Filling in the framework: Seasonality and Change

So when I set out my philosophical framework for fitness I built it up to a fairly vague sentiment that it had something to do with acknowledging our place within the ecosphere. I've also since referred to it as our strongest selves on our weakest days as well as our weakest selves on our strongest days. Not to mention a more literal prescription of activities that a 'fit' human should partake in. There are plenty of other people out there who will tell you exactly what you need to do day after day to be fit and healthy. What I find more commonly missing is that first point, and more specifically the influence of seasonality on what we do. Or to put it another way, fitness is inherently interlinked with change. Prescribing a single diet or exercise program is acknowledged to be flawed for a population, but people still seem to think they can find the one true answer for them while failing to account for the fact their environment is constantly changing - and if fitness is about resilience and coping with the unexpected or unusual then the lifestyle ought to reflect that.

So what does this mean? Basically I'm saying that doing the same thing all the time is not the healthiest, easiest or most effective approach. Our bodies are hugely complicated systems that have developed to handle changing conditions, both cyclic changes (such as seasonal or even diurnal climatic conditions) and unpredictable chaotic events. It's easy to see that a system that only experiences a constant steady-state input is incredibly vulnerable to changes to that input. I won't go further into chaos theory now but suffice to say the stronger system is one which is able to make compromises to adapt, and as a species our success is down to this ability. To be human is to be resilient to change. But if you try to achieve this by controlling your environment and holding the inputs steady, don't be surprised if things break down when you lose control. Better to learn how to work with your body on what it excels at.

I should probably bring this back to ground and focus back in on popular conceptions of fitness. From the training side, this isn't terribly controversial. Cyclic programs are many and varied, linear progression is accepted to be a reasonable model up to a point, but ultimately people are comfortable with the idea that they need 'rest' days (or days of varying intensity), that they generally require deload weeks, and beyond that athletes aim to peak for their competitive season. Sure, people dismiss random chaotic workouts designed to 'confuse' the muscle, but they do embrace progressive overload which is to say that performing that something should change from workout to workout. And then there are those who advocate sub-maximal loads, or fartlek runs (where you vary speed according to how you feel). There's no single right answer. As noted in my previous post, if you are doing this things, then you are fulfilling part of your fitness lifestyle. How you structure it, what goals you have to motivate you, whether you want to concentrate on perfecting the technique of a small number of exercises so that you can get an increased training effect or just want to get up every day and challenge yourself in new unexpected ways, it's all details. Trying to find the optimal workout is going to be different for every person, and for every day, and for every year. Perfection is only achievable for one specific set of circumstances at one moment in time. Be fit, not crazy.

It's one thing to be comfortable with the abstract idea of change and variation being the way we work, but is that really why I made such a fuss about nature? No, when it comes to aspects of lifestyle other than physical activity, considering the environment becomes a bigger issue. The other main pillars as far as fitness go are diet and sleep, and while some people are experimenting with these varying from day-to-day, fewer and fewer think about variations over the course of a year, except perhaps to entrain their habits with their competitive activity cycles. This is the cart driving the horse. I say fewer people think about this because in the past they had no option. In fact only going back 100 years we have people going to bed when it got dark, and eating only what was available locally and was in season. They slept more in winter, and ate more in summer. Ok, so seasonal variations are different from place to place and another remarkable faculty we have as a species is to have adapted to a fairly large range of ecosystems, but each of those is still internally consistent. Places where days are of fairly constant length still have different foods available than places nearer the poles where the seasons are more marked. And our expansion into these areas took time and has driven differences in genetics. And within a generation we have created a new, entirely artificial and inconsistent environment where the sun shines whenever we want and we can eat anything at any time. Naturally when faced with this choice we tend to always create the most favourable inputs, and as a consequence we become more vulnerable. I'll leave it here for now and pick it up again when I look at the evolution of nutrition in more detail.

An exercise in bifurcation

It should come as no surprise that I could take issue with the definition of resistance training. Usually it's set up in dichotomy with 'cardio', which is really no better defined. Do they refer to different classes of exercise? Anyone who has ever done high volume barbell complexes or tried to run up a hill could tell you the limitations of that approach. Perhaps then we can define them by their impact on the body, but what physical activity doesn't involve muscle contraction or the cardio-vascular system? These terms have become shorthand for opposite ends of a spectrum that in reality has more than one dimension.

Now I could spend some time coming up with a handy graphic at this point, but what we're talking about here is strength, endurance, agility, technique etc. No training is going to exclusively affect only one of these areas. For the elite athlete this kind of reductionist approach may be necessary to beat the competition, but it's a complication we can do without. That's why I appreciate the step away from these terms in the Primal literature. Instead there is an identification of moving slowly a lot, moving quickly occasionally, and lifting (and moving) heavy things occasionally. If we allow that the body is a heavy object, then all of these can actually be fulfilled by moving around an appropriate environment (ie. one that includes climbing, gradients, the ideal obstacle course if you will). I'd recover our dichotomy by saying that we want to:

• be physically engaged most of the time - moving under our own power or just supporting our own weight, small details such as the mobility and strength involved in getting up and down from the floor
• occasionally exert ourselves beyond our comfort zone - stressing all our systems to trigger adaptation is how we grow, and in life we either grow or decline

All the scientific/ancestral/logical reasons for doing something can be fit to these without the negative connotations that cloud so much thinking.

Of course, these are still pretty vague, and as soon as we start talking about training strategies rather than being representations of normal day-to-day life then we do have to get more technical. The key here though is that fitness is not served simply through one thing or the other. However we go about it, whether regular walks, standing desks, sprawling in the floor instead of the couch, practising yoga or being a member of a nomadic tribe you will be missing out if you don't find ways to significantly increase the percentage of the waking day spent being awake - or to put it another way significantly decrease the time spent zoned out slumped in a chair. And similarly whether you sprint up hills, climb trees or rocks, do gymnastics, play rugby, or just find something really heavy and pick it up you need to include these sorts of activities to maintain a healthy body, preserve (or build) lean mass, strength, coordination.

It's increasingly popular to identify diet as the main factor behind fitness. More often than not, people are actually conflating fitness with fatness. Nutrition is obviously a massive issue, and will be addressed in later posts, but if a currently healthy person does the activities above then they would have to try very hard to sabotage their fitness. I don't really want to separate diet and exercise, I believe they're synergistic, I merely want to stress the point that fitness isn't necessarily a visual thing. For that matter, it's not always ideal to live by athletic goals. We define metrics to evaluate progress as a matter of necessity, much as we have training programs because our working lives don't provide the physical stimulation we need. But for my money, fitness is doing the right things however imperfectly, and growing as a person. An individual may pursue a specific activity to compete and excel, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are more fit. If they do so without compromising anything else then great - many people need that drive and it's inspiring to see what can be achieved, but that doesn't have to be the target. Exertion is relative, and if done properly should naturally lead to progress.

