How I Gained 13 Days in a Year

I’m not one for hallelujahs. Being of characteristic British reserve I rarely sing and shout about anything. So when I tell you that the following testimony is about as close to an epiphany as I have ever had, or am ever likely to have, you can be sure I mean it.

I was always an exercise junkie. As a youth I would hang around the squash courts for hours playing all comers. I’ll admit there was a period in which I concentrated primarily on the consumption of beer – a sport in its own right, I would have argued at the time ‘ but this was clearly down to the exuberance and folly of the young rather than a departure from type. By 1996 I had discovered the gym and was lifting weights 4 or 5 times a week.

For the next 6 years I accumulated the stock knowledge base of the gym rat, passed down through generations of trap-laden hulks and distributed via magazines written for steroid users by steroid users. As bidden by these magazines I would spend 6 hours per week in the gym doing a mixture of heavy weights to failure and cardio to strip off the fat. My diet mantra was “Eat as much as you can as often as you can.” I would guzzle glutinous post-workout shakes and spend hours at work with the flatulence of a cow.

As time went by, I evolved my diet to be healthier. I figured out that that it really did matter what I was eating and not just how much, something brought into sharp relief by the belly I had developed and the way people said “Wow, you’re big these days” without it being clear whether this was a positive statement.

I also learned that to gain muscle I had to have periods of overeating, in which I gave the body a calorie surplus and trained especially hard to encourage the use of these extra calories. I would accumulate fat but that’s okay, because in the next phase I would eat less than I needed and concentrate on stripping off the surplus fat with low intensity cardio whilst still training hard with weights to encourage muscle retention.

I had also learned how important it was to eat regularly. Since I was by now determined to eat only healthy food, I spent hours in the kitchen preparing food in plastic containers to be transported to work. Holidays required extra preparation and could be a nightmare.

The thing is, by the time I had started doing this I had already gained a lot of muscle and possibly come close to what my body was willing to build under normal circumstances. So instead of the ascending saw-tooth graph of weight I was supposed to see, I actually had a flat one. When I was a kid my dad would put me on his knees and bounce me up and down as though we were driving a car. One day I said to him “But we’re not going anywhere Daddy ‘ we’re just going up and down.” This is how it felt.

Around this time, I started to do a little more running than usual during one of the ‘cutting’ phases of my diet. Disillusionment from trying in vain to build more muscle and the persuasiveness of some friends moved me into the arena of the runner, and within a year I had lost 20 pounds and was running half marathons in a little over 1:30.

I continued to obsessively refine my diet to be (in my view at the time) as healthy as possible, to the point where the only fat I ate came from a small amount of nuts and seeds, one egg and oil supplements. My range of plastic containers became as legendary as my awkwardness in restaurants. I was on 30+ miles per week and had climbed aboard the calorie merry-go-round. My eating drove my running which drove my eating. I would eat a huge meal on a Saturday night and then run for 2 hours on a Sunday morning to burn off the calories. “You look skinny and unwell,” said my partner. “Can you run a mile in under 6 minutes?” I asked in response.

So enough already. Here is my epiphany. Last year a friend of a friend referred me to Art Devany’s Evolutionary Fitness essay. I read it. I wanted to be skeptical. I had spent years refining my diet so that every nuance adhered to the supposed nutritional best practice. I had just bought 25kg of unsweetened whey and casein powder. I read it again.

Within 4 weeks, I was a different person. I had found a way to become just as obsessive about not doing things as I had been about doing things. If I missed my 5pm meal, or did not go to the gym for two days because we were travelling, it was actually helping. I did not need to match my calorie intake with exercise. All I had to do was continue to obsessively avoid certain foods (it didn’t matter to me that it was different things I was avoiding now) and workout harder but less often. Now I was working out for 4 hours less per week, spending 2 hours less preparing food and felt twice as good. That’s 6 hours per week, which is 13 days in a year.

So although I cannot tell you about miracle weight loss, since the change in my body, though positive, has not been significant, I can report that I have gained something far more valuable than muscle ‘ time.

As for whether this lifestyle is medically or nutritionally optimal, I will leave that for others to debate. All I can tell you is how it feels for me and will leave you with the strap line from a commercial for Croft Original Sherry that aired on UK TV in the 80s ‘ “One instinctively knows when something is right.”

About the Author

This article was written by Methuselah of the Life Spotlight Blogger Community. His full website can been seen at http://paynowlivelater.blogspot.com.

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