In memory of a fat man

A few weeks ago there was a small article on the BBC news website; a 30-stone man, not yet that old in years, had died shortly after an operation to remove part of his stomach in an attempt to help him lose weight. The other night there was a program that briefly featured him, and that made me decide I had to write this article.

It is all too easy to look disparagingly at the overweight and think to yourself that it's their own fault. All it takes is a little will-power, some self-control, and they wouldn't be like that any more. It must be their own fault for getting into that state in the first place, mustn't it? It's not as if anybody forces you to over-eat.

And now, I have to disagree with myself. What I wrote above is right only in a very general concept, but there's something far more subtle involved with weight-gain and loss that requires knowledge and understanding in order to give the will-power a chance.

Just over a year ago, I was 15 stone, half of what this poor dead man weighed, and had only just realised that I was technically obese. The change had crept up gradually on me, although I had known for a while that the bulging sagging torso I was now seeing in the mirror couldn't be a good thing.

So I read the health advice given in the side-bar links. How to lose weight was oh-so-easy. Eat less of the bad foods, and exercise more. Cut out all fats, all 'bad' snacks such as crisps and sweets, avoid all silly diets and pills, and aim to lose weight gradually at no more than 2 pounds a week.

I planned an exercise schedule; a walk every evening as soon as I got home from work, and a walk at lunchtime around the woods encircling the building. I began to eat more apples and raw carrots, and cut out all biscuits and crisps. Over a four week trial period I managed to lose 2 pounds.

It wasn't the 8 pounds I had planned in my spreadsheet, so I increased the amount of evening exercise until I was walking 2 hours each evening from Monday to Friday, and 30 minutes each lunchtime. In the following five weeks I lost absolutely no weight. I converted some into muscle, and found a marked improvement in breathing ability as I climbed the steeply wooded slopes to try and photograph the elusive deer, but no fat went away.

Over the next few months I managed to lose a grand total of another pound, and in May of this year, disillusioned with the ability of walking to shed the weight, bought a bicycle. For two months I went out four evenings a week and cycled for an hour, stopping at secluded spots for 30 minutes exercise to make sure that it wasn't just my legs that became firm and muscular. After the first 4 weeks on the bike I tried the scales again, in vain. Although I had shrunk my waist by almost an inch, I had not shrunk my bulk by as much as a pound.

I had originally determined not to become a calorie-counter, but as an exercise for a week, I totted up in a spreadsheet what I ate, and when I ate it, and also worked out the daily calorie requirement for someone in a sedentary occupation. I noticed a lot of snacking through the day and evening, mostly fruit and high-bran cereal, but even so, the totals suggested that I should be losing a pound a week. A pound of fat was 3500 calories, and I was close to eating 500 calories less each day than I needed to. For the next few weeks I cut out things like orange juice with breakfast, and consciously tried to eat less of things like cous-cous, rice, and noodles at lunch.

At the end of June I had still only seen a change of two pounds. I was certainly more muscular in the legs and arms after eight weeks of exercise, and had lost a little fat from my face, but the bulging shopping bag that was my stomach still swung ponderously from side to side as it preceded my every move. Even worse was the fact that, no matter how much I tried to cut back the snacks between meals, I still found myself desperate for something to eat within an hour of finishing whatever it was I had allowed myself.

So I started to search the web again to see what could cause a slow-down in weight loss, or hunger cravings despite eating the right sort of food, and wandered into the bitterly-disputed world of low-carb diets. What caught my attention was a description of the way that carbohydrates cause insulin to be produced, as a result of which the carbohydrates not immediately burnt for energy were stored as fat for subsequent use. However, the insulin also caused a desire to eat, and I recognised the signs of positive-feedback, which is an engineering no-no.

So I became a lo-carber for one month as a trial. I put the packets of high-fibre bran flakes away in the cupboard together with the cous-cous, rice and pastas. I ate no fruit. I drank no alcohol. I left the little spicy biscuits beside the coffee cup on the breakfast table. And it worked. By the fifth week of the diet I had dropped below 14 stone for the first time in that many years. The hunger cravings that used to start an hour after eating vanished, not gradually, but almost immediately.

