Fat to Fit, but still hungry – My story - Part 1
Before the Beginning.
That guy on the right of your screen is me, awesome aren’t I? Back then I was over 16 stone with an impressive set of moobs.
I had created barriers, and they were holding me back.
I'm sure almost everyone can resonate with this at some point in their life.
Of their mindset holding back any progress.
Actually, there is often very little really holding us back. For me, I can conclusively say there was Nothing at all, apart from a mindset of delay and denial. “there was nothing more I could do” or I would deal with it later.
As a teen I'd played pretty high-level basketball. This helped my basic health and fitness by default, but I was always skills focused, not fitness. I wanted to shoot, dribble and do all the other little tricks I saw in the And1 mix-tapes…
As I got older, I always carried excess body fat and was not particularly strong or muscular with it.
Endomorph shape but no strength to back it up.
In my twenties, I had a gym membership and even used it, from time to time. There was no real progress made in my physic or health from this though. Probably because the workouts were typically "Bro-science” - gone wrong, 3x10 chest and bicep focused. I never trained legs, paid any attention to my performance or probably did a decent workout!
My diet was whatever I fancied at the time, or was easy to make. So lots of eating out, takeaways and oven baking.
Being chubby was getting OLD.
I wasn’t depressed by any means, but I was self aware and self-conscious, Making decisions based off being fat, not what I really wanted to do.
This is probably the same as soo many people reading this but i still feel it’s important to say. I decided to make a change - to get myself in it the right shape, size and weight for life and long-term Health.
Things happened in my life, and they affected me more than I realised at the time. It’s worth mentioning them as they help to explain where the sudden change of mindset came from and where this all began.
1st pivotal moment and biggest impact…
I lost my Grandmother, the 1st death in the family I had dealt with personally.
She died, basically from long term health problems in the end, mainly due to her having a poor heart. She went too young and was unwell for too long in her life. I remember her having big operations from a young age and never getting much better. My now wife, then girlfriend, never got to meet her. That as well as family genetics played on my mind.
"Bad Health + Bad Heart = an early end" … Did I have the same genes?
2nd
I started to realise the lifestyle I was leading as well the then "workouts" I was doing were getting absolutely nowhere. I’d drink and eat all weekend and then pretend to be healthy for 24hrs or so on Monday. Strangely, I wasn’t getting any healthier, fitter or lost any weight. Funny that!?!
3rd
In my basketball (by 26-27 YO ish) I was becoming less than useful. I'd played for my County, South West UK and trained with a few England teams. I coached too and I played National League Premiership division as a 12-18YO. So I should have been able to hold my own the on court and enjoy it, I thought!
Basketball defined me as a teenager and now I was losing it. In local men's league, at the prime of basketball age, I got frustrated. Often subbed to the bench and fairly useless when I was on the court!
Finally, the beginning!
Health isn't in the Gym.
The first step I took – probably the easiest looking back - was to up my gym game. Changing my diet would have been too much for my mind then to admit. It means a lifestyle shift, and when you’re comfortable (and chubby), changing a diet is not an acceptable idea. Self denial still had hold
So, my sporadic gym workouts became a 2-3 month plan with set routines, exercises and even… rest days!
No more “rock up” and mess about with mates for an hour, but a 8 -12 week plan with a goal and structure. Recording lifts and times, focusing on getting results and looking for improvement in all areas, not just my physic.
The goal was to add muscle and lose fat - aesthetics and health. I also wanted to lift heavy weights and have some impressive numbers in my locker should any one ask (Dude how much do you lift these days?” HA!), even though I have no idea what that was. Impressive compared to who?? As you can probably tell, still pretty misguided.
I got stuck in for a year or so. Learnt more and more about the exercise side of things with no focus on nutrition and diet. I knew my compound movements and my isolation movements. How to structure a workout and plan with enough volume, rest and even some more advanced ideas. Like Trigger routines, mind muscle connection and so on (pretty pointless at the time considering!)
I’d work hard in the gym and then go out and have a pizza with a few beers.
Working harder and harder in the gym without taking any notice of my diet, the fuel that was running everything. Pretty obvious really!
Again plenty of people will have been in this position. Some are lucky for a while and their natural increased testosterone as a young man and some genetics get them to their equally short-sighted view. I wasn’t that lucky, but either way we all end up with the same results from this approach…
Add up the compounded muscle fatigue from an strenuous training plan with an unbalanced, poor diet, very little mobility work and the result is mediocrity!
After some initial short-term progress, niggles of injuries pop up more often. Then you make No progress, bear in mind I hadn’t learnt to food for fuel yet - I was going backwards as fast as forwards!
“You can’t exercise yourself out of a poor lifestyle and diet.”
Work life balance - more perspective
As a tradesman, an Electrician, my working life started to take over. I was working with my dad in his business and we did what was required day to day and job to job to get sh!t done. Large project or small, something was always pulling you this way or that, at all hours of the day.
You’d think working long hours in fairly strenuous activities would keep you trim but it doesn’t.
Actually, what generally happens is your body adapts quicker than you realise and so a lot of guys under-exercise and over eat, due to time constraints and stress. It’s not an easy life when you step back and look at it. For me, I don’t think it was a good fit either.
Fast or convenience foods becomes the norm. A lot of this stuff is barely food - highly processed and full of hidden sugars and fat. More research and effort goes it to the consumer wanting to eat another after another, hiding calories and ensuring you don’t get too full, so you never stop eating than providing something convenient and nutritious.
Studies have shown that processed, convenience food is so useless to the body, calories shown on the pack are not always processed by the body correctly and instead can cause malnutrition and gut issues. It’s like its not even food!!
I believe food for fuel should always be nutrient dense (not necessarily calorie dense), wide ranging in colours and textures, with variety & balance of nutrients at the core. This should the basis for any long-term healthy diet, whatever the personal goal. By definition, nothing about this is inconvenience, or super time consuming in the age of availability. Next to every pie, pudding or bag of crisps, is fruit, vegetables and lean meats (cooked and not).
I started to read blogs on health & fitness and (cringe) bought supplements.
Although the nutrition sections of these blogs and sites were often lacking, or just promoting their latest “muscle building” product, the importance of nutrition and proper diet was starting to beat me into submission. I started to see It wasn’t about flavour all the time and what condiment to add to my chips.
This was before protein was the latest fad on product packaging. Yogurt got lucky right?!
SIDE NOTE This trend to “high in protein” as the selling point is only part of the real story in food for fuel, but it is a step in the right direction. Just remember, check the nutrition facts on the back! Sometimes its laughable the so called high protein source, it should read, high protein, compared to how we engineered it with no protein in before! But that’s for another time.
I remember reading something called “the 80-20 rule”. In bodybuilding (bear in mind where I was getting my early insights!) the article suggested results come from 80% nutrition and 20% in the gym.
This stood out to me, particularly as I was the opposite!
“You can push a hard as you like in the gym, it’s the fuel that makes the difference! “
The obvious next step was diet. Eating to fuel the body correctly. A total shift, in mindset at least needed to be done. At least as a test to see if all the stuff I had read was right.
I took the tracking skills I had from the gym training across to my food intake and guess what?
Shocked myself!
The changes to my body were really quick and very noticeable! I noticed in literally 3-4 weeks, people commented within 2 months of the changes. That’s proof for me of the unequal balance in fitness, and health, to getting proper nutrition to fuel the engine correctly. I’d spent 2 years + in the gym and now in 2 months what I started this all for was happening!
It’s also proof of how bad I had been eating before. In my next Post, I’ll share the 2 contrasting diets.
Luke