That was then – over weight! This is now
When I first started this site I was not sure whether I should really write about me and include photos of me and my family. As I’ve previously written, I used to drink alcohol, be over weight and generally have no idea about exercise, training or diet. I have started intermittent fasting / time restricted feeding; embraced foraging and am trying (albeit badly) to embrace meditation and mindfulness having made 2023 the year of mind and soul.
I have also thought a lot about this blog. Whilst I still want to maintain privacy especially regarding my family – for obvious reasons – I have felt it is important to be a bit more open and describe my journey in greater detail. Although I have covered this in some detail throughout this site, this post will solely be about me, my struggles with weight and alcohol but then also my journey to how I got where I have through training and exercise.
Sum quod sum – I am what I am
As I have briefly touched upon, I grew up in a village in rural Dorset called Osmington. For those of you not familiar with Dorset, it is the ‘picture postcard chocolate box’ image that everyone assumes England looks like – thatched cottages with creeping wisteria and ivy climbing over the walls.
Dorset: The first years of my life
I grew up as an only child with two incredibly loving parents. My weekends involved walking in the countryside, playing in the garden and swimming. One of my favourite walks was over the cliffs to ‘The Smugglers Inn, in Osmington Mills (pictured below). As a kid, swimming was my sport, and I spent countless hours training at all times during the week. The weekends were spent, again in swimming pools throughout Dorset and the wider Westcountry.
Eating out and drinking
Eating out in restaurants was definitely a recurring trend. I started to develop bad habits, I remember routinely going to bed feeling ‘stuffed’. Fast forward to the me of 2023, I can’t believe how I let myself eat so much. Perhaps some of this was due to how many calories I burned through swimming? But it was also because I simply liked to eat! As I turned 18 and started preparing for my A Levels, I stopped swimming. It was also as I turned 18 that I started to drink alcohol.
I remember my 18th birthday party being the first time that I felt ‘drunk’. Halfway through a birthday meal with some mates, I went to the toilet, looking in a mirror at myself drunk and not entirely enjoying the experience. Now, I wonder why I ever started drinking. But I was young and it was what we all did. It would take me another 14 years to give up alcohol.
Although I was and am a good cook, I went off to university and spent the next three years eating takeaways, ready meals and drinking alcohol. Having stopped swim training and with a combination of drinking and bad eating habits the weight started to creep on.
Welcome to the world of work
I graduated in 2007 and quickly got a job in Bournemouth, Dorset. I was recognised as someone with a lot of potential.
The senior management team put me onto a fast track development programme which involved completing a part-time MSc. For the next three years, as an ambitious career focussed employee, I was working long hours by day and then long hours at night studying. I also spent a lot of time travelling between Bournemouth and Birmingham where I was completing the MSc. As you probably guessed, my diet involved more takeaways, fast food, restaurants and alcohol with little physical exercise / movement. My weight rapidly increased and at my heaviest I weighed in at 112kg / 246lbs.
The future Mrs GoodGutGuy
It was then as I got to the end of my studies that I met my future wife. This is one of the earliest photos of the two of us on the cliffs of Bournemouth. It is also probably a photo of me at my most my most over weight back then.
As they say, the rest is history and a few years later, we were married.
By this time, we had also moved to Manchester – possibly the complete opposite to Dorset – and we were expecting our first child. Between meeting my wife and the birth of our first child, I had lost a huge amount of weight. I did this unsustainably though.
Rapid weight loss
It was achieved through a combination of a calorie restrictive diet and a lot of exercise and training. To give myself something to aim for, I signed up for the British Heart Foundation’s Pier to Pier swim – a 1.3 mile swim between Bournemouth and Boscombe piers. After months of training, on race day I finished in the top 10! A few months after completing the pier to pier and at my lowest weight we went to Budapest. By this point I was weighing 80kg having lost 32kg / 70lbs.
Ballooning weight
Although I put a little bit of weight on after hitting my lowest weight, I managed to keep it within a ‘healthy range’, largely until the birth of our first child. Although I had started ‘eating normally’, I kept up the training and would go to the gym four to six times per week, mainly in the morning. We bought our house a few months before our eldest was born. There was a lot of work to be done. The day we moved in was the last time I exercised until February 2022.
From that day on, the weight slowly crept back on. I remember weighing myself the day after she was born and the scales tipped 93kg. Furthermore, the old trends had come back. Eating takeaways, stuffing my face and I still drank alcohol. By the time my youngest was born, I was almost back to my heaviest and I was 105kg.
How had I let myself become so over weight again?
I remember thinking that regularly, and hated myself for it. However, I had all the excuses – having young kids was hard, I was too tired to cook healthily etc. Plus, I had the mother of all excuses – working in healthcare at the time of a global pandemic. Of course, thanks to the government, I wasn’t allowed to go to the gym. I could also permit myself to drink lots of alcohol because going into a hospital each day was stressful. At least, I kept telling myself this – there was nothing from stopping me training at home! Apart from me!
However, deep down, I was disgusted with myself. I felt terrible, I would get out of breath after walking up the stairs and getting into bed. But worst of all, I knew if I continued on this path, I’d be a terrible role model for my kids. I didn’t want them growing up thinking the way I lived my life was normal. Nor did I want to be the dad that couldn’t run around with them, or was irritable and bad tempered due to bad sleep and low energy levels.
One of the only good things that came from this period was my interest in fermentation which started out as a lockdown hobby.
2022 – the year I would turn my life around
For Christmas 2021, I got the ‘4 Pillar Plan’ by Dr Rangan Chatterjee as a present from my mum. I started reading it and a few days after Christmas 2021 I knew my current lifestyle couldn’t continue. It was whilst drinking more alcohol that I suddenly made the decision that it would be the last beer I would touch. I also decided that I would adopt a keto diet having previously dabbled in it.
And from that day onwards, I have turned my life around.
In the February, I signed up to the gym to start exercising and training. It was the gym that I used to go to before the kids were born and I quickly contacted Stephen. Back before the kids were born he ran the most mental of classes – bootcamp. By the time I returned to the gym he no longer did classes, but still did personal training and knew that he would give me greater focus. Much like a few years back, I signed up to a sporting event to give myself a target, this time it was the Manchester 10k in May 2022.
Having given up alcohol and changed my diet, my improvement in fitness and the speed of change was phenomenal. Previously, I could hardly run for more than five minutes without stopping. By the May, I was running a sub 60 minute 10k.
Fast forward to April 2023
I am now hovering at a sub 80kg weight. No longer focusing on my weight as my end goal and with a much greater focus on ‘body composition’ I am now focussing on muscle mass and body fat percentage taking on a greater focus. My training regime has changed accordingly with a greater emphasis on resistance training including, weights, strength and functional movements accounting for a greater proportion of my week. However, I continue to do a couple of HIIT / tabata style workouts each week as well.
I will continue to revisit this page and ‘my journey’. But one thing is for sure. After having lost weight and rebounded, I will never let myself go back to the old me!
