January 13, 2012
by Laurence Gunn
0 comments

Purging and detox: an idiot’s guide to weight loss

I wanted to wait until a week or so into the new year before I wrote another blog entry; at this time of year, advertisers and marketers are busy cramming the airwaves and t’interwibble with desperate pleas for us all to start on their fitness or diet programme, or buy whatever food product that claims to be low in fat (as part of a balanced diet…though usually the sugar level is through the roof) and I had no intention of trying to compete for brain space among all that loathsome adver-tat. As ever, it is a shameless exercise in trying to prise open our wallets in yet another ill-advised bout of consuming our way to health and fitness.

To update you briefly on where I am with my weight-loss and exercise regime: I’m probably the only person in the western world to have lost weight over the Christmas holiday period, so much so that I actually managed to go down from a 34″ to 32″ waist trouser. This was primarily down to my regime, which in this instance unfortunately meant being away from family due to a lack of means to get back to the family heartland in deepest, darkest Essex. On the upside, this meant that I was nowhere near the usual rounds of goose-fat roast potatoes, kilo tins of confectionery and one-more-won’t-hurt sloganeering. I wasn’t alone, though: I was looking after an adorable rescue dog, Chico, who has now been re-homed somewhere very loving, surrounded by kids and an endless supply of socks to steal. Combine that with new year’s eve spent in the drunken company of a lad’s mag pin-up favourite and it was a pretty good holiday all round.

I’ve not been able to exercise much over the holiday period though, due to a shoulder injury that I incurred doing wide-grip pullups. I managed to give myself acromioclavicular strain, which is a pretty unusual injury to inflict on yourself the way I did it because it is more commonly associated with impact injuries such as heavy rugby tackles or car crashes. I was limited to cardio work, so my time in the gym was spent getting to know the stairmaster intimately as well as pounding it out on the bikes; I even managed a little time on the treadmill despite my knackered knee, which was incredibly edifying.

I certainly didn’t do enough in the gym to have lost weight through exercise, so for me this whole period was great support for the idea that weight loss is 70% dietary regime and 30% exercise.

Doubtlessly, this reads nothing like your holiday break, which I hope was fun-filled through and through. And this is where I want to get back to what I was banging on about in my first paragraph: if, like so many others, you have overindulged in the Christmas break, there’s a fair chance that a small little beacon went off in the back of your mind that looked or sounded like a new year’s resolution to cut out the over-indulgence, just in time for the deluge of adver-tat as mentioned. This kind of resolution is perfectly understandable and, moreover, is a great idea! I hope that you are keeping up your new regime a few weeks in and are keeping a sense of humour about the whole thing.

Frequently, these kind of resolutions will start with a January purge, most often a month off the booze or cutting out meat, sugar or some such. It might well be backed with a strict, month-long detox diet. If this sounds like you then might I make a suggestion right now: stop. For the sake of your own health, just stop. While there are many assorted kranks out there that will advise this sort of thing as a way to get the new year (new you) off to a flier, there are plenty more medically qualified dieticians, doctors and surgeons that will tell you what a stupid thing a purge or detox is to do to your body.

A detox is a monumentally daft thing to do. I’m not the first to say it and I won’t be the last: what exactly is the foreign particle in your body called a toxin? Have you tried asking your GP? Oh, you had it defined by a magazine or advert? OK. That makes sense. Lifestyle journalists, advertisers and marketers are well known for being BMA qualified.

The net result of such a purge is to force your body to find the vitamins, minerals, acids and other essential compounds it derives from food elsewhere, usually starting with your lean muscle tissue and then your internal organs, not the fat that you are actually trying to get rid of. Last time I checked, a fully functioning liver and kidneys were pretty important in losing weight and generally maintaining good health.

