I started getting thinner just as I entered my fifties. Since then I have been getting younger… fitter, healthier. More attractive, I think.

It’s weird… I spend my twenties and thirties feeling miserably ugly, crippled by my own certainty that I would never deserve or earn the real love of anybody. I thought, and I still think it’s true, that the state of my body was an outward sign of an inner turmoil. How could anyone let themselves get in that state? How could anyone love someone, put their future happiness in the hands of, anyone who allowed themselves to get to such a desperate and long-lasting low point?

I hardly ever had days when I felt great, physically or about myself, and no amount of cheerful bonhomie, generous socialising, reckless drinking and ambitious over-working could, I think, disguise that fact. If anyone ever was interested in me, romantically or physically, I was unable to see it. I would talk myself out of ever allowing myself to suspect it, for fear of clumsy destruction of carefully cultivated friendships.

I was good at friendship, of girls especially, and cast myself into the friend zone deliberately, while secretly falling a bit in love with almost everyone I formed a close bond with.

So now… I have been out of that life for a while, partly by choice but largely because of circumstances. My friendships have been neglected and most have withered. Some, many in fact, were built on a false premise and it’s probably best to let them fade away. In the absence of constant nurturing by me, true friendships sustain. Some others I really miss and it may be too late to recover them.

Meanwhile I have turned into the person I wished at the time, and would wish now if I allowed myself ever to look back, I had been in my twenties. Slim. Not recoiling from accidental glimpses of myself in the mirror. No longer avoiding cameras. Fit, able to run and keep up with (even beat) my kids in a race. I look younger, I feel younger, I probably have more life ahead of me than I did ten years ago.

I’m 53 going on 26. Shame about the girls. But how joyful not to have to worry about all that ever again!

We got a dog a couple of years ago and, despite a pretty radical haircut, he really feels the heat. He slinks from shadow to shadow and can only play for a short while before flaking out.

I know how he feels. While I was fat I was completely unable to cope with sunshine. Heat was bad but sunshine was worse, I was trapped, like the dog, inside a thick layer of insulation which made it hard to bear. Being fat, of course, there was only a very limited extent to which I was prepared to shed clothes in order to cope. It was just horrible.

I was reflecting on that memory last week when, I was startled to find, I was only only OK in the sunshine but actually enjoyed it. The feeling of the heat on my skin was pleasurable. I finally had a real need for sun cream.

I have the opposite problem in winter, of course. But a simple pleasure I never thought I would have.

Roll on summer!

My wife is tiny. Will fit in any overhead storage, as she likes to say. I got in the car the other day after she had been driving it and, as usual, the seat was pushed forward, the steering wheel lowered. So I got in, and adjusted them to suit me.

I got in. Quite a thing. I remember when I test drove my previous car – a big SUV – my stomach touched the steering wheel even with the seat right back. When I went on planes, I was the person nobody wanted to be sitting next to. I’d be crammed in, squished up against the armrests, sometimes accidentally pressing the button to recline the seat with my bulk. I’d suck my stomach in as best I could, desperate to avoid the humiliation of asking for an extension seatbelt. The tray table in front wouldn’t fit into the space my stomach would permit, it would be sitting on top, sloping away from me.

I went in a small plane once, in New Zealand, and the seatbelt wouldn’t stretch around me at all. When I shared taxis with people, I would be the one to diplomatically get in the front seat, to nobody had to cram in next to me. Sometimes ordinary chairs would be too small, sometimes I’d worry about breaking them.

The hyper-awareness of my size, the impact of it on everything I did, the acute sensitivity to the risk of creating embarrassing situations or putting others in an awkward position, pervaded everything I did.

So, the other day, I got into the car, adjusted for my tiny wife. And then I adjusted the seat. There is now a gap between my stomach and the steering wheel. If I ever get to fly again I will fit right in – to my seat and with my fellow passengers.

It feels good.

It’s meant to be all up and positive and telling you all the great things about this transformative journey I’ve been on. This blog, I mean.

And it is. The message above all others is that even for someone like me – seemingly in an unbreakable pattern for decades – can adopt some new habits, keep doing it, and have a pretty transformative experience.

It has changed my life infinitely for the better. But there is at least one downer.

My skin. It has descended. Literally, a downer. Turns out that losing weight in your early fifties leaves with a loose skin. Which gathers, wrinkly and drooping, around my lower torso. My belly button has taken on a stretched, yawning look, like The Scream.

I can’t decide if I hate it, or want to value it was a reminder of where I never want to be again. Sometimes I stretch it out, smoothing it and making my belly look flat and younger. I often wonder if I could get it removed, and if I did whether I would lose a couple of extra kilos into the bargain and finally cross the rubicon into the below-25-BMI zone (which I am still attempting via a renewed hardcore keto phase). I tuck it into my boxers, embarrassed if my kids see it while I’m changing.

