you like me have crept up to being maybe 20kg over weight over ten years despite being 'sporty' and active.

So in my diet I say count up only your extras, but also benchmark your core meals to see if they are about 1600kcal total.

Now you see why i do allow myself some extras, a mix in fact as follows:

1 X 250kcal cake per week
2X. 200 kcal Beer, "pint" p.w.
3X. 80 kcal light beer 33cl p.w.
85g chocolate 350kcal spread out over more than one day
3x ordinary fruit yoghurts@ 145kcal ie with added sugar , per week
2x small additional portions dinner @ ~300kcal each pw
3 x 150ml glasses of wine , @~ 150kcal per glass pw
1X banana per day @ 100kcal
2x other fruits. @ 60kcal each per day
1 x jam sandwich per day @ ~ 230kcal
1x glass squash per day @ ~100 kcal
"".  "".  "".  Orange j.    "".   "~130kcal
50g crisps per week
25g nuts per week

What are the Other Extras to Avoid?

Well they are desserts, snacks, drinks over 20kcal per 250ml glass, extra large portions core meal, additional portions core meals, grapes more than 50g per day, more than one banana per day (if you do not take it as a part of a 600kcal lunch that is, then you can have two.), more than the one 250ml orange juice at breakfast.

Beer and wine are quite limited as you can see, but you can have vodka diet cola or any other very low cal mixer on a clean spirit. The alcohol in spirits does not really all get metabolised to sugar. It is a complex biochemical pathway which uses up a lot of energy underways and spews out intermediate and biproducts underway, which incidentally build up through the night to give you, yep you got it, a hang over.

What's The Down Side of The Sporty Fatty Diet?

Well if you have landed solely on this blog entry, then read further. This weight loss regime does allow you a very nice level of extra wee treats but it is at the expense of exercising three times a week aiming for each session to be 2 hours long with a heart rate maintained at 55-70% max heart rate  ( usually around 120 - 140 bpm depending on your age) .

You will sweat. You will gasp once in a while to catch your breath. You will find it monotomous at times. You will struggle to see the point. You will get exhausted, especiallly at the beginning of your 4 to 12 month programme or in especially hot or cold weather (avoid extremes over 30'C and under -12'C)

However you will get used to the sessions and suceeding to keep your target 5-7 hours. You will get very good fitness benefits from it, and for some like me, much better than even doing say an hour a day five days a week. Most of all you will promote fat burning during and after excercise and you will most likely moderate your appetite as the body gets used to using more fat when sugar stores are depleted.

I will give a footnote to Weightwatchers TM and "the walking diet" who also propose an exercise calorie burn way of counting burnt versus intake. It is just for me, the obvious reason i am sporty yet overweight is not core meals, rather it is due to my appetite for extras and consumer lifestyle.

Some Tricks to Get the Duration of Your Training Up

As I said in my last blog I would help you with some tricks for how to increase the duration of your exercise sessions and more importantly  how to fit them in around a busy forty-something-married-with-kids or thirty something working all the hours lifestyle

Time Bandits

Realise what steals away your spare time. The worst for this in many western countries, especially the UK and USA, is working masses of unpaid, non transferable overtime hours. You are in avoidance if you are fat. You are avoiding conflict by not pushing back. You are often for most average employees working hours which will get your boss promoted and your director a pay rise, not you. Bolchy I hear you say? There are plenty books to make you more efficient at your job by spotting time wasters and time wasting activity and learning to prioritise.

Well there are hundred of time bandits every day at work especially and some at home.

Let us though say ok, to hell with that, you must work and/or do family stuff all week and have no time for any long sessions of exercise.  Okay then we are looking at getting five hours out of effectively 30 woken hours from friday afternoon cessation of work week to sunday evening good night story. One sixth of that will be used on your waist line and building a better cardiovascular system.

Firstly to say, moderate intensity exercise is relaxing and recreational!!! The stress of sweating like hell, collapsing on the floor, leaving with acheing muscles is not there. You can start very lightly and build up from your 40 minute current base line as a sporty-fatty dabbler in exercise very easily.

Take saturday morning. Kids at TV, saturday supplement in hand, tens cups of coffee....get your arse out and go do a gentle joggy walky tour for two hours, think about planning the rest of the weekend, gather your thoughts from the week, listen to an interesting radio show or talking book on the mp3 player. Same goes for sunday am> on this regime you will be avoiding drinking alcohol much, limited to two beers a week and half a bottle of wine each day evening on friday and saturday. No hangover, everyone else doing very little, get out.