Once you are done with your four-week plan, your body then craves more of what you have been starving it of to replace what you have lost, which is likely to cause you to overeat. Presto, a few months later and you have not only regained the original festive excess weight, you might even have put on a few more pounds. The product marketing cycle doesn’t help either: January’s detox is soon out the window in the face of the year’s first pay packet, a Valentine’s meal and, of course – for anyone with kids – chocolate egg season soon follows this. Move on another month and the good intentions of the new year’s resolution have become a hazy memory; a few weeks further on and we’re back to starving ourselves to get ready for the summer holiday on the beach, a fortnight or so usually spent gorging on the regional delicacies and sampling copious quantities of the local plonk (we are Brits, after all). Yo-yo dieting, anyone?

Stop! Take a step back! It’s really simple: don’t detox, purge or whatever else you want to call it. Cut down your consumption by all means if you are overweight: seek a balanced regime of carbohydrates, proteins, amino acids and fun certainly, just don’t go to extremes. Speak to your GP; they’ll most likely advise you to go slow and steady and can help build a dietary regime suited to you. A crash diet might ‘get you there’ faster but you’ll most likely end up fatter by late February or March because your body really isn’t designed for diet by starvation.

Better eating and a better body is a slow process, one that we still have not managed to shortcut in a consequence-free way, despite a hundred-plus years of snake-oil salespeople telling us otherwise. Our product making is still not more advanced than our evolution, even if our marketing and advertising is.

Happy eating!

December 6, 2011
by Laurence Gunn
0 comments

Failure: the basic principle of successful fitness

Men’s health and fitness is a strange beast, a huge industry incorporating gyms, trainers, supplements, clothing and fashion, magazines and websites (and blogs…), weight-loss products, weight-gain products, medical staff and complementary therapists among many others. Making all of them profitable are the advertisers and marketers, the masters of the micro-message, who are forever enraptured with promoting the idea of ‘faster, stronger and better’ to men.

I often think to myself, if I were to take the messaging of these stakeholders on board wholesale and live it, would I convince myself that I can become Superman or that I’ll live forever? When I contemplate all these industry players vying for my attention and, lest I should forget, my hard-earned cash, I wonder if the actual meaning of successful health and fitness management – long-term commitment to a good dietary regime and regular exercise – becomes lost in advertising white noise. All that is sold is the image, the end result: from zero to hero in 30 seconds, straight to the six pack, broad shoulders and not-so subtle suggestion that Gisele Bündchen is now making a beeline for you.

Will I become Superman if I slip this pill or wear these trainers? No. I know this just as well as you and it seems laughable that I’m even making this point. Yet we all know that our rational minds tend to fly out the window when we are in the midst of a shopping frenzy, or sat on the sofa watching Rocky: we imagine ourselves differently. Narratives often encourage us to put ourselves in the shoes of the hero; advertising and marketing does the same thing. Both sell dreams, the only difference being that marketers and advertisers back it up with products.

It’s a pretty underhand trick that is being played, promoting the idea that you can be the all-action hero and succeed simply by buying health and fitness like any other commodity. I’m both amused and appalled at the sheer volume of quacks peddling consequence-free shortcuts on that basis; as a journalist, my inbox is littered with examples. Of course, to sugar the pill even further en route to opening your wallet, there’s rarely an opportunity missed to superimpose the idea in your mind of you, that ideal, heroic you, onto a photograph of someone quite exceptionally physically attractive*.

*(Someone who, by the way, is most likely simply born that way by dint of their combination of genetics and the lucky chance of developing an appealing phenotype.)

The point here is that this kind of message making is designed – consciously or otherwise – with one thing in mind, which is that you, the desperate believer on a quest for success, must fail in your ambition and give up; if you didn’t, you wouldn’t spend profane amounts of cash forever chasing next season’s quick and easy answer. Cue glossy advert…

The weirdest thing for me is our collective ignorance of the real meaning of that very 600lb Western Lowland in the room: failure. For many that continue to gorge on the feast of fitness fads, failure represents giving up, hopelessness and a swift return to comfort eating, drinking or whatever else. What a shame. What a waste of energy. Of life, even.