Similarly, official guidelines of 30 minutes a day may be a useful strategy to get people started in the real world, but you need other changes to follow on to call it a truly fitter lifestyle. So, as far as exercise goes, is there more you could be doing throughout the day? Is there some aspect you're overlooking? Or does the idea of being able to cover 15 miles in a day, run up a hill, or lift your own bodyweight seem impossible to achieve? There's always something you can do however small to move forward - even if it starts with stepping back.

A disclaimer...of sorts

While a lot of what I talk about I express as fact, I'm aware that it's unsupported. It's not that I haven't read the research, but I'm not interested in trying to prove theories by citing internet articles. If people are interested in details, I'm happy to help point to things they can read which may help and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of sources. After all, as a scientist I have to be able to fit all observations to my theory. But people are generally far too inconsistent in how they apply scientific research to make their decisions and I don't want to contribute to that with a half-assed job. So I won't.

I'm not here to prove anything or sell anything. If I express something that triggers a though or more research of your own, I'd be glad, and if it provides a basis for initiating discussion so much the better.

Running: the technical part

Few things catch me off guard as much as the ongoing debate about footwear and running form. While I don't intend to try to provide comprehensive guides or repeat work presented better elsewhere on the internet, it is in keeping with my basic principles that there be a simple, accessible approach if something is considered natural. So how does fixing running form tie in to our basic animal nature? Remove your shoes. Given time, you should be able to develop a robust, efficient and effective running style. But that would make for a short post, so let's talk a little more.

Heel-striking. The balance of discussion is certainly shifting, but even those with some experience are hesitant to commit fully to arguing against it, and all the technical papers and biomechanical analysis make little impact because even when scientists can draw conclusions with high certainty they are not invested in mass marketing. And this confusion then allows new runners to be misled. There should be no debate. Heel striking was an artificial invention by a man who thought he saw an opportunity to make some money. It may look like running but it really isn't the same thing. It's only possible by designing heavily padded shoes. And the same trend has progressed to 'fix' a litany of problems, orthotics, stability control, coil springs in the soles. The answer has always been more technology. This is the guy who founded Nike. Similarly people have since benefited from this trend by selling machines such as ellipticals, which are intended to mimic aspects of running while fixing issues that didn't exist. Heel striking is not a natural activity. All the benefits and discussions on the utility of running are thrown out the window if someone insists on heel striking. It's like using a Smith machine to squat. It may look like squatting but it's really not the same and when it comes to injury prevention all bets are off. In fact it's like doing squat mornings on the Smith machine with the pussy pad on a bosu ball.

The studies are there, the more expensive and 'advanced' your running shoe, the more likely you are to get injured. 80% of runners get injured every year as it is. And somehow we have a generation who accepts this as normal and still believes and trusts capitalism to provide the solution if only they pay enough money and put in enough technology and expertise. Are entire body has evolved to be able to run. This is why we stand upright. This is why we have big glutes. This is why we have fantastically complicated feet full of bones and tendons. Take a look at our progress so far at re-engineering this with running bipedal robots. There's no contest.

Ok, so if going barefoot is self-correcting, what can we do to merge this with the real world? Well still nothing is as instructive as doing it yourself, even if it's not all the time your body can learn a lot from its own feedback mechanisms, and you can learn how it feels to run short distances barefoot - and if it's on concrete you'll learn quickly! The basics of form follow fairly naturally. Compared to the cushioned jogger, there will be higher foot turnover, you'll land around the midfoot, pronate naturally as the foot and leg absorbs the impact directly beneath your body. Any lengthening of the stride comes from the legs stretching behind you rather than stretching in front, but it's not efficient to do so at the cost of fewer steps. Compare the effort of pressing 100lb overhead 50 times or an empty barbell 100 times. For sprints, sure, use the strength and push harder, but otherwise it's an endurance game, and if you keep your feet moving it's very hard to go wrong. Take the time to build the strength, and your ankles, arches, achilles, calves, quads, hamstrings, glutes, hips, abs arms and neck and more will all develop to do their job of keeping you on your feet. Go on uneven, varied terrain and the return will be increased exponentially. You may not be going as fast, but you'll be able to keep going, and that's the aim. To keep going, not get injured, and be able to tackle anything that comes at you after a long run.

Running: the rambling part

Running. It holds a strange place in the national psyche. It's generally perceived as the entry-level exercise. Taking a brisk walk every day is a good start, but for those who decide they really want to improve their fitness and lose weight I'd bet more take up jogging than anything else. But it's usually a hate-hate relationship. People struggle their way through uncomfortable and sweaty sessions, slogging their wheezing bodies round the block before collapsing back home to nurse their blisters. It can be a high barrier to entry - while many believe this is the price they must pay and continue to put themselves through it, others move on to 'more advanced' fitness activities or abandon their hopes altogether. After all, if they can't even hack going for a little jog what business do they have running at all?

Yet still there are people lacing up their shoes every day and hitting the road, with varying degrees of success. Something drives them, some basic belief that running is good for you. It can be surprising how negative non-runners can be about the activity, until you realise that most of these people are actually failed runners. Whatever arguments or reasons they throw out against the utility of running, you can be pretty sure they still tried it at some point and weren't happy with the results. The flipside of this most natural form of exercise is that people expect it to come naturally. You are either a runner or you're not. People resist the idea that it is something they should have to learn. And our society reinforces that, one way or another. Whether it's acceptance of a sedentary life (which is slowly changing) or the belief that 'cardio' and fitness are mutually exclusive, there are plenty of facilitators out there who will let you slink away and take the shortcut on that cross-country run.

I was there. Nothing was as bad for my asthma as trying to run through the mud in winter as we circled the school, and nothing as embarrassing as the showers afterwards. Through my teenage years I'd wheeze and rattle over short distances, and stop before my legs literally burned to nothing. Shin splints were most common ailment, even through that period at university where I tried committing to jogging regularly. And oh the chafing. Once a week was all I did because that's how long it took to recover. There would be occasional bright spots. When the sun came out and I could bounce along and feel ready to take on the world, but by the time I rounded the next corner and saw how much farther I still had to go my spirit would dip and my legs would grow heavy. It was boring, it was uncomfortable, it left me struggling to walk one time in three and it didn't seem to be having a magnificent impact on my waistline.