It has been sort of the other way around on my face. I have lost the rather substantial double chin I had before. “What’s this lump?” my daughter used to ask, and I vowed to lose weight, and I kept my vow. So my chin has ascended, unveiling a hitherto unseen jawline and leaving a mini-downer as well in the form of a premature turkey neck. I have adjusted the lighting so I don’t see it all day when staring at myself on Zoom calls.

Now my daughter doesn’t comment on either thing. She mostly doesn’t comment on my weight loss at all, which I am glad about because it won’t be many years before she becomes obsessed with her own appearance and growing up with someone constantly talks about losing weight doesn’t provide a helpful context for being body-confident and happy. She only seems to have vaguely even noticed, much more aware of the amount of exercise I do which is a much healthier precedent.

I’m not going to go under the knife for vanity. I spent enough years certain of my own ugliness to be pretty happy with the dramatic shift in my appearance.

But… have to admit… I’d love to lose the loose.

I felt unwell yesterday. I think I was a bit hung-over – another thing to give up, there – and these days drinking too much has a dramatic effect on my mood the next day. I don’t get classic hangover symptoms, I just feel awful.

Just before bed, I was reflecting on how long it had been since I felt like that, but also how frequently I used to feel unwell.

I used to be paranoid to the point of hypochondria, every symptom a sign of impending medical disaster. I rarely acted on these feelings, in part because of my underlying conviction that my ill-health was my own fault and I felt guilty and ashamed seeking the help of doctors who rarely dealt with me with any empathy or true kindness.

Of course, these all passed. It wasn’t lung cancer, just a nasty and persistent cough. It wasn’t bowel cancer, it was piled. So far, with one exception which I’ll write about another time, I have not uncovered anything really wrong. However, along the way, I spent countless days in a state of serious fear and anxiety about whatever it was. Convinced of my nascent lung cancer, liver disorder, heart disasters or whatever else.

Thinking about it last night I realised I haven’t felt that way in ages. Feeling good is something I don’t really notice until I have a reason to pay attention. But it used to be little enough of the time for me to notice and savour the good days – they were in the minority.

Now the good days massively outnumber the less-good ones – lockdown stress notwithstanding. Being thinner, and fitter, means I basically feel pretty good most of the time. I work standing up, I do some kind of exercise every day, I don’t ache and twinge and worry.

That’s good, because I suppose one of my primary motivations for embarking on this, other than just the long term frustration of being fat, was wanting to stick around long enough for my kids to be old enough to manage without me. I was 20 when my mother died. Not old enough, I was still a child and I had no idea how to cope.

I’m older now than she was when she died, and my oldest kid is only 10. If I want to make it to my daughters’ 30th birthdays and beyond, I need to be and stay as well as I can. I feel like I might just have made that possible.

Goodness knows how I would have coped with the pandemic if I had been indolent and overweight. The sanity-saving benefits of exercise are at least as important to me as the physical benefits. I guess I would have been a lot more hung over, a lot more frequently. I would also be permanently paranoid knowing that, at my former weight, I would have been massively more at risk if I contracted Covid.

Last night brought it home. However shitty I sometimes feel right now (and who doesn’t?), that life of constant background fear and anxiety took a huge toll. I haven’t needed to see a doctor for ages – maybe the last couple of years. If I did, I would no longer be fearful or hesitant. They might not share or admire what I consider to be my triumph, but they no longer look at me with disdain or contempt.

And I feel good.

One of the pernicious things, for me, about being overweight was the label. The indelible announcement about yourself. When people first encountered me, the first thing they knew and saw about me was my size. Whether I, or they, liked it or not, that meant they had already made a judgement about me. Most of the time, I doubt it was flattering. Being fat is associated in many minds with self-neglect, over-indulgence, laziness, ill health, unhappiness and a whole host of other negative impressions.

I have to admit it’s also associated with those things in my mind, because for me they were all true. Unhappiness, to massively over-simplify, made me fat. Being fat made me unhappy. It seemed to be an unbreakable trap and much of the time I came to just accept it. I would think to myself that what I was doing amounted to a slow suicide, I expected to die early. Although I didn’t want to, I accepted the inevitability of that. So there was no point battling against my weight, I would never be able to change it anyway, so I might as well indulge myself because it was comforting and at least temporarily allowed me to feel, somehow, good.

So I ate and drank too much, did no exercise, had as much fun as I could at work and socially and accepted that my path was set for me.

A classic tale, in other words.

I also tried to make myself, and my weight, as invisible as possible. Because it was impossible to be seen without being judged, I tried not to be seen. Not in a reclusive way, but I wanted peoples first impressions of me to be formed before, or as soon as possible after, they first caught sight of me.

