Well that’s that! Christmas and New Year are done. Let’s get on with 2020 and working towards the Parish Walk - after all, it is only 24 weeks on Saturday until the big day!
To celebrate the new year and new decade, I have broken out two new pairs of trainers. Wow! I did not realise how worn out the old pairs were. It is like walking on lovely squishy pillows now.
Personally, I am looking forward to getting back into the regular training routine and knowing what day of the week it is.
I have tried to combat the additional calories and the excesses of Christmas by doing some extra training. With that comes additional tiredness and aches and pains. I will just be glad to get back on a predictable pattern.
Hopefully the weather will improve as well. It has been dreadful some days over the holidays. However, you just have to drag your ass out of bed and out of the door. No staying in bed as the easy option. The hardest bit is pulling on the kit and taking the first step out of the front door. I find that once I start and especially once I have finished a training session I feel relaxed, happy and like a million dollars generally.
I find my training is amazingly good for my mental health as well as my physical health. It is a chance to think and put everything in order as there is nothing else to do - apart from putting one foot in front of another.
My training does not really increase from now until late May. I may do a few extra miles here and there but a week generally consists of 2 or 3 mid week walks of around 6 miles and then a long Sunday walk of between 15 and 22 miles.
It is just a case of keeping plodding on, as it were.
I thought that I would use this entry to focus a bit on my nutrition and the position that I came from up until now.
I will be absolutely honest. I have food issues. I am an all or nothing person. I cannot simply have one biscuit or piece of chocolate. It is the whole packet or the whole bar. My capacity to eat without feeling sick absolutely amazes me. So I find it easier to just avoid the junk food completely. I would love to be able to have a few bits here and there but I am not at the point yet. Madeleine is trying to help with rationing some post heavy training treats but we will have to see where that goes.
I also have an obsessive personality in other areas. When I focus on something or get into something it absorbs me completely and I can take it to the extreme end of the scale. That can be great sometimes but also can have problems associated with it too.
It has been a good thing when it has come to changing my lifestyle and losing weight.
When I first finished the Parish Walk in 2014 I would estimate that i weighed in at about 105kg or maybe a little more - around 16.5 stone. Proof that sheer stubbornness can get you round the course rather than being a skinny whippet.
Madeleine was heavily pregnant when she was supporting me that year and did an unbelievable job.
The plan was that I would do the walk again the following year when Elliott had been born as it would be a lot easier for us. We would just ship Elliott off to grandparents and I could walk with Madeleine’s support. Well that never happened!
We soon found that parenting gets in the way of training, eating, sleeping and every other aspect of life.
Instead of trying to finish in 2015 and 2016, I just wandered to Peel and actually quite enjoyed it.
I took a break for 2017 and realised how much I enjoyed and missed being part of the event.
During that time from the 2014 finish to July 2017 I had been spending “quality time” with my newly increased family.
I thought that spending every evening at home constituted quality family time. We had a good diet, or so I thought. We ate very little processed food and would always try to cook from base ingredients.
The problem was that our portion sizes were far far far too big. I was probably having 2 or even 3 times the amount of food that I needed. Also, carbs featured heavily in most days - rice, pasta or potatoes. So heavy on carbs and heavy on volume was a bad combination.
Well something wasn’t right with that idea as by July 2017 I had hit 124kg! I had ballooned - although being a big guy, everyone said that they had not noticed.
I made the decision that I wanted to prove that my 2014 Parish Walk finish was not a fluke and that I wanted to try and finish again.
That is when Angela Clucas at Next Level Nutrition was recommended to me. I needed help to try and combat the sickness that I suffered with on long walks and a sports nutritionist seemed to be the obvious place to go.
As I have mentioned in an earlier post, Angela was great and managed to get the subject of our first meeting around to losing weight but made it seem like it was my idea. I agreed that I would sign up with her and follow her guidance. I have been working with her ever since and I can honestly say that most of the gains are due to the nutrition work.
So how did it and does it work?
Angela has completely re-educated me and my understanding of food and what my body needs.