Even later, after I'd overcome my asthmatic tendencies, gotten stronger, healthier, fitter, I still struggled. That last summer of my PhD, when I cycled, walked or ran to campus 5 miles away 3 days of the week and swam the other days. When I could play badminton or frisbee for hours on end, darting about the court or field, when I could hike in the mountains all day. I don't think I ran that whole 5 miles once. I would manage a mile or two then need to walk, my legs and my lungs conspiring against me. And through all this not once did it occur to me that I didn't know how to run. I was willing to accept my physical limitations. I thought that if I kept trying I would find it easier, it's not as if I never enjoyed it after all. But those moments of pleasure were rare. Too often all I got was the satisfaction of having made the effort. I figured that would have to be enough. 10 years of voluntarily, albeit sporadically, exercising to become fitter and healthier still left me uncomfortable running much more than 400m. I never got seriously injured, but I would credit that to never having been so committed as to put in the mileage many novice runners do in their attempts to improve.

So where am I now, barely a year after I read a book that changed my perception of running so entirely as to blow away all those years as a failed runner, all the excuses and half-truths I'd whispered to myself? In some ways I had been lucky, I'd stumbled on to discussions about correct running form 2 years ago and could finally see that technique isn't something that only matters in separating elite sprinters by hundredths of a second. Whatever level you're at, technique matters. I can only suppose I'd blinded myself up until this point as I was well aware that I had had to learn some things about how to walk if I was going to cover 25 steep miles without joints seizing up, why should running come any more naturally? So I had begun the work of actively trying to correct the physical and postural problems inflicted by our manmade environment. I still felt that there was no need to run any great distances. Short sprints were fine, there was always time to catch your breath in sport and so many other things to do. And besides, running properly required commitment, training, its own rest days and recovery right? You couldn't expect to go out every day, especially not if you were doing other physical activities.

Well that all depends on what's important to you. Of course you can go run every day, if you choose to do it right. You can deadlift without breaking your back or squat without ruining your knees, if you take the time to learn how and to build the strength, stability and mobility you once had as a child and lost as you graduated to the desk. There is no greater functional movement, and it is a shame to see the misinformation that holds people back, just as it is to see the litany of excuses from people who are otherwise well educated about fitness and equipped to perform well. As my previous posts have explained, fitness to me is not judged in a single moment or on a single action. If you can't drop everything and run at a moment's notice, and more specifically if you don't know your body well enough to know how to do it safely, what speed is maintainable, how to surge past obstacles or recharge your batteries all while on the move, then while I may be impressed by your dedication, strength or skill at a particular activity don't expect me to be impressed by your fitness. For me it's still a work in progress, but in that year I've gone from being that person who needed a week or more of recovery after pushing to run more than half a mile to being able to stroll out the door with no intention other than to enjoy the outdoors and end up going 7 miles and wondering later that day if I wouldn't like to go out and play some more. It is natural. There's a reason why people keep trying to do it. There's also a reason why so many fail, and we'll get to that in the next post.

What is fitness?

So, let's talk fitness. Most of my posts seems to start with some sort of caveat and this will be no different as fitness is a somewhat nebulous concept.

(yup, random pictures are back to hold your attention)

So here I'm just looking at the outputs, the final expression of being fit. Which for now means physical activity. Different people will have different priorities: strength, speed, agility, stamina... For a long time after I started making the effort, I considered myself relatively fit. I could hike all day, every day for a week over mountainous terrain. I could run endless sprints in an Ultimate tournament for 5-6 hours and come back the next day and do it again. I'd even been able to throw in respectable numbers of pushups - at least I kept them strict! But as far as basic measures of physical accomplishment go I had always struggled with the fact I couldn't even begin to do a pull-up. Strength gains can seem an open-ended goal, but while I prefer to focus on 'functional' activities there are undeniably some basic minimum levels I think a fit person should be able to achieve.

I think fit people should be able to get about. To support their own weight, pull themselves up, be able to lift and carry a 'reasonable' weight, to be able to get up and down from the ground or a chair, to sprint short distances, to run 10k and all of this on the spur of the moment without special preparation or warming up, and achievable into old age. Some of these are hard to achieve with a typical lifestyle, sat at a desk all day, driving from place to place etc. While this concept of fitness stems from our animal selves the reality is that we have to try and marry that innate heritage with all the other aspects of our life that seem to demand time and energy.

There are lots of ways to approach training with different levels of efficiency and efficacy to get in a physically fit state, and there are elements of technique or skill that need to be learned to be able to safely move around without injury - in truth these are aspects that should become so deeply ingrained that you don't have to think about it. But the hidden depths here go to maintaining a strong, healthy environment where you don't suffer in your efforts from exhaustion, hunger, injury, stress or weakness. Being fit isn't about breaking records. It's not what you can achieve on your best day, it's who you are on your worst.

The Manifesto

When I try to decide what to write next, I keep ending up looking for a higher level of abstraction. I can't talk about meals until I've talked about diet. I can't talk about exercise until I've talked about fitness. I can't talk about fitness until I've defined health. It's difficult even to talk about what's normal any more. In the US at least, being overweight is 'normal'. Looking to the general population to determine what is typical doesn't seem too smart to me. There is a distinction that is gaining traction between surviving and thriving. I seek to thrive. So what 'truths' do I hold to be self-evident?

• We need not become crippled as we age
• Illness is minor or rare
• You can lose weight and not be hungry
• You can build strength and not be sore
• You can always walk
• You can run for hours every day without injury
• The only things you need for sure are sun, sleep and water
• Performance need not be coupled with eating
• You can lift things every day, and recover rapidly from extreme effort
• You can maintain a calm, balanced mood
• You can find a way to include any vice
• Being healthy means being able to cope with occasional adversity
• Life is variable and multi-objective, there are no definitive optima
• Early-afternoon fatigue is not inevitable, nor any fatigue
• Most weather doesn't need to be avoided
• You don't have to crash or hit the wall when being active

I'm sure I can (and will) add more, but this seems the best way to get started on what I consider to be normal for me, and what I think is achievable by the vast majority of people. I also think, taken as a whole, the benefits of such a lifestyle often fulfil the deepest desires of many, while making a mockery of the excuses employed to avoid change. I know there are different challenges for different people, but I don't like to see people affirm their own helplessness for lack of information. So many messages are pervasive in our culture to the point where they aren't even questioned, but you can gain without pain, you can make a difference, you can have your cake and eat it. And if any of these things aren't true for you, that's your choice.

Framework for fitness

Ok, this is the big one, the unified theory of everything, 42, a thousand monkeys doing Shakespeare...no, wait. What this is is an attempt to identify what my overarching framework for fitness decisions is.