The other dead time I find is late saturday afternoon after the shopping is done and the kids are picked up.

Squeezing and Stretching
So you see you can squeeze things into those 30 hours at the weekend, and allow maybe a one evening window for a two hour session by letting some e-mail chains answer themselves.

Another big benefit of doing moderate exercise with only 50/65% max heart rate is that you can start exercise much sooner after you eat dinner during the week, or at the weekends. So after a light meal you can be out half an hour afterwards while you arre still digesting your food. Hey presto, a mid week session is in the bag and you can still put the kids to bed or go and read some e/mails for an hour at night. Also your lower intensity will mean that you sleep better than having done shorter, higher intensity sessions which start an hour after your dinner.

So you can squeeze things in even with a 'busy' lifestyle, but for many single sporty-fatties you will need to stretch out more than you squeeze.  You maybe do a couple of training sessions a week and then say play a full 90 minute rugby match or five a side football match, or XC running hack at the weekend.

You need then to stretch out your sessions, while also moderating down their intensity given you know that they have been 80-90% hard work outs . 

The simplest way to do this effectively I believe is to build up over a three week period. Firstly sessions which were 40 minutes in the gymn, get stretched to 50 minutes, then an hour and ten minutes and so on. Commuting work outs get a detour, probably best with some form of circular route or one you can cut short if you do get really tired or bored. Build up is the key there. 

Variation. To keep up interest, especially in the gymn, vary what you do within the session. Also you can vary outdoor sessions by route or type< cycling is very easy for anyone to build up to two hours tours on because it is low impact and you have gears to enable a steady power input over varying terrain. On that topic, use your terrain cycle (MTB or hybrid) on trickier paths and longer gradients, taking it easier and being in the woods so to speak . Then as an alternative, become an accidental tourist and combine various routes to sight see or go places you never bothered to look at before, see how new building work is getting on and so on. 

if you already have a team activity or sociable training session in your weekly plan, then it is likely that this is say spinning or five  a side. You need to talk to the team, coach or mates and explain that you need to take it easier a little during the session because you are aiming for endurance training. Then you can add a warm up and prolonged warm down to the core hour session, and hey presto you have stretched it out to two hours.  Maybe some of your friends will join you. A mid week club sprinty cycle ride may then get a splinter group who do two to three hours of slower steady training.
Take another sport, swimming. It takes a very dedicated athlete to takle two hours of chlorine and so on, but building up to an hour session and maybe that is one and a half miles , 100 legnths of a 25 m pool.  Then combine this with jogging lightly to the pool and jogging home, or cycling, or walking with a heavy pack.

Finally coming back to our modern hectic lifestyle, we go from seat to seat, and I know myself that I have driven as long as forty minutes to get to a gym each way of an evening. In urban traffic this could well be quicker by cycling or even jogging to the gym. Choose then a gym within walking distance or either your work or home, or en route between the two to which you can combine the commute to during the week, mornings or evenings, or at the weekend where an hour in the gymn with half an hour each side commute will whizz by.  The same can be done with team activities, but then that may mean going down to the B team or taking a different position with agreement from the coach where more moderate intensity can be sustained> defence in stead of mid field for example.

Combining with Family

Combining with the family can be tricky especially with small kids who cannot keep going for longer than a half an hour or so. The best way with small kids is to get a bike seat for them or a twins-trailer. However do not expect them to sit there for more than 20 minutes at a time> rather, combine this part of the cycle tour with delivering them to friends or an activity, and then use the bike alone. Commuting once again, or just having some time foryourself while your spouse plays with the kids, while stealing maybe as much as an hour by commuting.

Alternatively for walking or XC ski tours is to carry a pack of 10/15kg or more and do a two hour family tour, where you keep moving about when the family take those little breaks, just up and down in the tracks or on the spot a bit.

As kids get older, some of their sports activities become longer and you can then do the commuting thing and train while they are at the sport at the same facility. Sometimes as in swimming clubs, you will find that there
is a lane for parents you maybe didnt know about (they keep it a bit quiet so it doesnt get too busy) Getting your kids used to physical commuting will set them up for life with a good attitude to burning calories instead of driving everywhere.