I avoided being in photos. There are 30 years of my life with virtually none of me. The few that exist make me cringe. Some because of just how bad things got (I was on the inside, looking out, so could avoid confronting the reality). Others, when I was much younger, because it was so much better than I thought at the time. I was thinner and more attractive in reality than in my head.

One way I avoided photos was by taking photos. I was an obsessive clicker, and even made my living from photography for a while. The other side of the camera was a more comfortable place for me. My career has defied my introvert tendencies and forced me to do quite a lot of public speaking. I never, ever, watch the videos.

I was early on the internet and became a master of online chat, long before there was the bandwidth for cameras and photos. It was all about the banter and I was really good at it. I could start a conversation with a few words and establish a real connection in a few sentences. It was a great comfort that nobody could see me.

Inevitably, though, once we established a connection people wanted to meet up. I wanted to, too. I was single, lonely, desperate for a partner. But I rarely met anyone. Because our conversation started invisibly, their mental picture of me was of the person they wanted me to be. The person I turned out to be, physically, was always a disappointment. So I let a lot of people down by refusing to cross over into the real world from the virtual one. When I did, I made sure to do it early in the relationship, and I tried to paint a picture of myself to avoid disappointment.

But, in my experience anyway, not many people really fancy fatties. The fact that anyone, ever, was interested enough in me to want to be with me, to sleep with me, was and is a source of amazement. There’s another blog post to be written about that.

Back to invisibility. I did, and do, love it. Blending in, not being noticed, detaching my persona from my body.

I used to achieve through, as much as possible, absence. From photos, from places. It didn’t work very well, and I managed to have a great circle of friends and career success anyway. But I always carried the knowledge that, to some extent, everyone who knew me saw a fat man. It was a big part of who I was.

Now, it’s different. I am invisible in the best possible way. I am just average. I don’t stand out. Physically, I’m just an average guy now. I don’t stand out in the crowd. It’s hard to form a strong impression of me before I open my mouth. I have become ordinary in the best possible way.

Its bliss.

I can’t tell you the amount of money I have wasted buying gadgets which, in my mind, were going to transform my life but in reality just gathered dust. I even considered launching a reviews website called “Two Week Test”, the premise of which would be that if I was still using a gadget after two weeks, then it was worth buying. Could still do that.

Me measuring everything started like that. I saw a review of a hair-curlingly expensive smart watch, called a Garmin Fenix 5, and decided it would change my life. My reasoning was that it basically did everything my cycling computer did (also a Garmin) but with the advantage of being strapped to my wrist, meaning I would not forget to bring it with me. Forgetting the computer, attaching it and removing it and turning it on and off meant that I only logged a few of my rides.

So I bought a Fenix 5. Two weeks later, it was still strapped to my wrist and there it has stayed for, I think, about 30 months so far. It started the transformation.

Now I knew how much cycling I had done. How many calories I had burned. How many steps I had taken. I fely good about it, and started to compete with myself. Could I do more distance this week than last week? Could I go harder and faster, beat my own times on the regular commute back and forth? I started to understand my heart rate and saw it improve over time. I now know what V02Max is and have seen that so amazing things too.

The watch hooks up to my phone automatically, and syncs data with Garmin’s system, and shares it with things like Strava if you want it to. It gets my weight from my smart scales, it knows what I have eaten from MyFitnessPal and everything just works automatically.

At the start, when you do this, you beat your own records all the time. It’s motivatonal and addictive in a way I never imagined it would be. After a lifetime of pointedly ignoring my own reality and existing in a state of denial, it was incredibly positive.

I have only ever used my Garmin, so I can’t really say which one you should get. The Garmin is great – the one I have is overkill and does way more than I need. I thought, for example, that having a little tiny map on my wrist and being able to use it too navigate would be cool, and will be the first time I use it, but that moment is still in the future. I always have my phone. What can I say, I always like to head for the top of the range, it’s a bad and expensive habit. The Fenix watches are up to version 6 now, I think, essentially the same but better. There are loads of other Garmins, mostly cheaper, and plenty of other brands too. For exhaustively detailed reviews, look here https://www.dcrainmaker.com/

If you’re buying a watch for the same reason I did, I would say get one with GPS at least, and my experience with Garmin has been all good. If I was buying one today I might give an Apple Watch some thought.

So, I recommend a smartwatch. Get one, use it, start to compete with yourself. Since I got it there have been very few days when I haven’t logged some proper exercise – usually cycling or running. I am fit, now. Actually decently fit. That hasn’t been true since I was at school. It feels good.

I had managed to be quite active for quite a long time because of cycling. Once I started measuring everything, including my calories and my weight and all my activity, I started getting more interested in getting fitter. Some of this was just selfishness… earning more calories (because deep in my soul I remain greedy). But also because cycling on its own had started to feel too easy, like I wasn’t really getting much out of it.