Why does this matter? Well, scientifically speaking, fitness, exercise, nutrition are all new and immature. There's no consensus on what the governing context is to make sense of all the disparate bits of research going on. And I'd wager that's the case with most practitioners too. Part of the reason why it's so easy to bounce from one diet or gym routine to another is because people don't have a strong guiding principle to follow. Likely they have a dozen partial ideas they have picked up with aren't internally consistent and they hedge their bets by trying to do a bit of everything.

The closest I've seen recently (and it's spreading with remarkable speed) is the fairly vague "do what works for you". If this isn't an admission of failure from the industry I don't know what is. All approaches are equally valid,  no-one's opinion is wrong, you are the best judge of your own health and progress. As a blanket statement, it could be worse, but it's certainly not reflecting some underlying truth. It's so closely related to the democratic model that that is probably sufficient reason for some people to support it so staunchly. It's the worst of all systems except those we've tried. As far as science goes though, we ought to be able to look at this through a less idealogical lens.

And even so, even if we embrace our individualism and make this a question of morality, we all subscribe (at some level or another) to existing value systems. And while the details can vary from person to person, there are some values that most people consider should be universal. So I don't think it's unreasonable to search for what I think may be a universal framework for health and fitness - even if the details vary in the implementation.

Genetically we are all incredibly similar, interact with our environment in similar ways and are subject to the same basic biological processes. But this is often not how we see ourselves. Even if we have realistic ideas of our own limits, we tend to trust those around us more than is justified. And with good reason - our survival is inextricably linked to that sense of optimism. But it leaves us open to manipulation, whether intentional or not. We are unreliable narrators of our own lives.


Having expended so much time building up to it, I think I'll leave discussion of the consequences to another post, but any good guiding principle should be able to be expressed concisely, so here it is. I think the key is to embrace our place as part of the ecosphere. This is a seemingly trite statement, but for me it extends to acknowledging our evolutionary past, the forces that have shaped our environment, the (uncomfortable for some) reality that we are only human, more than that we are only animals. We're not above acting on instinct. We may be masters of our destiny but most of our actions are in fact run on autopilot. Our minds are not encumbered by physical frailties but rather are fundamentally entwined with them. This is the context within which I try to fit my decisions and beliefs. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I'd hope you might take a minute to think what you would replace it with, and how that philosophy explains the choices you make day to day.

Blame, responsibility and accountability

This shouldn't be a long post, but I believe it is a necessary one. Social interactions are complex. We have an endless list of written and unwritten rules for how to act and behave. People are brought up within a certain culture with shared values and understandings to minimise conflict and maximise potential. But it's not perfect. And I'm not an anthropologist.

My point is that, even for the individual, concepts such as self-responsibility are derived from social judgements and while there may be good reasons for their existence they are not always what they appear.  Or, to be more concise, just because someone is at fault doesn't mean it's their fault.

This is a concept I have held for quite a long time. From memory it started to crystallise for me when I spent time as a counsellor. People are not as able to control their environment as we like to believe. And self-image is not formed in a vacuum. These ideas led to me to increasingly identify cases where people were blamed, or blamed themselves, for problems in their lives. More often than not the problems appeared to me more an inevitable consequence of the environment they grew up in. Societal attitudes,  saturation advertising, explicit education - our beliefs and opinions are rarely our own, and to blame yourself for that seems foolish.

Note that this isn't an argument to abandon everything to fate. I believe it is possible to make a distinction between not accepting blame, but still taking responsibility to try and effect change. So while I may often disagree with what someone else thinks or believes, I very rarely blame them personally. I can understand and empathise with their position, and even accept that they may not be equipped at that moment in time to hold themselves accountable. This is the reality I accept, and when I talk about ways to approach self-improvement it is integral to the discussion.  Saying that a certain theory is valid...except for all the ways people fail - that is not a valid approach for me.  Imagining people to be an ideal mechanistic system has never worked. Context matters, environment matters, flawed perceptions and judgements matter. We don't need a scientific reduction of the fallibility of the human mind to accept its reality.

Calorie Counting

Life is complicated. My first post was meant to simply be a slightly expanded biography, a way to put some of my beliefs and behaviours into context in a way that is never possible through a few lines of text. I had no intention of making this an on-going blog. It wasn't that I had nothing else to say, but rather too much. Even staying broadly on the topic of fitness, trying to expound further on who I am is a daunting prospect that would likely prove doomed. I can tell you what I've done, what I've read, the basic mechanics of how I got from A to B. People are drawn to a narrative, we understand change, movement, growth. Trying to describe something in isolation, without comparisons, shared references, taking everything from first principles is a much more challenging proposition. There are entire websites trying to explain principles of building certain lifestyles, with thousands of pages of discussion on points that aren't explicit. Gaining knowledge is a process in itself, it takes time. Sharing knowledge is the same and is incredibly difficult to do impersonally.

So it is with low expectations that I begin the attempt to communicate my current point of view on subjects that I think others could benefit from. As much as this is an exercise in ordering my own thoughts I nonetheless hope that some part of it could help someone somewhere. For many people it may not matter at the end of the day, but I believe that it's important to have a correct understanding of things if you possibly can. So I'm starting with nutrition and, specifically, the Calorie Paradigm. This is likely to be by turn tedious and controversial, and not nearly as pretty as my first post. So let's kick things off with a pretty waterfall to distract you:

Fun fact, this place in South Africa claims to be the inspiration for much of Middle Earth.

So, before we get bogged down in the inevitable semantics, let me try to explain what I mean by the Calorie Paradigm. Readers will likely be familiar with the idea that Calories are something found in food. Some kinds of food have more of them than others, like the octane rating of gas. Food is what makes us go. Depending on how you're built and what your level of performance is, the rate at which you use these Calories - your mileage - varies. When your fuel levels get low, you need to eat more to fill up the tank (stomach) so you can keep moving. When it comes to body weight the maths is simple. If you don't put enough Calories in to the tank for the rate at which you use them your gross weight will drop. And if you add more fuel then you're using? Well, you know why they have those warnings not to pull the trigger again once the auto-stop has kicked in on the pump? That's right, obesity.

This is the first point to make, analogies suck. They're an imperfect way to try to convey a foreign idea with familiar concepts, and if you get carried away they break down. Suffice to say the Calorie Paradigm is often shorthanded as calories in/calories out, eat less move more, calories matter etc. It says the the biological processes governing body composition are dominated by calorie balance. And any alternative approach to diet selection (and by diet I merely mean what someone eats, not specifically eating for losing weight) is successful because at root it obeys the governing principles of calorie balance. That's quite a bold claim, but people have that kind of confidence in it because they think it truly is a physical law. On a par with the constancy of the speed of light (though less immutable as calorie balance is eternal). Let's examine that shall we?