Stealing From Base

So you see that this is all about the already sporty, but fatty, who has used the car invariably to go from A to B to sport. What we are talking about is upping the base time by varioous wee cheats as as well as just stretching out the duration in your three weeks of the regime. For me it was easier> I come from cycling and enjoy long tours in the hills or back woods, so I was able to up my sessions to two hours immediately when the XC ski season began, and then build up my cycling to two hour sessions within a couple of weeks of beginning. I prefer to go out on the bike twice a week for two hours when it is dry, and then have one brisk walk of around two hours. I have found that with moderate intensity I often spend a bit longer than anticipated out, especially when walking, while also the reverse, if I have a good run on my bike on a usual route and complete it quicker, I then go round the block so to speak for upto half an hour at the end, or extend the turning point out. As the XC season approaches I am interested in trying roller skis, or alternatively joining a gymn or club with facilities for indoor skiing machines. My local gym is only ten minutes brisk walk away, but I can easily extend that by various routes of upto half an hour without them being ridiculous detours.

Psychology Behind the Sporty-Fatty Plan Training and Diet Regime

Maybe some diets have some hidden psychological tactic behind them. Perhaps those single food type diets, the pineapple diet for example, trick you into liking food less.

Also exercise programmes: perhaps some of those have hidden agendas to awake your inner sports beast. I don't know. I want to be open about why the sporty fatty regime works psychologically.

We are probably born all of us, to be amateur psychologists, working out what other people do and why they behave like they or we as a group do. Some of this sub consciously, we just get to know what is normal and accepted for us personnally, what is different and what is maybe some behaviour we dont like.

However we as individuals assert that we have much more free-will than we actually exercise in our lives. In truth people have two horrid psychological flaws which hinder free will and change in lifestyle.

Beer Bellied Creatures of Habit

Firstly the vast majority of people are creatures-of-habit. We get used to our own routines in life. Worse than that some of our routines are completely counter productive- presenteeism at work is one of the worst. Hopping around in a self imposed super hectic lifestyle is another. Sitting eating crisps on friday night is another bad habit. 

The body collaborates by having systems of homeostasis> this means that any sudden shock to the body like a crash diet is likely to be fought back by the body wanting to return to its status quo, which may have taken years to establish. In our case, it is simply that we have learned to eat too much and habituated our lifestyles to short exercise bursts rather than the very beneficial long moderate intensity sessions.

So when a crash or starvation diet comes along, we just dont like it. We want to return to our habits. I resented the Atkins diet despite it varying in fact what I eat for breakfast. I just found it a hassle and something I didnt want to do. Also the last time I had a strict regime of long duration exercise and self denial, I felt depressed despite losing a lot of weight. i felt I was denying myself and forcing myself.

The first thing about the sporty-fatty diet is that it does not give you wholly new patterns in which to behave. Rather it modifies patterns  you already have. You already exercise. You can continue to eat some treats. You do not alter your main meals at all if they are healthy and balanced.

Beer Sheep

Of less importance perhaps depending on your social life, people are also terrible for behaving by following the flock behaviour. So in the UK we buy rounds of drinks and end up drinking what everyone else is instead of abstaining or taking a water. This means that many of your weekends, or even mid week post sports "quick wee bevvy" with the lads /lassies become calorie cramming sessions where after  your overloaded blood sugar is deposited as fat while we sleep the alcohol off.

So we don't break all old habits and end up miserable and we dont stress the body out, we rather modify our exercise and moderate our eating.

Having said all this remember that this train and control your treats diet is aimed at sporty fatties,  who have already forged the good habit of going training rather than sitting on the couch or doing more work, or reading the paper, or staying in bed at the weekend. So I doubt that this will be a very succesful regime for the sedentary person, unless they find that they enjoy long leisurely walks, jogs, cycles, swims, canoeing or extended gymn sessions etc etc and are able to form the new habit quickly. For example though as for myself, it was a period of unemployment which I decided to stretch my sessions out to over two hours, and now I find it easier to do this each week as if it was no real time at all, just like doing my time sheet at work or running the kids to school. More on that in the next blog.

Keeping it Real : Be Real Simple

Another fact of life when learning new ways of doing things as an adult is KISS: keep it simple, stupid!  Many diets including the Atkins diet, have differing phases where you alter things or even titrate in new foods or more carbos. Others have all sorts of recipies to keep you interested in eating basically watery salad leaves and cucumber, with tiny amounts of what we actually like and what makes us feel satisfied (which is where the Atkins and low carbo diets score high, you get satisfied by high protein, fat filled food)

Also many exercise training programmes include at least three different types of exercise and at least three different strict durations, and then they alter this week by week towards some presumed event or 'goal'. Basically for anyone who is non training for competition or very focused on a better body, it is complete overkill.

