I've worked out that if you take one step at a time for long enough in the right direction then eventually you get to where you are going. That's how I managed the unlikely outcome of walking Kokoda a few years back (5.5 days thank you very much). I was by far the slowest in the group, and arrived hours after everyone else each day, through the stinking, wet, slippery, muddy jungle. But I made it. I made it each day and collapsed in a heap. And then got up again the next day and did it again. Trudging step by step.
But in the last day or so I've been thinking more about the big picture for me health wise. Basically I, like most of us, was quite fit in my glory days (15 years ago say). I ran. I swam. I played all sort of sports. I engaged in a low fat diet, which was what we were told to do, and I was at a healthy weight.
Looking back I should have gotten up to more mischief than I did but then they say youth is wasted on the young don't they.
For a lot of my 20s I didn't treat my body really well. When I was 23 I lived above an Irish pub in Canada for 6 months, and that really fucked me up health wise. I think that was the time I went from being young and fit looking to being a bloke looking like he had been pissing it up in an Irish pub every night and eating pub food for 6 months.
Back in Oz I thought I would be able to do a body reset pretty quickly. Mentally I was still the same, after all. But instead I threw myself into my work, which involved sitting in an office in Sydney initially with lots of other people who sat in an office, and hit the turps once or twice a week.
Fitness has always been front of mind. I walked a lot. Tried different things. But then at 25 I think I mentioned I had what turned out to be a panic attack at work, and I had a full health check up as part of that. The doc said I was a fit young person but I had to lose some weight, and then, out of the blue, she also asked if I drank a lot 'because your liver is not looking so good'.
That shocked the shit out of me. What she meant was the blood test had detected that my liver was leaking enzymes, which meant it was working a bit too hard. How could this be when I wasn't drinking every day? Just once or twice a week really. Whatever she meant it spurred me into action, and that was pretty well the only other time I have gone off the grog. It was 2000 and I was living at Coogee in Sydney, near the beach. For 13 weeks I walked almost every day to Bondi and back (a huge walk in the mornings before work), didn't drink a drop, and lost 13kg.
What a fantastic effort that was. But at the end of the 13 weeks, icy cold schooners called and before I knew it I was back at the Coogee Bay Hotel enjoying the good life pissed with a view of the ocean. One of life's pleasures indeed.
Unfortunately that meant that I put the weight back on quick smart. The sad thing is that I remember a girl at work saying to me, "You seem a lot happier", when I was off the turps and exercising like a champion while losing weight.
The next decade - yes decade, past without me thinking about alcohol, at least in any negative sense, much at all. I enjoyed getting pissed, but no more than any other Aussie bloke I knew, and a bit less than some. Through work I probably had access to more grog on more days, and work probably drove me more too it as well..... but I would never have said I had a 'problem' by Australian drinking standards in any event.
But something was obviously out of whack health wise. That was evidenced in my weight gain, as well as me sleeping poorly, being a bit run down and perhaps even depressed. Even my face seemed to be getting puffy.
Something had to give. I couldn't keep going up in weight could I? Where would that end? Even if you only put on 2kg a year (hell I could do that in a weekend) then over a decade you put on 20kg!! And what, 15 years is 30kg!!! That's the insidious nature of weight gain over time - just as if you move in the right direction you can lose weight over time (because it always passes....) so too you can turn into the body of your teen nightmares over 20 years if you just put on a paltry 2kg a year. God help you if you put on 5kg a year. That would mean you put on 100kg!!! 3kg would be 60. 3kg is not a lot of weight to put in 12 months of hard living, and so the head in the sand approach over a decade can lead to catastrophic health disaster, at least from the point of view of you at 17 (and really, by any objective measure as well).
Denial is what allows this to happen. Every one of us does it. We lose the perspective of the 17 year old, but we keep the mindset. How many middle aged hags think they are pretty? How many tubby 40 year old blokes who look like shit still think they would be competitive as a second rower, and are still attractive to the 23 year old ladies?
If they really knew how they looked, and I mean really knew how they looked - the way the 17 year old sees them - they would probably top themselves. I mean if the 17 year old put on 30 or 40kg and aged 20 years in a weekend they would probably top themselves from horror wouldn't they. They certainly wouldn't get up and go off to work thinking it was normal, and get pissed on Friday and still think they were in with a chance, would they.
That my friends, is denial. It protects us from the horrific reality of it all. It wouldn't do to have everyone topping themselves now would it. The ego is far too strong and clever for that. I'm fine mate, although I must say, poor old Sam is looking like shit these days isn't he. And christ he's a mess when he drinks. Lucky for me I get wittier and better looking when I'm pissed.
Yeah right.
For anything to change, I guess the first thing is to smash through that ego, and gain some (but certainly not all) of an understanding that you have transformed into that fine young specimen into, really, a fucking disgrace. Someone the young version of you would be horrified, absolutely horrified, to become. A person they would throw eggs at. Or taunt. Certainly not hang around. In a sense, most people become the nightmare they feared when they were 16.
So some perspective is required. Not full perspective, or, indeed, suicide rates may rise. And that just wouldn't do. Nor is it required.
But what to do when you have that perspective? Many panic. They do something they cannot sustain and do not enjoy. They crash diet. They drink shakes (what sort of madness is this?). They go for a 5 hour walk in the sun and return exhausted.
Most of the time they can't keep it up for more than say, 13 weeks, and, like me in 2000, put it all back on, and then some to boot.
So it needs to be sustainable. It needs to be for the long haul. That doesn't mean you can't make difficult decisions. Like giving up the piss if it is getting in your way (as it was mine). Like dragging your fat ass out of bed each morning to go for a walk for an hour. Like not eating the sausage rolls at morning tea. And you make this effort, doing these things, until they become a routine. Until they become part of your life, and much less effort is required because that is how you live each day by habit.
Once you think you are in the routine, that you are doing all you need to do for sustainable change, then you measure yourself to see if you are going in the right direction. It does not have to be fast change, because time is on your side (yes it is). But it has to be change in the right direction. And rather than putting on, say, 10kg in 5 years, you will be losing it in 5 years.
Anyway, I am getting distracted. The big picture for me. It has just occurred to me, in the last 24 hours, that rather than being 1/2 way through a year off the piss, I'm really 1/4 of the way through a two year healing period. A body reset period. A transformation to get much closer to the hill running demi-god than the fat middle aged disgrace I would be otherwise.
If I just repeat what I have done in the last 6 months another 3 times then I will have undone 15 years of hard living. At least to the extent that is possible, at my age and given the past 15 years. I need not go crazy, just keep doing what I am doing with continuous improvement. So if I'm walking fine, then I can improve by eating better, or eating less, or mixing the exercise up if I seem to be stalling.
No mad shakes, or deprivation, or trying to run till I cry. Just moving, step by step, on a two year journey towards a fit, vibrant, happy body that a 17 year old me would be proud of.
And as of next week, I'll be a quarter of the way through.
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