So what is the supposed key to healthy eating? The First Law of Thermodynamics:

"For a closed system, in any arbitrary process of interest that takes it from an initial to a final state of internal thermodynamic equilibrium, the change of internal energy is the same as that for a reference adiabatic work process that links those two states. This is so regardless of the path of the process of interest, and regardless of whether it is an adiabatic or a non-adiabatic process."

In vague terms this is thought of as conservation of energy. So if we assume that Calories are simply a unit of energy, then any change in body mass is due to a difference between the energy in and out of the body, because we've all read Einstein's work we are comfortable with the equivalence of energy and mass. To be honest though we don't need go further than the first clause. A closed system means mass cannot pass the boundaries of the system. Every breath you take violates this - and this is not a trivial point. The heat exchange that occurs in breathing is a critical biological feature. People are not closed systems. Thermodynamic Laws are not applicable. And a good job too - otherwise our very existence would be a violation of the Second Law.

But surely there must be some truth to it somewhere? I mean, can't we pretend we're a closed system and apply conservation of energy anyway? Well, ok, we can do some approximations and see what happens, so long as we don't forget that we no longer have the Laws of the Universe backing us up. Let's try expressing this equation in a more complete way. We want to say that:

 (energy in to the body) - (energy out of the body) = change of internal energy of the body

Easy enough to figure out what goes in right? We have incident radiation, hot drinks, trips in elevators, food, punches in the face etc. Excellent. Some of these we can deal with easily enough - it's reasonable to assume that over the course of a day you end up at the same elevation at which you started for example. But others, like the weather, the temperature of what you consume, and the food itself are likely to be variable. So let's just ignore everything except food. Which we'll come back to later.

As for the energy out? Well, aside from the sweating, panting, and heat lost from any number of other bodily fluids, we've got running, jumping, lifting things, standing up, sitting down. There's probably a lot of factors to all that, not least climate, but let's approximate it all as a single number. Then just for kicks, let's simplify changes of internal energy as being equivalent to stored fat. This may seem like a slash-and-burn approach to approximating physical equations, but it's done with a very good reason. It's hard work to try and work out any of those other variables, so the only practical approach is to ignore them and hope they go away. It's not as if the original equation applies anyway (remember? you promised you wouldn't forget).

So let's clear some more of this deadwood out the way and recognise that food is not a unit of energy. It's all the same though right? E=mc² as we brushed against earlier. Well that's not going to get us anywhere. We're not actually capable of converting a sandwich into pure energy. So let's instead use the energy released when you burn the food, and let's use marshmallows instead of sandwiches for our mental image because they genuinely burn. Hell, this is mental enough already, let's have at reality:

 Ok, so we'll convert what we eat into Calories. We don't actually have a belly full of charcoal but it's an approximation right? To be honest, we're too far from the original equations to call this a simplification any more. I'd more properly call this an engineering model. The difference being that engineering models don't claim to be derived from real physical laws. They have their own set of rules which aren't physical, but which through experimentation have been found to give similar results to reality. An analogy if you will. I'm hoping that I've spent enough time now that when I say:

Calories in - Calories out = Change in bodyweight

This is not actually the First Law of Thermodynamics, it's something that looks similar providing we make a lot of assumptions and ignore a lot of other variables. It does not have to be obeyed, and it's only useful in as far as it helps us make predictions about what happens in reality. In fact, a more accurate approximation would have been to stick with conservation of mass:

Atoms in - Atoms out = Change in bodyweight

Here we can just talk about mass, we can justifiably ignore relativity effects and have something more meaningful but less practical. So let's see how practical the Calorie model is.

I should just note here that we made the assumption that the caloric change in bodyweight is represented by stored fat. Of course, there are many instances of people trying to apply this equation to muscle gain. I don't really know why, the maths doesn't even remotely begin to stack up. I'm going to try and keep it simple for now. Which means the first thing we want to calculate is "Calories In". We've already reduced our definition here by specifying that we're counting in Calories. Now let's idealise the situation further and look at this as if willpower were not an issue and people have and are able to exercise full control over what they eat. It's a big assumption, but it could be true for some people so let's give it a chance. We'll even disregard the coupled nature of the equation (the fact that calories expended AND changes in bodyweight are both factors in determining Calories eaten in the typical individual). We should be able to nail down this number right?

Well, if we make a few more assumptions maybe we can. First up, let's assume the packaging is accurate. This is a poor assumption, some foods can be 100% out on their advertised Calorie contents, but we can't really do the maths without it. So take the numbers on the box at face value. Of course, these numbers aren't actually the heat released when the food is burned. They reduce the food to its constituent molecules (approximately) and use standardised numbers you're probably familiar with. 4 Calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate, 9 Calories per gram of fat. These aren't the numbers you get from burning these molecules either, but this time it's a good thing, because they've been adjusted to account for digestion and metabolism! So these numbers are actually an estimate of the energy available to the body from these molecules when they are eaten. Except of course once you combine these molecules with each other, and a bunch of other stuff, and carry out various processing operations, and hell even if you just cook your food before eating it, you end up with differences in how the food is digested and metabolised. And that's just from the food's point of view. These numbers are trying to account for the calories lost directly at the other end of the gut, those 'stolen' by gut bacteria, yet more that is digested but not metabolised and is lost through urine. And if you think these variables don't change from person to person and indeed from day to day depending on health and environment etc. then I'd suggest that's an optimistic view. So those numbers on the box (even if they've been calculated correctly) are an entertaining guess of what the average amount of energy available from a food would be if it were metabolised as such. But there are definitely margins of error. Big honking ones.

So even the most conscientious acolyte would struggle to get a very accurate count of how many Calories they were actually getting in. And as just alluded to, even then this is assuming that all the Calorie-containing molecules are used for energy or stored as such. Of course this isn't true either, the body has many uses for proteins and fats which mean they're not metabolised for energy and so shouldn't really be counted in this equation. I wouldn't blame you for ignoring that either though, it's not as if we have been rigorous up til this point. Let's be exceedingly generous and say there's a 10% error in our intake (though 50%-200% would be quite easy to argue in some cases). Can we do better with working out what our "Calories out" is?

Thanks to the diet industry, we all have a good idea of this one right? Basal metabolic rate (the energy required to stay alive) + thermogenesis (extra energy released as you go about your day actually doing things) + exercise (ok, it's still thermogenesis, but it can be useful to separate out deliberate activity). BMR is the easy one, it doesn't change much day to day. It's also by far the biggest part of where your Calories are spent. As you might expect it's dependent on factors such as body temperature, body composition, size, diet, thyroid function, age, genetics, physical development, drug use and so on. Sound like time for some simplifying assumptions again? Well first let's note that diet cropped up again - Calories in is going to affect Calories out. You can't simply change one without changing the other. But let's ignore that. It turns out that there is remarkable consistency in metabolic rates. Most of us our within 10% of each other, even without doing any maths. That's handy. Not terribly precise, but if we correct for mass and age at least we can probably get a bit closer, probably within 200 Calories.

