Health, Fitness and Diet

Story · all 20 words

The Second of January

Every January my brother-in-law announces that this is the year he finally gets in shape. He has now announced it eleven times. I say nothing at all, because two years ago I did exactly the same thing, and I did it worse.

My version began in a doctor’s room. Nothing dramatic happened – she simply observed that my diet was the diet of a nineteen-year-old and that I was thirty-four, and that I had put on weight steadily for six years without once noticing. She said it kindly, which somehow made it considerably worse.

So I did what everybody does. I joined a gym on the second of January and went four times in the first week. I did not stretch at all, I lifted things that were far too heavy for me, and by the Friday I could not lift a kettle. Every single muscle in my back wrote to me personally to confirm that it existed. This is precisely how most people collect an injury in the first fortnight and then give up in the third.

What actually worked, when I finally found it, was much less interesting. I stopped trying to lose weight quickly and started trying to change one habit a month.

In February I began to cut down on fizzy drinks, which I had been drinking at a rate of about three a day without ever deciding to. In March I started to jog twice a week – badly, slowly, and in the dark, where nobody I knew could see me. In April I learned to cook four things properly, which did more for my diet than every list of rules I had ever read.

I did not stop eating junk food. I still eat it on Fridays and I enjoy every mouthful. But a balanced week carries one bad evening without any difficulty, and the food I eat for the rest of it now contains actual vitamins and a great deal less fat than it used to.

The change I genuinely did not expect was energy. I had assumed I was permanently exhausted because I was in my thirties and had a job and that is simply what happens. It turned out I was exhausted because I slept badly, ate badly and never moved. Now I work out twice a week, not hard, and I sleep like a man who has done something with his day.

The other thing nobody warns you about: learn how to breathe. A trainer spent an entire session on it and I spent the whole hour convinced he was wasting my money. He was not.

I am not in shape. I am simply less out of it than I was. But I can now run for a bus without arriving at work in a condition that requires an explanation, and that, honestly, was the entire ambition.