What I say here is keep it all simple and easy to relate to, while also admitting to yourself that you must make some changes. So for the duration of the entire weight loss you will build up to and complete 5 - 7 hours per week of moderate level exercise. You will eat normal meals but you will have normal single portions. You will have some treats and snacks to enjoy or self reward, but these will be very limited with simple arithmetic per week.

Goals Goals  Goals

Simple. It is a game of two halves and it is all about scoring goals, as the cliche of the pretentiously philosophical football commentator goes. One half is exercise, the other half is cutting out extras. The goals are very simple
A goal for 7 hours training per week in three sessions.
A goal to keep control of extras
Individual goals for each type of extra control. You win, but you also have had a nice lilttle treat.
Goals for keeping your intensity and duration of exercise up. This gets a little harder actually as you get better trained
A Goal / Reward for each month that goes, a declining waist line and kg on the scales
A Goal to make your new weight your long term light, fighting weight
A Goal to Get Fit and Use Your Base to Use your lighter body.

Simple Arithmetic Deal Making for the Slimmer Sporty-Fatty

In my last blog i did some simple calorie counting arithmetic, adding up JUST the calories from high calorie treats, beer, snacking and extra normal food portions per week, and then multplied by four to get a short month's worth.

The pre amble here for you dear also Sporty-Fatty, is that I do not binge eat or snack frequently,  i just know like anyone that i have some beers some nights, some chocolate after meals, a cake or two here or there,  and so on and so on. All small offences, and anyway I train so I should get some freebies right?

Well that sum of lifes wee luxuries came to an astonishing 22,000 kcal per month. That is around 3kg ,half a stone of fat from what i considered a perfectly reasonable allowance of goodies. Put it another way:  It is almost ten extra days worth of eating per month.

However by in large when i was training short and often,  i wasnt putting on weight, but did put it on at xmas or on holiday. When i set out on  fat-burning longer duration sessions january this year, 2014, I very slowly then, over five months,  lost three kilos (half a stone)

Simple arithmetic: i was doing arround 24 hours training exercise a month  @ 600kcal per hour on average, so was burning off around 14 000 kcal per month in addition to just being alive.

In net effect then compared to intake of just extras as the enemy, i should have been losing the battle by 8 000 kcal per month and therefore putting on a kilo. But I was slimming a bit, at about 650g per month. That is about 5000 kcal equivalent.

So then I thought, wait up here, the longer training sessions are switching my fat catabolism on at last, since coming off the atkins a year before and putting all that diet loss back on. But compared to my bad habit calorific intake , I am getting a net better net negative effect anyway (???)

The reasons for this discrepancy in my calculations could be several or a combination: Perhaps as a big bloke i burn more like 1000kcal per hour on skis or the mountain bike. Perhaps my treats actually in part constitute  say 500 kcal per day of my non training calorie needs. Perhaps my body has learnt to catabolise fat and does this after exercise when I am recovering,  or maybe at night ?

What ever the causes,  I was slimming ever so slowly without actually changing underlying diet : i was not going crazy in comparison to the excesses of Christmas 2013 and last years vacation in cheap beer and wine land, Denmark. However per month i was going mental in taking ten extra days total intake in treats and extras!

It seemed though a lot of training hours for 3kg and vulnerable to putting it back on if injured. I considered a back up plan of atkins again. Then i went back to my joke of comparing atkins to a diet with no beer and sweeties!

So here  I saw the opportunity to grasp my appetite and lifestyle while demands of work and family allow for 5-7 hours training per week in two to four sessions.

Basically i can eat a few treats to keep myself sane.

Here is what i decided to allow myself since  i was going down in weight a little anyway without limiting my extras well:

Two beers a week, 400kcal
100g chocolate.     450kcal
1 cake bit / muffin 400 kcal
50g nuts/ crisps.    250 kcal
Two extra portio.   600 kcal
                                ====
Total per week.      2100kcal
Per month c.         9000kcal

Versus calorie burn:
                              14 000kcal per month

Net effect.           - 5000 kcal per month

The last three months I have lost a kilo per month with fairly good levels of "compliance" say around 90% for the cut back on extras,  and reaching 7 training hours per week.