When desperately unfit people start a diet and exercise regime, they are prone to giving up easily, only ever to return after completing the subsequent emotional loop of hopelessness, self-recrimination, apathy and then, eventually, inspiration. (That inspiration will usually result in spending, of course, a cycle that marketers and advertisers know only too well.) Why? Because they feel that failure makes them less of a person; they think that, somehow, things are easier for other people ‘because x, y and z’. (I include myself among this number.)

Failure just isn’t the negative term that fitness beginners think. There is a widespread lack of understanding that failure is usually a sign of success, that you have done as much as you can, that you have tried. Certainly this is the case when it comes to training with weights, because if you don’t work to failure then you’re not doing it right!

Failure is good because it tells your mind (and your soul, if you are so inclined) where your limit is today: when you reach failure physically, your body then goes to work repairing itself, making itself stronger and better able to cope with what you throw at it. Ally failure and repair to your imagination – that bit of you that sees yourself as the action hero – and progress and hope is what emerges. The difference between the 30-minute quick fix that advertisers promote from when you do it for real is that success is a slow process: you have to look at where you want to be tomorrow, next week, next month and in six months then commit to it. You have to commit to failing regularly! Geddit?

Both mentally and physically, failure is a process that should lead to constant review and improvement. It’s the same for the body as it is the mind, as indeed it is the same for art, business, science and engineering. The next time you see an advert for a fad diet or pair of trainers that puts across an image of the body beautiful, take it on board and imagine yourself with the body that you want by all means, though don’t forget that success along that road takes time, effort and, most importantly, endless failure.

November 9, 2011
by Laurence Gunn
0 comments

Amit Gupta needs you!

I was sent this a few hours ago and have put it up unedited. Please read and do what you can…

College student Amit Gupta has just under 28 days left to find a suitable bone marrow donor to combat the Leukemia threatening his life by getting people to get a cheek swab to test for compatibility at http://amitguptaneedsyou.com/

Because South Asians (Indians , Pakistanis, Nepali etc.) are so sparsely represented in the donor pool a unique all-out drive has begun to beat the clock and the disease.

“Leukemia is a word no one wants to hear. It is a type of cancer that starts inside your bone marrow. Amit Gupta has it, and his survival is 30% to 35%. A bone marrow match would double his survival. people are severely under reported in the donor pool including other minorities. finding a perfect match are about one in 20,000. Amit has been using social media to get the word out and reach potential donors. ” Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN, USA. http://on.cnn.com/sELFzT

The nature of Acute Leukemia is it’s swift and often unheralded, undiagnosed onset. Amit had been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why. After an exam and some lab work his doctor called and was brief, “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.” Within hours he was hospitalized and the race had begun.

“I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. South Asians are severely under-represented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help,” Amit said.

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

Amit started the photo websites Photojojo and Jelly. Both sites have galvanized into action with “Swab for Amit” gatherings, making calls to South Asian clubs and putting out the word all over the Internet.

A few ways to help:

– If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
– Anyone who is South Asian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point them to http://amitguptaneedsyou.com/

Students have organized a donor drive by contacting 100kcheeks@gmail.com. They sent kits, flyers, information and made the whole process easy. From NYC to San Francisco from the UK to India strangers are participating to help find a donor and save Amit’s life and eventually help others.

November 3, 2011
by Laurence Gunn
0 comments

Why I lost 6kg in six weeks easily

The way a piece of toast bites on my front two teeth and molars is of immense importance to my mornings; the soft cracking of hard-baked flour, yeast, salt, fat and water at breakfast should cut though the aluminium thickness on my tongue just so, like some bizarre gastronomic exfoliation, greeting my taste buds with its subtle biscuit accents.

These days, two pieces – wholemeal – are the stock breakfast accompaniment to a pair of perfectly poached eggs and a generous blanket of fragrant black pepper. My mouth coddled awake and ready to speak again, there’s then tea, my faithful brown friend: brewed for four minutes, milk in first with the bag, one pint at a time. It’s not a polite social event, as my oft-used and mangled Liverpool FC mug will attest, rather my fuel for the day.

