The Rules

When I set off down the road of weight reduction, I consulted no books, joined no societies, asked no advice and adopted no scientific theories. This I wanted to do on my own, and I was so aghast at my own developing fattitude that I resolved to design my own rules. I never called it a diet. Diets, fundamentally, don't work. The emphasis is too much on weight reduction and too little on the consequences and the aftermath.

So here are the rules:

1. Eat less

The simplest, most obvious and in some ways the easiest rule. I had put on all the weight, largely, from eating too much. I had and still have too little exercise in my week but exercise, while burning up calories, does not achieve the weight loss which I was after. So, I had to become more disciplined about what I was eating. This really meant, in the first instance, to start paying attention to what I was eating instead of just eating it and then regretting it afterwards.

2. Coffee

This was a symbol. I have never drunk much coffee but I had started drinking filter coffee each morning at work, accompanied by milk and two spoonfuls of sugar. Every visit to Starbucks or Costa would involve a similar order, though without the lashings of frothy milk which I find overfilling and burdensome. I decided that black sugarless coffee would be my start to the day. I think initially this amounted to a form of punishment as my impression of black coffee was sour and tasteless. It quickly became a symbol for my new eating habits. Not only did I tolerate it but quickly came to the conclusion that I had been wrong about coffee for years. I enjoyed it better than ever. I can now tell the difference between different coffees and know which I prefer (freshly ground Green Mountain, if you want to know, only available wholesale other than the large sack donated to me by my lovely friends the Proudfoots when Eilidh was closing her excellent cafe at the Hermitage golf course). Mornings cannot begin without a steaming draught of black caffeine and a banana. Slightly unnervingly, evenings now frequently end with a similar effort, but without the banana.

3. Lunch

Hitherto I had lost all control at lunchtime. Despite frequently being keyed up at lunchtime in the middle of a frantic day, I would indulge in the standard three courses of lunch: two thick shop bought sandwiches (always from the fridge - but who keeps bread in a fridge?); a bag of crisps; and pudding in the form of a snickers or mars bar. All washed down with a bottle of diet Coke.

Early afternoons always left me feeling overfed and dissatisfied - not unsatisfied but uncomfortable. Since lunch is supposed to be refuelling, my energy levels were so badly degraded that for all the eating I might as well have had nothing. I am sure that a nutritionist of relatively low standing would be able to point out where I was going wrong but if you're not thinking about what you're eating you're just not conscious of any of this.

I'm still hungry at lunch but fruit and fruit juice and a sandwich usually meets the need, and often a cup of coffee and a cereal bar will suffice.

4. Snacks

This is an area with which I still struggle. A cup of tea or coffee on its own doesn't seem right. It may be hunger, or habit, or simply the need to break the monotony of lifting the cup to the lips, sipping, and putting it down again, but I was eating a lot of chocolate at work, and at home once it came to 10pm I was sitting down to a plate of oatcakes and cheese or breakfast cereal with maple syrup. And not just any oatcakes. My mother's oatcakes, which as I understand it rolled pinhead oats, flour, salt and lots of butter. And then add cheese, and since these are thick oatcakes, a layer of butter to make the cheese comfortable.

I have not completely resolved this one but I have certainly found that salvation can lie in the fig roll. There's nothing in a fig roll. You can apparently lose weight eating one, so if you have two...

I still have butter and cheese but much less than before. Giving up chocolate was not an issue - at heart I don't really love chocolate the way many people do, but I do love cheese. Emma says I am scared of three things: silence, no cheese in the fridge and bouffant hair, all three of which are irrational but real. For someone who once listed his hobbies as butter, pastry and sitting down this was a hard row to hoe.

Emma did once say to me that it was okay to be hungry, and for a time I had to allow myself to be hungry in the evening. I also had to eat less at evening mealtimes and try not to eat too late.

5. Puddings

I anticipated that I would have difficulty with puddings so I simply decided to go cold turkey. That was much easier than I feared. Actually, I have come to the conclusion that I am a sort of pudding fantasist, and that I impose expectations on puddings which they cannot possibly meet. I have spent years hoping to find the sticky toffee pudding which meets my hopes, but only a couple have come close. Mostly pudding is an obligation which I felt I had to my stomach, so for a time my stomach could go hang (rather an apt description of the condition which led to these rules in the first place).

I have a strange relationship with puddings. Brought up in a house where self control is a moral obligation, I was also encouraged at every turn to finish everything on my plate and to take on each course offered out of politeness and because to do otherwise could imply that the cooking was sub standard. In other words, food is an area of remorse and offence, and pudding, which always struck me as the self-indulgent add on to the important part of the meal (the good for you part), was terribly important. You didn't refuse pudding. I could never quite reconcile these different positions.