This is as noted above, a kcal net minus less than the theorised 7000 kcal /kg . This does not trouble me ! There can be some tissue fluid loss. More likely i am burning a training relating 20 000 kcal per month because i use more per hour and i go onto burn fat in particular upto an hour after training.

So in effect i have decided to ONLY count the extra calories on top of what I usually eat. I actually avoid desserts, but have a yoghurt twice a week and maybe an ice-cream dessert. As long as I train and avoid extra portions of these I can continue then. 

Also i take fruit and wine as "free" calories because I consume them in moderation. Exclude more than one banana a day or one 50g portion grapes though. Wine means a bottle per week of normal red or white. Avoiding doing it all in one night that is!

Another change I made was being careful not to snack before or after exercise by planning out meals to take, or planning to eat at a time where i avoid snacking in between. Alternatively,  the snack is healthy and replaces a meal. Or i count the snack as one of my two extra portions dinner allowance per week.

Also on the point of extending your fat burn after a two to three hour session, in recovery modus , avoid simple sugar sources like the plague for an hour. A banana gives quite slow blood sugar release as it is digested so is ideal for example, right after exercise. Two bannanas ,some nuts, and an apple would constitute a meal post session.

So it certainly isn't monastic at all, but the key is to keep the training to over two hours for at least two sessions a week, and then avoid snacking and adhere to the weekly quota.

Now into my fourth month and having had a mixed active /sedentary holiday, I am still on track 1kg per month but also i am starting to find it much easier to conform to the avoid-extras-dieting side, and my appetite is starting to go down.

In essenced what i present above is a target of 7 hours duration exercise per week and a limit to my extras to 2100 kcal.

By default i have counted the calories for you ! The fatty calories are all in our extras and luxuries, not from a 'staple, balanced diet' which includes usual single plate portions of protein, fats, green vegetables and carbos.

For your own sporty-fatty calculation, I bet you that you were like me and taking in currently a net surplus on paper of about 5000 to 10,000 kcal/month verus exercised hours at maybe 800kcal per hour but short duration.

For me the bug bear was beer, 10 to 12 a week before. Here I have totally decimated intake. Poor me? Well no, wine and clean spirits are free and i take a chilled fizzy water or diet cola as an alternative "cold one".  Everything else is ' halved' but more over to that, it is controlled while still being a nice treat to look forward to.

The other bug bear for me was what i once called my post exercise "snackette", which filled in during the time it took to arrange dinner. With planning I now avoid this unless the "snackette" replaces a meal, or if i downsize the meal ,or if I count one of my weekly extra meal portion allowance. Also a snackette should be healthy: a whole meal bread sandwich, a fruit bowl, 50g of nuts and raisins.

My final general black dog on the shoulder was justifying a lot of additional intake of calories by actually having exercised in forty minute to one hour sessionsp, two to five times a week. This plagued me for years and gave me a super-appetite. Also this was a hang over from old cycling days where carbo loading for a four or five hour training run, or a race, was a necessity: stuff yourself or go empty.

I think there are many sport forty somethings or even younger folk for whom this is hitting the nail right on the head. Also for the  onlh wee bit chubby sporty, who is maybe at a  competitive level but still carries a bit of unsightly lard.

My point of view is that if you are going to count calories then start with your sociable drinking in the pub ,then sweeties and cakes ,then salty snacks, then any more than two juices / 500ml sugary drinks per day, more than three desserts or starters per weekx, then also extra portions at meals. Your regular diet as the lay person and sporty type is likely to be a healthy balanced diet which you do not need to alter the core of. Also if you change your duration up to two hour sessions, two to three times a week you can live easily with some wee luxuries and loose weight in a sustainable and healthy way.

Sports diet supplements (which are over 200kcal per half litre or 250g)  are a trap: they are for endurance sports or if you train very regularly and hard, with a total of over 10 hours per week. Despite being healthier than sweets or cola, they are extras, to be considered as such in the 5-7 hour week plan.

Why We Are Sporty Fatties ?

The answer to why a person can train hard three to four times a week but still be fat is that on net, we in western countries are eating way too much.

Diets in the traditional starvation sense, are both counter productive and outright boring for many. I tried atkins amongst others and found it a bit dull, but more over it was really expensive and difficult to coordinate with family meals.

But I did loose a good few kilos on the atkins, putting them straight back on though after i got bored with it. And the Atkins diet got me thinking : okay all the naughty luxuries i eat and drink are high in simple carbohydrates. What if instead of atkins you just cut out the beer and the sweets?