Lunches and dinners are all home cooked using fresh ingredients and little salt or oil, though the important midday meal is often missed as the concentration required by work dulls my appetite to little more than cerebral white noise. I’m a good cook, it turns out, a fact that my housemates gladly attest to at least a few times a week; spiced, grilled meats, fish and chili are en vogue among the MaidaValeables these days.

Former days of dietary sin
Frankly, it’s all a bit squeaky clean, devoid of decadence, though I haven’t gone as far as snacking on bean shoots yet; I’ll leave that until I’m 90. It’s a far cry from how I found myself weighing 88kg (13st 8lbs): over the years, dim sum, pizza, patisserie, kaeng phet, mithai and alcohol ruled my cupboards, a lifetime of comestible-centred ignorance complemented and compounded by the typical UK office fare of cheap chocolate and cake*.

Gobbling and golloping through the day was my default behaviour; I did it without thinking or questioning. I grew up thinking that being full meant feeling stuffed and that this was a good thing; I also developed a habit of eating something refreshing or cool when I was bloated, just to relieve the discomfort.

I got the fear, though, as I reached 30 a few years ago. Knowing that there is some history of cancer and diabetes in my family and having seen the pain they cause, I reasoned that I wanted the best chance of a different future for myself.

To get from that point to this – from 88kg to 82kg in six weeks – is a big change and it came down to a surprisingly simple decision. If I wanted to be fitter and slimmer, I just had to practice being conscious about it. Every single time I felt the sensation to eat, particularly junk food, I had to learn to question it. Am I actually hungry, or am I reacting to someone or something else, such as someone singing a lyric from a junk food commercial?

I acted when I realised ‘it’s your life, stupid!’ and went from constant, unthinking grazing to being able to rationally challenge my impulses for just one more doughnut or chocolate. It was a simple choice to be responsible and I practice it every day now. One big practical help along the way so far has been keeping my food diary.

Digression
It took a moment of peculiarly abstract thinking to reach that imperative to act. As a lover of English (sometimes misinterpreted as a pedant) and casual learner of Romance languages, I happened by accident one day to remember the French phrase for dieting: suivre un régime.

When I say ‘diet’ in English, I tend to use it as a contraction for ‘reduced-calorie diet’. I also often invest emotionally in it: Garfield the cat puts my thoughts succinctly for me, saying that diet is nothing more than ‘die’ with a ‘t’ on the end. The connotations are all of denying yourself and endless grind and, still for a lot of men, there’s something distinctly unmanly about the whole affair. Illogical and overly simple as it sounds, for me, ‘regime’ doesn’t carry the same negative cadence when associated with ‘food’: these days I don’t diet, I follow a regime.

The other thing that has been a massive help in changing the way I think about food is to not ruminate about how I used to behave around it, or think ahead too much about traditional gorging festivals such as Christmas and New Year. It doesn’t pay to beat yourself up about past mistakes; it is also a terrible misuse of energy to grow anxious about connecting dietary dots so far ahead of temptation season. Much better to think about only today’s meals.

I know that if I start thinking about how much I have enjoyed eating entire 1kg tins of Christmas chocolates over the years now then I’m giving credence to the possibility of doing it again this year. In anticipation, I might even act on the idea of buying a cheeky box of pralines now.

Or I can just arbitrarily decide that it’ll be better for me to not think about Christmas stuffing until that particular week and have an apple now if I’m actually hungry. By the time that holiday arrives, I can just take each temptation on a case-by-case basis because I’ll have spent a total of 14 weeks doing it. I’ll have fundamentally adjusted my idea of what good eating is by then through experience, learning to consider one day, one meal, one snack at a time.

No miracles
I thought of healthy eating as a big daunting wall, that there was some great secret to doing it right and, just as an extra kicker, I conned myself into believing my genetics meant that I was predisposed to be fat. It turned out that I had just been standing too close to the wall because, stepping back, I found that I could walk around it with no problem…and without resorting to miracle techniques.

