It had to happen, I'm writing a book about it.
People keep asking me when I am going to do this, and I have embarked on a separate writing project already by writing a minimum of 1,000 words a day for a year to kick start that pesky writing habit that I never did much with.(www.constantwriting.blogspot.com)
So after yet another reminder that I should get around to this from Gary's editor friend (who coincidentally very politely rejected a novel I wrote over twenty years ago, no hard feelings I swear) who when told of my plan said 'that will be easy to sell!' (or something of that ilk) which is pretty encouraging, so here I am getting around to it.
Because I am writing daily in the fictional arena (at least for now) I'll do this as a separate exercise and follow the commercial model of creating an outline and then creating some sample chapters and then sending it off to see if there is any interest in it. As I have plenty of material in my blog and a year of comments and mentions on Facebook etc... it will be easy enough to reconstruct my year of diets in a single slim volume (with pictures and some fave recipes for added flavour).
Fingers crossed.
Here's a first draft of an introduction.
Introduction: How did it all come about?
Back in March 2012 I was at least 126
Kilograms as the last time I had checked was back in 2010 and the
126 showing on the scales in my parents house gave me quite a fright. How did
I get that heavy? And I certainly was a fairly heavy, unhealthy
person like many people become without noticing how.
I accepted that I was big, probably
'technically' obese but I never really thought of myself that way.
Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror or in a photo
and think 'I can probably afford to lose some weight' or
something less flattering to my self image if I was feeling down or
depressed.
But did I class myself as 'fat' in my
head? No, not really – I did what I suspect most people did and
just did not think that much about it. Certainly my doctor had
advised me to lose some weight and every now and then if I annoyed my
wife enough she'd make a comment about wanting me to be alive when
our kids grew up, which was pointed and true but never sunk in.
Denial is a powerful tool when left alone, which is basically how it works anyway right?
In February my sister in law got
married and I was at home alone that morning and catching up with the
wedding party later that day. I grabbed the shirt and pants that I
was supposed to wear and found to my horror that the nice dress shirt
I had bought the previous year was quite tight. Because I wear casual
clothes to work (the advantages of being an IT cliché) I had no fall
back position. I put it on and took a bus into the city, stopping off
at work for a little while to get some things done before heading
down to the Hilton where the wedding was being held.
I knew that the shirt I was wearing was
too small, it felt tight and had been cutting into me for the bus
ride in to town, and sitting at my desk I could feel it grabbing at
me and thinking about spending the next ten or more hours in the
shirt was too much to bear. That shirt that did not fit, the largest
one I had was a XXL and had been a little loose when I had bought it
in 2011 and here I was in February 2012 an hour before I needed to be
at the ceremony standing with my wife who looked fabulous in her Maid
of Honour's dress, while I was feeling like a sausage bursting on a BBQ in summer.
I went out and bought a bigger shirt from a shop in K Road, who
kindly ironed out the creases for me, sold me some cuff-links and
sent me on my way immensely comfortable again.
This could have been my wake up call to
lose weight. This SHOULD have been a wake up call to lose some
weight. It was not.
I just carried on as normal and it made
no difference except now I had a funny story about being so fat I had
to buy a shirt an hour before the wedding I was going to. You can
laugh at yourself, and we all know you should not take yourself too
seriously and we just carry on with things the way they have always
been. The only difference was that I now had a nice dress shirt I
could wear and be comfortable in.
In March 2012 I was reading an article
in the NZ Herald about a new book all about Sugar and how it was the
bane of modern life. The author sounded a little unhinged and like an
anti sugar zealot preaching the evils of Sugar. I instantly dismissed
the idea as the raving of an over enthusiastic person selling a book
based on fear and over emphasis on one 'silver bullet' solution which
I have always been suspicious of. Despite this the article stayed
with me for a a few days not because I thought it was true but the
idea that it was almost impossible to cut sugar out of a modern diet,
because it was so pervasive.
I thought about this for a day or two
and got the idea in my head to see how hard it was to cut sugar out,
was it that hard to do? I had no real idea about diet, the plan that
would form after that first month and I had no intention of losing
weight. I assumed that I may lose a couple of kilos and that could be
ok, but then and there it was a bonus effect. I was satisfying my
curiosity, proving the claim true or false that sugar was really that
pervasive.
So I made myself a mental challenge,
and told a bunch of people I was doing it and why, it was an
interesting thing and it got me thinking about additives and how much
we don't know about what we are eating.
While it was a 'diet' by definition, I did not do it to lose weight, not at first. Then the coolest
thing happened, spoiler alert if you've not figured this out from the
cover, but I lost weight and quite a lot. I had to buy some scales
because I had none, I had not weighed myself in two years and the
last time I did I didn't like the number I saw. I had lost nine kilos
by the end of thirty days.
Nine kilos just by cutting sugar
completely. Lisa, a woman I worked with told me she read about this
diet that the comedian Jimmy Carr was on where he stopped eating at 6
pm and had no caloric intake after that, and that I should try that
next.
From this initial curiosity, the grain
of an idea of changing up the diets, my willingness to blog about the
results I came to the conclusion that I would do one year of dieting
in 12 one month diets.
The rules were simple, I started on the
10th day of each month and commenced a new diet until the
9th of the following one. The diet had to be simple, a
simple rule in one sentence or a few words. If it were complex I knew
I would not do it. I was pretty sure I could make it through 12 types
of simply expressed diets in twelve months and post once a week on my
blog.
The weight fell off initially because I
was doing something, anything to improve the way I related to food. I
added exercise somewhere around the halfway mark of the year and by
the end of it all I had done thirteen separate diets in that year. I
had lost forty five kilos in weight alone, I had changed my wardrobe
twice and even ended up on Television in Australia's Channel 9
talking about my plan.
I'd like to claim credit for being a
dieting genius and having a goal and sticking to it, weight and
health wise. In reality this was a lucky confluence of events that
changed my life for the better and in ways that still surprise me
have inspired others to make similar changes or take on some of the
many, many lessons I have learned.
I blogged about my progress every week
for the 52 weeks, and daily in the last few weeks when I was heading
to the finish line and creeping up the to the magical mythical number
of my BMI. A number if you had asked me at any point of my life after
turning twenty until just before I got to the end of my year of
diets, I would have said was impossible.
In the end it was not impossible, it was not even improbable.
It was doable.
In the end it was not impossible, it was not even improbable.
It was doable.