Angela sets my macro levels (calories, protein, carbs, fat) week to week based on the past week’s results, training levels and phase of training that I am going through. She never dictates what I eat and I am not following a meal plan. I have my macro targets and how I achieve this is up to me. This is great for flexibility and being able to eat the foods that I like. If I fancy eating the same thing for seven nights running then I can do that.
The mantra is consistency of habits. This is something that Angela instills in me and within her wider client group. If you make consistent poor choices then obviously the results will be poor. However, making consistent considered choices will bring great results.
I try to stay to my targets every day but life gets in the way sometimes and it is not always possible, especially in the last six months when I have been travelling with work a lot. The over arching aim is to stick to the targets for 5 days out of 7 but most of the time I would say that I manage 6 days out of 7. I can still have a pub session if I like but I know that I cannot do that every night, unlike the previous version of me.
I log all of my food into the My Fitness Pal app and I weigh everything. Some people say that this is too anal and too picky but I have recognised that I simply cannot judge weight and volume by eye. The kitchen scales are most used bit of kit in our house now I think.
Every Sunday night/Monday morning I check in to Angela’s online system. This pulls through the macro information from My Fitness Pal. I then add my weight, body measurements (chest, bicep, waist, hips, etc), some progress photos and then I answer a bunch of questions about how things are going and how I feel. None of this is specific to me and all of Angela’s on-going clients follow the same process and answer the same questions, no matter what their goals may be.
Angela then gives feedback and advice during the course of Monday and provides the macro levels for the coming week.
The process works perfectly for me as it keeps me on the right track. I have to justify my choices to someone and explain what happened if I fall off the wagon. If I was left to my own devices then I know it would be a case of - it doesn’t matter today, I will get back to it tomorrow. Unfortunately, tomorrow would never come!
So over the course of the 2 years from July 2017 to June 2019, following this system, I lost about 40kg! I started the 2019 Parish Walk at around 12% body fat, down from 32% when I started.
All of these changes were gradual over the period. I lost around 1kg-2kg per week and sometimes my weight went up depending on the week and what I have been doing. The key was that Angela monitored the loss carefully and made sure that it was not happening too quickly so as to be unsustainable.
I now appreciate that losing weight in a controlled and maintainable way has to be a combination of nutrition and exercise. They work hand in hand.
Every 3 months I also have a body comp session with Angela. This basically involves her drawing all over me with eye liner, measuring me with a tape measure than then nipping my skin (fat) with callipers!
The body comps allow me to see “real” progress rather than our dodgy weekly tape measure measurements at home. It also shows if I am gaining muscle and losing fat. Weight may not change too much but the underlying composition may be significantly different.
Again, some may say that this is over the top but I have found that I keeps me focussed and pushes me to make improvements.
There is also another huge motivator in all of this.
Whenever I need to remind myself why I do this and why I put myself through the tough training and obsessive food monitoring I always refer back to a couple of pictures. This will always reset my mind and remind me of the promise that I made never to go back to where I was in 2017.
June 2017
May 2018
The massive realisation has been that the “quality family time” is not the time at home every night of the week but instead adding an extra 20 years to my life, not having a heart attack at 50 years old and getting to spend that extra time with Elliott and Madeleine.
I put my family through hell sometimes with my moods when food or training is not going right. I just hope that they realise one day that I am only bothered by it so much as I know that it is so important for my health and psychological well-being.
So that is where I have come from and where I am now. Every day is still a battle with myself over food but I know that I have to keep following the plan to stay fit and healthy. This is worth it. I feel fitter, healthier and overall happier than I have ever been.
There are still demons to be fought but I will overcome them and “Fat Paul” will never return. My relationship with food is still not good but I am determined that this will change as time goes by and I understand nutrition and training cycles more.
In the meantime I really want to string together a good run of Parish Walk finishes. The finish times are never too important to me but rather being able to say that I beat the challenge again!
Hopefully my posts are still vaguely interesting to some people but, as always, please feel free to give me feedback. My next post will be a bit more on the detail of my food during training, carb loading and also during the actual walks.
Happy New Year to everyone and get out there training!
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