I’ve been surprised by the level of support that I have from my friends in dieting and starting a fitness programme. By our own admissions, none of us leads a monsatic lifestyle but the guys are right behind me in making the effort that I am. Maybe it helps that I’m cooking a lot at the moment…

*As an aside on that: birthdays!!! Who came up with the idea that the person having the birthday actually has to buy all the bloody food for everyone else?!? It’s one of those little life tips that is suspiciously absent from school curricula, along with the biology lesson about nasal hair never stopping growing.

October 24, 2011
by Laurence Gunn
0 comments

The three Ts of a perfect press-up

I’ve just been speaking to my awesome housemate, cousin Nico, who asked me about press-ups, or push-ups if you’re from the other side of the pond; I found myself passing on a lot of things that I have been learning recently from Gary Logan, my trainer.

While I have had the benefit of one-to-one training twice a week for the past month (at great personal expense and going so far as to make a blog about it as well), Nico has embarked on a more down-to-Earth, dare I say it, pragmatic and sensible approach: at-home training. Both of us, though, are essentially after the same thing, which is improved fitness and strength rather than beach-perfect pecs and abs. After all, the nearest sand to us is in Hyde Park and is used for horses to parade and poop on.

Nico announced in his inimitable, understated tones, that he has been doing three sets of 27 press-ups each morning. I did a double take, re-ran his sentence in my head and blurted: “That’s FAR too many to do in one session, especially being new to exercise.”

Now, press-ups are my least favourite exercise, equal alongside chin-ups. With each press, my will to continue drains faster than my wallet when I’m in a patisserie. To hear that my housemate had suddenly decided to try breaking a world record, for the quickest dose of tendinitis ever incurred on a new physical development programme, set a few alarm bells ringing for me.

He soon confirmed what I suspected: “I’m the sort of person who has to do things until I can’t carry on, until I’m completely knackered.” I know that mindset well. Mine is exactly the same, which is why I’m now recovering from knee surgery and Achilles’ tendinitis and have a mangled knuckle in my left hand that can come only from a boxer’s fracture.

This whole conversation was weirdly timely because I’d been having virtually the same one with Gary while training at The Third Space gym this morning. Gary had been telling me how much time people waste in the gym doing the wrong exercises the wrong way and at the wrong point in their training programmes; not focusing on these areas leaves people prone to injury. So bad is the problem that he actually spends a significant amount of his time on the floor at The Third Space correcting people’s postures and technique as they work out unsupervised.

Much as it is tempting to let a good mate injure himself for my own amusement, the better part of me decided to physically show Nico the correct technique for a basic press up in the early stages of a fitness programme. I worked out while demonstrating that a good press up comes down to three factors:

  • Timing: keep a good tempo at all times while raising and lowering yourself, not too fast or slow
  • Tension: keep your abdomen and oblique muscles tense throughout the exercise (pretend that you have a weight balanced on the small of your back to encourage your body to do this)
  • Technique: never push yourself up to the point of locking your arms in the open (stretched) position; keep your collarbone (calvicle) and shoulder blades (scapula) parallel to the floor; keep your hands set wide apart, not under your chest or abdomen*; do a maximum of three good sets of 10 repetitions

*There are many different kinds of push up that focus on different muscle groups and that are useful for more advanced training, so it’s not always appropriate to have your hands wide apart but, when starting out, this is good form to follow.

You can see a good video demonstration of press ups here on YouTube from FitnessFuture in the absence of footage from my untidy living room.

Of course, it’s the age-old story: as soon as I had finished demonstrating push-ups, I was being asked about pull-ups (we’re ‘lucky’ enough to have a chin-up bar in our house). No rest for the wicked.

To gloat briefly before I depart: I’ve lost 5.5kgs in the past month since starting my training and diet regime. My clothes fit better and I’m more mobile; it’s a relief after the past year but, better than that, it just feels good.