I knew from my diary in which I recorded the exercise details that I wasn't losing energy, instead I saw a steady improvement in the times taken to reach certain points on the route, that I was able to stay one gear higher climbing the gradients, that I could increase the number of exercises at my woody gym, and that the aching muscles at the start of the ride vanished sooner and sooner. My teeth and hair didn't fall out, I didn't have any dizzy spells or muscle spasms, I was feeling physically much better for it.

It wasn't a no-carb diet, I still had a couple of slices of toast under my scrambled eggs in the morning, and a pitta bread with my chicken kebab every evening, so it was more of a strictly-controlled-carb diet. But one episode showed me very clearly just how in the grip of the sugar-fever I must have been. I was sitting on the bench by the crossroads just finishing the chicken kebab, when a distinct picture flashed through my mind of the bags of sweets that lined the aisle in the little convenience store over the road. I even had the smell of marshmallows in my mind. Something inside of me was begging for sugar, and wanted me to cross the road and go into the shop again just to renew the association.

When I gave up smoking 14 years ago, I never had mental pictures of cigarettes, or thought of curling smoke. I had said to myself that I didn't need to smoke, and threw the cigarettes away, and never touched them again. People have said to me that I must have an iron will, and I do know that I can make myself do certain things if I put my mind to it. But the mental flashes of sweets and sugar suggest to me that while smoking was merely a mental habit that I was able to control by will-power alone, the sugar and carbohydrate habit was a physical one. Like smoking, it required a clean break, without any weaning-off process or substitute, but unlike smoking it was wired inside me at a deeper level.

Nobody wants to be overweight, apart from a few Sumo wrestlers. Most of the too-large people I see wandering down the aisles in the supermarkets are trying to choose sensible foods like low-fat options, and wholemeal bread, and fruits. But I wonder if we haven't all been sold a lie over these past few years, the myth that fat is bad for us. I took the advice, not just from the websites, but from my own doctor, that cutting out fat and eating more fruit and vegetables was good for me. And now I wonder if there isn't a far simpler explanation for the fact that the good advice just doesn't seem to work.

Is it possible that cutting out fat from our diets has resulted in the body forgetting how to use fat as a fuel? I have been carrying around two or more stones of stored fat, and yet my body ignored it for all those months, not because it had a Joseph-like dream of seven thin cattle eating seven fat cattle, but because it found it easier to burn the quick-acting ever-so-nice tasting carbohydrates and sugars?

Of course that's not the end of the story, the battle between the diet faddists and the established health advisers still rages fiercely, with telling little arguments like "The slimmest race of people (Japanese) in the world eat the most carbohydrate-rich diet" on the one side knocking the Atkins arguments over, coupled with the undeniable medical evidence that too much fat is bad for your general health while a diet rich in fruit and vegetables is good for you. Another recent 'fad' to emerge is the idea that different blood-types require different types of basic diet, and just like the Atkins adversaries, dieticians and doctors are speaking out sharply against it, some quoting medical research, others quoting current thinking, but nearly all of them saying it is nonsense.

There is no clear advantage to either side that I can see, and I have the distinct impression that what is needed is a new class of nutritionists and fitness advisers to examine each of us and give us personalised plans tailored to our individual peculiarities. Sadly, even if it happens, it will have come far too late for the dead 30-stone man and thousands of other unfortunates who have put their faith in 'the healthy thing to do'.

(Standard author's disclaimer to protect myself from nutters who take everything literally and then try to sue).

I am not a Doctor. I am not a Dietician. I am not a Nutritionist. I am an engineer, and tend to think of things in an engineering way. Don't copy me, don't ask me for advice on how to go on a low-carb diet to lose weight. If there's anything in my writing that I want you to try, it's this: 'don't believe everything you read, don't take conventional wisdom as gospel, question everything and do your own research.'

If taking regular exercise and eating less fat and more fruit is the healthy and proper way to lose weight, why are there so many diet books for sale, and so many slimming clubs, and so many promises made for plans and pills? The law of supply and demand suggests that these other options exist because they are needed, because the 'healthy option' just doesn't work for a large number of people.