It placed a little strain on my relationship with my mother in aid of losing weight. I had, naively, assumed she might be pleased that I was seeking to achieve this target. There have been, for some time, a number of things my mother never says to me, including "You look nice", "I like your hair" and "You've lost weight". But no. Instead, "What's wrong with it?", when I turned down a plate of crumble; or more likely "What's wrong with you?"

The reason, ultimately, is simple. In the highlands, food is the language of love . To refuse good food is a form of rejection. It had to be handled carefully so I didn't cause offence. Now, it's "You've lost far too much weight" and "You're tired and irritable because of this silly diet you're on". Secretly I think she's pleased and it's now just another form of banter between us.

Those were the rules. They worked. Well, either they worked or something else which I was unconsciously doing at precisely the same time did.

I lost three stones.

Moobs of Steel

On 26 December 2009 I weighed myself for the first time for months. Until my 30th birthday or so I would readily have accepted the description "skinny"; latterly that description only existed in my own mind, and there pretty tenuously. Not long past my 46th birthday and here was confirmation of what I had suspected for some time: 14 stone 7lb, about a stone heavier than I thought I was, a stone heavier than I had ever been and, worst of all, heavier than my twin brother for about the first time I could say.

On the side of cereal boxes, next to the weight, there is frequently a legend bearing to say that the weight is as given but that the contents may have settled in transit. That was me. My contents had settled in transit.

I was very upset. Among the paradoxes of identity which I live with - am I islander, highlander or Edinburgher; am I funny or dour; am I well liked or largely ignored; - I had had to deal with a burgeoning (literally) question of whether I was a fat person reaching his inexorable plateau, or a thin person struggling to get out of a fat person's body. It left me with a sense not of unattractiveness - weight having nothing to do with that - but of embarrassment that I had let my diet become so ill-disciplined that I had accrued all this bulk.

Until I was 30, I could eat whatever I wanted and it had no effect on my body shape. What it did to my internal organs was less clear and no doubt that harvest has yet to be fully reaped. After that point, presumably due to a slowing metabolism and a more sedentary lifestyle, my diet did not adjust but my weight did. To put it short, I went from no chin to several.

The effect of bouncing the scales at 14 and a half stones was to make me realise that something had to change. I have two young sons and their future is, to some extent, dependent on my remaining reasonably healthy and avoiding avoidable health disasters, at least so far as that is within my control.

As a result, I set myself a target, and made some rules for changing my lifestyle, in the hope that that might achieve for me a reduction in my general acreage and free up some house space for the children and Emma. I will deal with those rules in a later post but I spent some time discussing this with my good friend Gareth, who shared some of my concerns about time of life and increasing poundage. We agreed that accountability would be important in helping each other to remain on the straight and narrow path that might lead to being straighter and narrower ourselves. Essentially, Gareth summed it up: by the end of this, it'll be Moobs of Steel for us.

At least I now know the name of my first album.

The Return of the Achnasheen 4

In August 1982 my brother John, cousin Norman, friend Andrew and I set off on a mighty cycling trip from Inverness to Harris, stopping at Torridon and Broadford youth hostels on the way. None of us has ever forgotten these three days, for a variety of reasons, and when I wrote about day 1 for the BBC Scotland/Scottish Book Trust project entitled Days Like This, it was a chance to share the experiences we had on that holiday and revive some of the painful and less painful memories we had.

The experience of writing and sharing that story led me to consider whether or not we could revisit that trip and retrace our wheeltracks now. Following a flurry of email and telephone contacts we have now reached the point where two separate expeditions will be setting out from Inverness in August one week apart, one comprising John, his son Callum (now 17) and Andrew; and the other comprising me and Norman. Family and calendar commitments have made it impossible for us to co-ordinate diaries for the same week, which is slightly unfortunate, but the spirit of the original journey will infuse both weeks.

My purpose in starting this blog is to write, largely for my own interest, about the preparations for the trip in August, and to record in some detail all the events that will surround it. We have no written or photographic record of the 1982 trip since none of us had a camera nor had forethought the invention of the internet, and we certainly weren't diarists. Memory is one thing but can be haphazard.

I also want to commit to print something of the experience I have had in losing weight over the last twelve months, thoughts which have been crystallised by a couple of chapters in the book I'm currently reading, The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten; richly entertaining and witty, he takes on trends and theories which have considerable modern currency and deflates them with precision. His thoughts on the low fat cooking fads of the 90s are well worth reading. I intend to link in my experience to his thinking.

I fervently hope that this won't be the only post or that when it comes up again it won't be to complain about another dismal World Cup performance by the England cricket team...