October 9, 2011
by Laurence Gunn
0 comments

Impatience, post-surgical recovery and training

I had knee surgery in July to remove a flap of meniscus cartilage; I put a 2cm tear in it while ambling innocuously in the office in November last year. That injury followed a bout of Achilles’ tendinitis – in both ankles – that I brought on in over-enthusiastic training for 2010′s Bupa Great South Run.

I’m 32 and have to remind myself constantly that I’m not 17, especially now, when I want to exercise. These days, recovery takes longer; four months since surgery and I’m not fit to jog or run. I’m still a long way from full training and sometimes, some days, in my enforced semi-permanent reclining, I simply boil with the frustration of it.

Learning to be calm and rational is key, employing the kind of patience that has so far in my life eluded me. I reason often with myself that I can’t afford to be patient with a spare tyre around my waist anchoring me down to be caught by type-II diabetes or cancer. What good will I be as a dad some day if I can’t run in the park, or if I don’t even have the energy to take my kids out at the weekend?

My imperative to work hard and get fit is strong but, from where I’ve lain for the last year, immobile on my sofa, hypnotised by soporific waves of traffic endlessly flowing past my lounge, I peer blankly into the library opposite: I can’t move properly. Physically, I’m less than I was and I’m ever-less sure that I can make it back to full fitness. I’ve been so long removed from the credo of ‘faster, better, stronger, happier’ that I’ve started to question if it is worth pursuing. Sometimes, I begin to think that slowing down a bit isn’t such a bad idea. But not yet. Surely?

On Wednesday, in my haste, I pushed my knee too far. Mindlessly impetuous, I opened up the taps for 30 metres to find a good seat on the tube; running was fine but, when I stopped, there was for a second of my time nothing in the world other than the unyielding hot sharpness of a razor through the rear of my right knee, destination patella. The damned thing has been swollen ever since and I haven’t been able to put my full weight on it today, so it looks as if I’ve put myself back another six weeks.

If you’re beginning to think that I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment then you might have a point. I don’t really care about the pain too much: exercise hurts! I’ve known a lot of people go to the gym and give up a few weeks in simply because doing resistance work requires a lot of effort and is a distinctly uncomfortable experience; a lot of people give up on learning guitar early on for the same reasons. My trouble is that I don’t stop until I’ve injured myself and, lacking patience as I do, I try to do too much too quickly. Caveat emptor!

So, with my busted knee, ropey Achilles’ tendons, tweaked hamstrings and mangled right hand, you might have guessed that the place I’d be is the gym, right? Right.
I’m in training at the moment at The Third Space, under the auspices of an extraordinary personal trainer, Gary Logan; I’ve asked him to get me in fighting shape in six months. It’s a futile request because I know that the mashed metacarpal of the little finger of my left hand can’t take the blunt force of punching. Yet I keep telling myself that I can find a way around it.

(By the way, that’s Gary as in Gary “Shogun” Logan, former boxing champion (W33-L8-D1). A terrific bloke and, as I’ve discovered, star trainer by appointment: someone good enough to coach Jaimie Redknapp and Kylie Minogue in the ring is certainly good enough for an out-of-shape office cube jockey such as I!)

It’s really slow progress, as you might expect in my condition, so my latest impulsive moment with the tube won’t help me get in shape any quicker. Gary has wisely limited me to upper body resistance work but I know that this is only half the picture for what I’m trying to do. I’m climbing the walls to get started: I need to get back to doing cardio workouts.

First of all, though, I have to address some lifestyle issues. When I woke up on Tuesday, on the dot of 7am as my personal training session was starting three miles away, I had a warped little delusion about all Gary’s title-winning shots raining down on me vengefully at some point later down the line. Well, there was that little delusion and about 10 minutes of furious anger at sleeping through my alarm. The ‘encouragement’ seemed to work, though, I made it to my Thursday session with 15 minutes to spare.