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.