Another reason i came off atkins was because i wanted to train cardiovascular condition and frankly i believe it is not a healthy combination.

So that got me thinking after i had put all the weight back on. I trained then five months in fat burning duration and intensity and lost maybe three kilos. This seemed pretty poor effect from 7 hours a week training in long sessions. It would take me several years to get down to 100kg. Also what if i couldnt train?

I went back to thinking about the atkins diet and cutting out sugary extras. What if I just cut them out and did nothing else (apart from my training)?

I decided then to count up my extras and got a shock which both explained why I wasnt losing weight and why back in the late 90s I had managed to put on an unwanted 3 stone despite being quite fit.

Take beer for starters of course. 150kcal per pint appx (c. Half liter) Beer is not so evil, in fact the sugars in beer are short chain starches and without the alcohol in it, beer would be a good endurance sportsdrink or liquid breakfast with medium to slow release carbo's. However many beers doth a beer belly consist of. So eight beers a week is 1000 kcal. Doesnt sound so much?

But then take the higher calorific nuts and crisps we take with said beer. That was about 200g at a wacking 500kcal per 100. Another 1000kcal per week. Hmmm.

Then take a regular "extra" - an additional glass of OJ in the morning and several glasses of squash with dinner. We can also round that off to 1000kcal per week.

Now chocolate and cakes or buns:  one 250g bar per week @ 450 kcal/100g per week and a couple of cakes @ 250kcal each. That is for point of arguement 1500kcal per week.

You start to see the sudden awakening I was having to my theory, which started in fact as a joke about atkins compared to just cutting out beer and sweets.

Now i could find the last culprit for luxuries or extras and that was simple: extra portions of dinner. This was happening three to five times a week because i was feeling hungry from training or the food was just there, in the bowl or pan on the table which is how we like to have a family dinner or candle light for two.  So that mysteriously enough I could approximate to 1000 kcal per week.

Now here comes the shock : i had been looking to train up condition gradually with long 2 hour sessions, and expecting weight loss to be best measurable  as per month.  So i then added up my weekly "extras and luxuries"  times four, and this is how it went:

1000 extra dinners
1500 choco/cakes
1000 exta juices
1000 crisps /nuts
1000 beers
====
5500 kcal per week: 

A staggering 22,000 kcal per Month!!!!

What was staggering was that I could easily allow myself all those extras without thinking much about being a candidate for obesity! Read again- they probably seem a reasonable set of little luxuries to you, and if you are from east coast usa, a paltry amount.

Now dieticians and physiologists disagree a little on aboslute quantity of calories per kilo of fat deposited (7000 to 9000 kcal per kilo) so let us bet on the high deposit side, and that means that i could be in theory larding up 3kg per month. (About a half a stone )

The fact is I wasnt laying on that much weight usually. However my weight probably did peak at 120 kg and was often around 118kg ( over 18 stone) and my waist line was pushing out of size forty trousers.  The fact was, as we will see in my next blogg, that I was exercising and trying to be "grey calorie burn" active, walking about and so on. The fact also was that as i exercised longer, so crept in more snacks and more extra portions of dinner and OJ to the level above, because i was hungrier and I was thinking i should keep my blood sugar up to avoid exhaustion ( fat chance!! Excuse the pun).

At a level of five to seven hours training a week, averging maybe 24 hours per month, then my weight was creeping down a little but the trouble being that my appetite was creeping up! So the danger is when I get an injury or holidays and xmas come that bang, three weeks go and i eat 18000 kcal in extras and put almost half a stone on again.

I decided then upon a compromise as you will read in the next blog.

Sporty-Forty-Fatty?

Introduction

This is a new blog for people who are just a bit like me: sporty but a fatty.

In this blog I will try and help people who are 'struggling' to lose weight aged over 30, while they have been keen sporty types or even very competitive athletes previously in their 20s.We still train but we are lugging around some extra baggage under our lycra and we are not getting thinner.

What you need most of all to do is to realise the errors in your ways, while also forgetting a traditional calorie starvation diet which so many people either become energy-lose or bounce back to fat gain from anyway. Also we will look at this problem as being something which is quite slow to fix, has lasting changes to appetite and lifestyle, and of course involves effort. Null Virtue Sin Labor.