This is a good time for a side note. An extremely common suggestion for people wanting to lose weight is to gain muscle, as more muscle means higher BMR. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just saying that if you spend a year losing 25lb of fat (quite feasible) and gaining 25lb of muscle (quite challenging) then you've boosted your metabolism around about a whopping 100 Calories. 

So, have much variation is there in thermogenesis? Well, depending on your level of activity the calculators will suggest anything from 10% to 100% increase on your BMR. Even if we all burned Calories as efficiently as each other, in all our varied definitions of activity, this is still highly dependent on self-reporting. And this is where the diet factor will really kick in. If you have energy to burn, you're likely going to burn it. If you don't have as much available, you can sweat at the gym all you like, but when you get home you're more likely to sink into the couch as your BMR ratchets down to keep things on an even keel. It think it's doing you a favour. This again actually works for us, it reduces the variation between people so it's easier to guess what the total energy cost is. Because it's surprisingly consistent within and between cultures. Even so, believing that you know better than within 10% accuracy what your daily energy expenditure is would be a bold statement. The estimates are good because statistically there's not much variation, not because the calculators really mean anything.

Let's try and use our equation now to lose bodyfat. Everyone knows a pound of fat contains 3500 calories. Sure, why not. So if we want to lose a pound of fat, we just need to plug in our "Calories out" and it's easy to then see how much we need to try and eat. Except it doesn't work like that. Barely anyone will try and persuade you it's that simple any more. You can only lose so much at a time. Why? The Calorie model doesn't say, we're just adding an additional caveat, changing the rules, which is fine since we made the rules up in the first place - it's our model remember? Not the Universe's. Empirically then we can say losing a pound of fat takes about a week. So we want to carefully balance out a 500 Calorie deficit. We might as well just make that the rule. If you want to lose bodyfat, calculate a 500 Calorie deficit. It's not as if we expect the model to hold up for weight gain at this point, not without additional empirically-derived caveats. Let's suppose a typical metabolism of 2000 Calories. It's on the low side, but we should probably include kids in our averages these days right? Now taking our optimistic tools, we think we can achieve a deficit of 150-850 calories. We can't really know any more accurately than that. At least we've guaranteed a deficit with our model, though you may be disappointed to be stuck at a third of the rate of progress you'd hoped. At this point it would probably be best to monitor your bodyfat, and if you're not losing enough then try and eat less, and if it's dropping too fast eat more.

I'll be honest, my atom balance equation isn't looking such a bad idea any more. Give me half an hour, or decades of research and experiments, I could probably suggest a mass-based intake that would get you in the ballpark and then have it self-correct by adding or reducing the amount of mass you consumed depending on the results. And without all this tedious framing of everything in Calories. Not that I'd recommend it as a strategy, because it still fails to address most of the issues that cause people to fail to adhere to a diet in the first place. I'm just saying that the whole Calorie paradigm is no more meaningful than trying to eat a specific weight of food a day. We could use any other property of food as well with decent effect. Ok, not all grams are the same, we should probably specify that it will work far better if you eat certain kinds of foods. Eating your allotment in paper every day is not going to work well, whether you measure it kilograms, Calories or candelas.

(thanks google, that's exactly what I was looking for...)

So if I think the model is fairly flawed (and I do by the way), why does it seem to work? Well, it works sometimes, but then it would because some people who are trying to lose weight will eat the right things and do the right things. And in fairness the underlying reality may have a strong correlation to mass of food consumed (and if you try to reduce calories, you will likely reduce total mass eaten - you'll also spend less time eating, and eat less of all macronutrients). It's not too much of a stretch to say that obesity may be linked to overconsumption in some aspect or other, so anything that reduces intake across the board has a chance of working. But that doesn't mean there's anything special about Calories. And before we get sidetracked again into Calories representing a fundamental energy balance, may I refer you to the bulk of this post above?

More significantly, simply the act of tracking something would have improved the diet. You can assume any explanation you like here, whether it's being more mindful of your eating, making better choices, becoming more educated about what's actually in your food. Tracking has been seen to work with nothing more advanced than plotting your weight daily against an arbitrarily determined slope. Without obsessing over any behaviours at all. So if you start digging up information and writing down every constituent of everything you put in your mouth, you'll probably lose weight if you want to lose weight, and gain if you want to gain. Unless you're trying to hit a certain number of course - and that number ends up being wrong. So it's probably lower risk to skip the calculators altogether.

There's a bunch of additional caveats these days to try and make the model work of course, some of which address the problems of adherence (hunger etc.) while others try to cover for the errors inherent in the calculations. Some do both. As an example, the Calorie model will often now include a rider to the effect of increasing protein consumption. Often to twice the amount or more than would appear to be required by any scientific study. This wouldn't be included unless it helped right? Or if there was a lot of money at stake in supplementing protein I guess, but what are the odds of that? So protein is quite satiating. Getting protein Calories will make you less hungry than cupcake Calories. What happens if we forgo the Calorie Paradigm and try phrasing that differently. Protein will make you less hungry than cupcakes. Hmm, seems to work, and we can probably explain it with some kind of biological explanation that has nothing to do with thermodynamics. Cool. Is excess protein a handy recommendation in other ways? Well, yes. As noted previously, protein isn't really a fuel at all, most of those Calories ordinarily wouldn't count to any energy balance. What happens if we double the amount of protein? Well, if you're desperately short of energy it can be metabolised, but if not it can just be broken down and the nitrogen excreted along with the rest of the waste. It's insurance if you like. You're eating Calories, but the amount you actually use depends on whether you need them or not. It's almost as if your body doesn't need you to get out your lab equipment and micromanage your meals. So long as you follow some simple rules it can balance itself out. Those rules are probably a subject for another time, but they probably won't need to justify everything through the use of Calories. In fact we could probably avoid a whole load of question and misunderstandings and stress if we didn't mention them at all. Just a hunch.

 

The Story So Far

Fitness. It's more than exercise. More than diet. It's a lifestyle. How do you define something that's constantly evolving? Well, you start at the beginning, and try and track the pressures that have influenced that evolution. So, here's some context from the past 30 years...

So, I was born in Edinburgh. Maybe it's in this picture, maybe not. We left when I was 3 so I can't say I remember.