Running was next. I started in a gym on a treadmill, working my way up from a few hundred metres, gradually further and faster.

Running, especially when you start, is boring as hell. As it turns out, being fit for cycling doesn’t help much with running – your legs have a whole other set of muscles and bits to start hurting and aching in a different way.

I solved the boredom problem with audiobooks. I prefer them to music because music is a metronome and you end up running in time with it – great if it’s the right tempo but annoying if its too fast or slow. But even then, in a gym, just slogging away, its dull and you have to make time in your day.

So, two or three christmases ago, I was off work and realised that I was missing cycling. I had actually reached the point where I needed exercise. So I went to the park and did something I hadn’t done for about 35 years: I ran. Outside. In full view of other people.

I broke a rule I had formed in school, when being galloped past by my fellow pupils desperate to avoid being late as I ambled in at the last possible moment. Nothing was so urgent as to need to run. I had avoided it ever since (can you begin to see yet how I got so fat and unfit?)

My first run in the park didn’t last long. A hundred metres, probably, then a bit of a stroll. I progressed to laps of a few paths in the park, as my family mucked about in the middle. That December I managed a total of 11km.

As I have discovered, though, the key to success is habits. I persisted. I built up over the year and managed over 500km in that first twelve months. This year so far I have managed 1700km. My lockdown challenge, with cycling to the office off the agenda, has been to try to run every day and I have mostly managed it. As well as getting fit, I think it has kept me sane, and if there was ever a time to feel fit and thin, this particular pandemic was a good moment.

What’s the point of all this? I guess its that, despite my decades-long aversion, running is worth a try. All you need is some shoes and some outside space. You can do as much or as little as you like and it’s an easy habit to keep up. Not being over-ambitious, accepting that some days you’ll be more in the zone than others, but that you will keep feeling better and better is what makes it easy.

And you can eat a little more, if that floats your boat.

How did I begin my journey to lose weight and get fit? After thirty years of totally failing to stick to anything, what got me going?

The very first thing was cycling. Persevering with that made a massive difference, to my self-belief as well as my fitness, and despite occasional setbacks – including various bits of the bike breaking under the strain – I always got back on and carried on.

Getting to the point where cycling was part of my routine, an everyday commuting habit, took time but it was massive.

I got fitter, but stayed fat. I guess I probably lost some weight, but not dramatically and not continuously. So things were better and I probably swerved away from the fast track to diabetes and heart disease. That’s how things stayed for eight years or so.

Then, one day, I decided to buy a Garmin watch. It did everything my bike computer did, but had the advantage of being on my wrist which meant I remembered to bring it with me. I logged every ride, and every step into the bargain, and uploaded it to their app.

The strangest thing happened to me, which I would never have guessed. I became highly competitive with myself. I wanted to cycle longer and harder. I wanted to beat my personal bests. I wanted to do a certain number of km per week, and then more. I became interested in heart rate zones and steps.

For someone who had avoided measuring anything – particularly waistlines and weight – for my whole life, this was quite a revelation.

So, weight was next. I bought some fancy connected scales and started weighing myself every day. A tough thing to do but essential to avoid denial.

At some point, when I was paranoid about maybe being diabetic, I bought a glucose testing machine and started monitoring it. I wasn’t diabetic or pre-diabetic and that stimulated me to take action to keep it that way, and it reduced my stress. Worrying about something but being too scared to find out is stressful. Not having to confront the wagged-finger of the GP to do it made it easier.

Later, when I took up a keto diet, I bought a similar machine to measure ketones. Combined with the glucose monitor it taught me a lot about how my body responded to food. At one point I even bought a blood pressure machine becuase I got paranoid abut that too (it’s normal). Another stress-buster.

Some time after I started changing my diet I also started logging my food, with My Fitness Pal.

It turns out, for me, measuring everything was massively important. It made me aware of what I was doing constantly. The mere act of logging everything I eat means I am much less likely to eat too much. Because my watch logs calories “earned” through exercise, I can take it a bit easier on days I do lots of exercise. Which is one of the reasons I don’t let a day go by without logging at least a bit of running or cycling.

When the weight is falling and fitness is rising, its easy to keep this up. Now I’m in more of a stable place I am still logging all my exercise, all my food, and less obsessively my weight and blood pressure. It’s all there in my phone and my apps and it’s the bedrock of an ongoing habit which I intend never to break.

Unexpected nice things about losing weight, part 1: armpits.

I didn’t really notice losing my armpits. But looking back, when I was younger they were concave when I lifted my arms up. Gradually, as I filled up with fat, they filled up with fat.

Turns out that when I started shrinking again, they did too. They’re concave again now.

Makes zero difference to anything, but I find it pleasing.