In common with most diets - when you bother to read the whole book and pay attention to what it is saying at the end - then diet is a phase after which you have a new lifestyle ie you eat less for most food related diets, and continue to eat less.  The lasting change in lifestyle do not really happen, that is why dieters fail so often.

Starvation diets fail for many people because they can rebound in two ways: many dieters develop actually a poorer appetite control  while some people prime their bodies to replenish the fat as soon as they finish the diet. Due to the starvation when the body reacts by expecting more starvation and laying down fat.  Also many people fail to go through with the diet because they are so boring and restrictive in what you can and cannot eat.

In this approach to losing weight I propose that we -the sporty-fatty - can firstly realise why we are carrying around a lot of lard on our middles, and then do something to lose weight and tackle our appetite. This takes what I call an effort phase followed by a maintanence phase, which is basically the lifestyle change. However what we are talking about is peaking in the dieting phase and then coming to terms with what we can maintain in our life balance beyond the diet.

Some diets like the "walking diet" are aimed at the sedentary couch potato.There are some former sports personalities who have written on the subject, Ian Botham and George Formann spring to mind. However here is my take, and experience actually underway.  I will warn you now that this is probably the slowest diet for the most hours put in training possible, but in being so it is the most sustainable and has the longest lasting effects for the sporty-fatty.

What we are going to look at are two main very simple factors which will help you lose weight and keep it off, and make you motivated to follow this long term course.


Prologue and Philosophy:

I was about 3 to 4 stone overweight for my own satisfaction. There in lies a first major tip- for your own satisfaction:  throw out body-mass-index BMI if you are sporty and do any sport which puts muscle and bone mass on. If you do an endurance sport like long distance cycling, marathon running or longer triathalons then BMI can be a reasonable guide, but it is based on historical data from before the pumping iron, getting tattooed craze started in the late eighties through the nineties. My ideal weight is 2 stone under my desired weight, at which I think I would look emaciated and ill: as 6'2" I would look like a lanky long distance runner with hollow cheeks and tiny sinewy muscles.

Also I was training actively all year round, a bit up and down with how many hours per week and the intensity and duration of the training, and frankly a bit aimless. Too heavy to race, not a gymn animal enough to get a body builder or gymnast's figure: no real goals, just the knowledge training at least three sessions a week was good for the heart and soul. I enjoy training a lot, like any sporty fatty, but not in huge amounts and not every day. However I do not enjoy being fat, 14 kg of lard.

We tell ourselves a good few lies about eating and exercise, and we fall away from discipline easily without setting goals. The core of the dieting side of this series of blog notes is that we eat and drink way too many extras. Life's little luxuries. In fact our training can be totally counter productive on appetite control because of its form and the time point we do it: we snack before or after training, we drink sugary drinks as a treat after training, we eat extra portions of dinner because we are more hungry after training.

The two worst factors for training which contributes to fat gain or fat status quo are

1) We 'carbo load' or snack to allegedly keep our energy levels up

2) We end up eating dinner late into the evening after training.

To tackle the first, and this is one we must tackle: Training effectively one hour aerobically in the gymn, or a 5-aside match, or a cycle, ski or run takes up more time and we think we need to either load up with additional calories the day before or take a snack before, during or after. This type of squeeze it in training often is effectively even shorter if we actually time "an hour in the gymn"- we maybe only get 40 minutes training. In that time we have barely used up available blood glucose and tickled muscle glycogen stores. We have burnt little if any fat. Worse the 40 minute burst can adversely affect our appetite as we get that blood sugar low before glycogen release from the muscles and late liver balance out our energy supply. "no pain no gain" means a lot of anærobic activity which is the worst for burning fat because not only does it only use sugars, but also it is only short time sustainable and you need to use a lot of oxygen to clear out the lactic acid before the body can then start metabolising fat, which is actually a more aerobic process than burning sugar.

Training in the gymn takes up time and we often do it straight from work or say weekend mornings before we have a lunch and treats with friends or family. Coupled to being more hungry immediately after we finish and not pushing our bodies longer towards liver glycogen and eventually fat break down, if we eat late we over compensate in calorie intake, late at night when we are more likely to lay down any extra calories or simple sugars from the meal as fat....   and lose no weight, despite being a bit fitter.

The new mantra of peak burst and intensive super aerobic weight lifting work outs is actually very good for many who are trained as it can help maintain a higher average VO2 max , anaerobic threshold and strength. However these max out bursts are pracitally useless for losing weight in the first place as above.