The next 10 years are slightly more relevant. Growing up in the countryside meant running through the fields and up and down the lanes. It's one of these houses here:

That, combined with family holidays spent camping and occasional weekends away in even more rural areas, led to a love of the outdoors. Not that I enjoyed being dragged along on hikes in the rain, but running about and clambering on things was always an enjoyable diversion. My first school was understandably small, we didn't get to the point of formalised sports. I wasn't even in the main village so didn't have enough neighbours to play football (soccer). We'd run around the playground during breaks with our made-up games. Notably, through a bureaucratic quirk I also ended up getting twice the amount of swimming lessons that most people got. It was an infrequent but pleasant family leisure activity.

Children can grow on anything, but the food consumed is likely to be habit-forming. We were lucky I guess in getting home-cooked meals, including occasional home-grown produce. Mostly though we got our main meal at school. Again though, this was a relatively small scale, without multiple options. They cooked a proper 'balanced' dish. My parents in retrospect were good about not giving me the means to supplement this with my own purchases - which when they came inevitably tended towards sweets. I did not enjoy most vegetables or 'real' food - I was picky enough to refuse to eat anything that still had bones. But though I complained, for the most part I ate well. One other detail that may be salient. Before I was born, my parents were living in Africa. This resulted in a habit which has propogated throughout our whole family to this day to base meals on a mountain of rice. There's been considerable diversification, but these dishes (and similarly with pasta) were considerably more prevalent in my youth than I have since learned is typical.

The end of this period covers the move to secondary school at 11. We now had a cast of thousands, and were introduced to all sorts of standard English grammar school PE cliches. We had expansive fields for our games lessons, there's even pictures online...

While I'm sure there was other sports, my abiding memories are of wheezing through cross country runs (at this point I was still somewhat asthmatic) and learning the basics of rugby, ably assisted by the bully who had shown up my last year of primary school and who evidently relished the tackle more than I did. Throw in the communal showers and I did not find a love for sports being kindled. I wasn't particularly good, and didn't particularly have fun. Compared to my other classes where I was respected, it's no surprise my interests veered elsewhere. To be fair, I still played back home, though there was less time once we got to and from school. I was also now cycling over the hills - including occasionally as far out as school which was about 10 miles away. But what could have been a great opportunity to develop physical abilities was arguably being missed.

This was compounded then with my first taste of freedom in buying my own lunch. As should surprise no-one, I managed to get to the front of the queue every day of the week by virtue in part of my membership of the band and choir (which rehearsed at lunchtime) and on other days by my suggestion to the head librarian that I could help better if I finished lunch early. Because the library was where I spent my free time. So what did I now eat for my main meal?

This, but lower quality. Burger, chips and beans. With a can of coke and a kit-kat. Every. Day. And I loved it.

With 5 formative years at school left, things then took a turn that would be profound and cement the above trends in interesting ways. We moved. Here.

So, what impact did London have? First off, no dedicated playing fields at school. We cycled through several sports we had to travel for. The only one I remember is badminton, because that was the only one I would consent to go to - I wasn't too bad at it, and there was minimal opportunity for turning it into a contact sport. The bully problem was magnified as I was now a complete outsider, without even the refuge of the classroom as the teachers were just as confused as the other students over the fact that I actually learned things. So, minimal activity at school, which was a mere 5 minute walk from home. I still cycled - as there were actually places to get to. At my peak I covered 3000 miles in a year - the year before I learned to drive.

I did find other outlets though. Through a friend I was motivated to join the air cadets. I wanted to give a good account of myself and all things considered this was a positive environment to try to do pushups and situps and run around in the dark pretending to shoot people. I got myself a pullup bar to put up in my door at home, but could barely move, nor figure out how to progress. I was even interested in signing up for the Nijmegan march, but at the first training walk I ended the first day after 10 miles blistered, chafed, and essentially immobile. Depending on the environment, the will was there, but my body wasn't really up to it any more. In retrospect one other key fitness-related feature of this period was learning to become a glider pilot, for reasons that will be explained later.

I can't remember what happened for lunch. I'm pretty sure when we moved we switched to having our main meal at home in the evenings and I took a packed lunch to school. My final 2 years though when I changed to another school for sixth form I know what I had for lunch. Technically I had it at the first break in the morning. Every day.

And I'd now graduated to a full bottle of coke, and a tube of Smarties. And this was back when Smarties had real E-numbers and letters on the lids. Let's add this to the infinitely more accessible shops and increases in allowance and assume that outside of my meals I was eating plenty of unhealthy snacks. For reference, breakfast throughout all this time at home was most likely toast, sometimes cereal.

So that's how things were when I left home. I had ambitions of being fit enough to serve in the Armed Forces. I enjoyed getting dirty. I could cycle a fair bit, swim pretty well, and didn't hate playing badminton. But I was making consistently poor food choices whenever I could and getting rounder all the time. Time for a change of scene.

(At some point we'll get to pictures I actually took)
University, so much going on, all of it within a mile or two. Of course all the sports clubs were too intimidating, I even avoided the badminton club as I'd never played competitively or even with any real rules and I wasn't sure if I'd be welcome. I was confident enough however to join the football team. Well, the 4th team. With all the other people who liked muddy fields and not expecting to win. Other distractions prevented me from really missing out on any regular physical activity. There was a period of several months at least where I took up jogging. Pounding along weekly with a friend in a miserably uncomfortable way - running would have been too charitable a word for the activity. Around this time I also acquired a set of adjustable dumbbells. But I had no idea what to do with them and picking them up didn't seem to get any easier.

I did finally start to use my upper body for something though. I got a convenient summer job.

As you can see, none of those boats are going the right way. It may have been more about technique than strength, but for a couple of years I travelled up and down the river in the summer months more than anyone else. You'd never see my boat in this situation. I was full of good intentions. But lacked the knowledge or support to implement any of them well.

Of course, you must be wondering how my diet fared, now I had complete autonomy. To be honest, my meals were good. I cooked, and did pretty well compared to most students. But I also now washed everything down with 2l bottles of coke, day after day, and munched through 200g blocks of chocolate as I sat hunched in front of my computer. I never related my lack of success or enthusiasm for physical activities as deriving from my diet, but I don't know if I'd've been able to counter the emotional forces that encouraged my binges even so. Despite that, and perhaps because I maintained an interest in being active, I never went over 220lb. And I know that because that was the limit taking the front seat in a Grob.

See? Relevant. As it was I never actually passed my spin tests as the instructors simply couldn't get it into a proper spin with the amount of ballast I brought on board. If I had a hard line, it was that I wasn't going to get too heavy to fly. That probably counted for something.

From here we can skip daintily into the post-grad years. Here everything became more focused, and generally less melodramatic. My last summer of undergrad I discovered people that friends of mine pretty much made up the entire college Ultimate frisbee team. So I joined. And had fun in competitive team sports for the first time. And wasn't actually too bad. It helps joining a team that then goes on to be undefeated for the season I guess, and I can't take all the credit for that. So impassioned was I that at my next uni, I started a team, got enough people together and got to not only play several times a week, but go to tournaments and do all the fun stuff I wish I'd been doing years earlier. With the high turnover of a post-grad uni, it was hard work, but the club is still going strong 5 years after I left.

That's not all. If the foreshadowing wasn't enough, here's a surprise. I started playing badminton regularly. The uni had an informal club which played 3 hours, 3 times a week. And most weeks I was on court all that time. On the minus side, I never really overcame my upper body weakness, but on the plus side I never had to worry about my clearances going long. Over these few years, I also joined an outdoors group that took me on weekends away to go hiking, on purpose this time. It took some getting used to but the discomforts of my teenage years were passing by as I improved and started enjoying the whole deal. My last summer before I submitted my thesis I either walked, ran or cycled to campus, 5 miles from my house, or else went to swim in the morning, pretty much every day. If I wasn't strong, I was at least active, and moving my weight back down. And really building a pretty solid base of fitness. Thing I could do regularly, daily even, for fun.

So did I change my diet? Bad habits are bad habits, although I now bemoaned every time I got in the car to drive to the nearest shop just to buy cookies or chocolate. Didn't stop me though. By my final year I was doing much better on the orthodox view of healthy, taking packed meals rather than buying food on site, cooking pasta salads and lean chicken breast etc. This was when I first started following any real prescribed Diet. But staying up all night coding could undermine even the strongest will, and mine was nowhere near that strong yet. Enough time had passed now for me to tie a high bodyfat percentage to lack of progress with relationships. Suffice to say the drive to change myself wasn't entirely noble. This first sustained effort got me down to 182lb, but never any lower.

Moving on again, we have some more experiences that have to be recounted for their aggregation into my lifestyle. First, through the outdoors group mentioned before, was my 'expedition' to Nepal. A culmination of many things, a 3-day hike into the Himalayas, followed by a 6 day raft back out.

Physically I was up to the task. What was interesting however was learning another food culture (this was my first time outside Europe). Aside from the details of what they ate (and how fit and strong the guides were, despite not having protein shakes to hand) I was most influenced by the habit of only eating 2 meals. This was revelatory at the time, and factored heavily into my eventual foray into intermittent fasting. I may also have learned a thing or two from killing a goat on the beach.

This adventure was closely followed up by a 3-month trip to South Africa teaching kids to play frisbee. This was finally an opportunity to spend the whole day being active, if at a modest level and again without strength so much as endurance involved. And the food provided here was neither terribly nutritious or filling, and we had opportunities to supplement it ourselves. An addiction to quality biltong notwithstanding, the net effect was deleterious to health. Some records were less flattering than others.

I did get to spend some time though seeing how the poorer locals typically ate though, which was again quite fascinating. And I didn't always look so bad...

After this, I started gainful employment. My opportunities for playing now without a campus were severely limited. I mostly tried to combat this through judicious use of Wii Fit. And Just Dance. I was knuckling down on the diet though, building on my experiences abroad, experimenting with just a morning and evening meal, adding new dishes to my repertoire, trying unconventional foods for breakfast, and perhaps most significantly resolving to quit sugary drinks. And I did. I just stopped. Went a whole year, and for the most part didn't really miss them. The headaches and so on I'd always used as an excuse to imbibe disappeared pretty much straight away. My default drink now in any situation was water, and so it has remained. And it works perfectly well.

It surely felt different at the time, but this slow grinding of the gears in retrospect didn't appear to deliver much. Without hard figures on changing body composition, I forget about how hard simple activities used to be. How different would I be had I not kept making my imperfect way towards a brighter future? I don't know, but I'm sure there's a hundred other turning points so obscure as to be forgotten that were just as intrinsic to building the foundation to do the things I'm doing now. Not that we're there yet, just 2 more years to cover...

Hello USA! Hello winters where you genuinely can't go outside to play half the time. Hello Ultimate scene where you can play pickup every day of the week in summer, but none of it competitive. Hello junk food culture, and a firm decision not to be seduced by it. And hello foul chocolate and unsatisfying baked goods. For the record I did spend my first year driving out to a (hard to find) badminton club regularly, but it was just too far to drive over summer when I had other options, and the habit broke. After the first few months I settled in to some serious diet evaluations and measurement tracking. Starting with actually lifting weight for the first time seriously (though on machines) at the little apartment gym - and eating all the things. Through the slow carb approach which broke my dependence on grains, and other programs I forget now that introduced fasting on a more serious level. Here's a pretty chart.

In fact it's only now looking at it again that I can see the progress of the year following this. You can see how closely my waist (and chest) measurement varied with weight. However, while I'm by no means at my lightest currently, I measure a couple of inches less than at the equivalent weight 18 months ago. These diets, when maintained, delivered a drop in weight, but wasn't revealing rippling muscles underneath.

My second winter, I finally caved in and got a gym membership, after years of believing I could do everything I wanted to get fit outdoors. I got given my first program, mainly dumbbell work, that I went through and got a measure of where my weaknesses were. I also joined a number of classes, though they generally fell under the category of 'aerobics'. This is also when I went primal, which has been my guiding dietary philosophy ever since. This might as well mark the start of when I seriously thought of fitness as something to train for, rather than something one acquired as a by-product of doing fun things. That working to become fitter was a lifestyle choice. I also discovered I was relatively good at running, at least on the basis of running to the gym which was less than a mile away. By american standards though this was noteworthy, and I was persuaded to enter a race.

A few months later these same people persuaded me to run Tough Mudder, with only 6 weeks notice. I wasn't satisfied that our 'boot camp' was going to help me any more, curling and pressing 10lb dumbbells over and over. I introduced my friends to the joys of running about and scrambling over playground equipment, and I took to the trail to how this running thing would hold up. What eluded me was that one pull-up. The component of strength I was seriously lacking to navigate the obstacles. I tried, but had nowhere near enough time. This had however led me to Stronglifts, and I flirted with the Smith machine during my preparation. I wouldn't get to use a real barbell until I found another gym, after the race. I mentioned I liked getting dirty right?

This may be where many recall my entry to Fitocracy - it was my profile pic for quite a while. I'd actually joined a few months earlier though, to track my sporadic running. However, it was perfectly placed for my full-blown transition to lifting. 8 months later and I'm finally dialling my diet back in to support my activities, while once again looking to make that final breakthrough and see the definition I've been working on. It'll still take time, and may go down as the slowest cut in history, but I've had some fun along the way. And maybe things do look a little different these days.