Operation: Wedding Fitness

So, it’s 6 months until W-day. According to the usual wedding mags I should be doing a plethora of organisational tasks. I’m not – most are already in hand and the rest can wait. What am I worrying about at this point? Losing weight in order to qualify for honeymoon goodness.

Now, I admit this is an excellent incentive; money usually is. However if I am honest my real incentive is much more deep-rooted. I am not a particularly vain person; I take the most basic level of self-interest so that I don’t walk around looking like a hobo. However W-day is going to be me, thrust out into the limelight for the first time since sixth form.

I want to look good, I want to look healthy, I want (more than anything) to look like the man that I perceive myself to be in my head – and who I haven’t seen when I look into the mirror for a very, very long time. I am not under the delusion that I will wake up and see myself as I was when I left school – rugby-playing, smile-wearing and incredibly naive. I want to see Dan at 30, mature, a little wiser but still wearing that smile. Oh, and a ruggedly-handsome jawline wouldn’t go amiss.

The potholing club always tried to find the most interesting caves

I’ve made some, how do I put this, interesting choices throughout my life. While I regret nothing (I wouldn’t be with Sharon if I did), I do regret the effect that some of those choices have had on my body. I am medically obese, and sedentary – especially considering just how much sport I used to do at school. It’s 6 months to go, and there is no time like the present to take your life in hand, and get things back on track.

So, here is the start of my journey – and like any good writer with no shame I’ve decided to share it all with you lot! I have the same problem that I expect a lot of you guys also have: time. At school activity is planned into your day – receiving basic exercise is relatively easy. When you hit the big bad world, making time for exercise can be very difficult. I leave the house before 8 and don’t get home again until about 12 hours later. When you have to factor in essential things like eating, this doesn’t leave me with a lot of time.

There are a lot of gyms and fitness centres about these days. I really don’t get on well with gyms as I don’t have the discipline to keep myself going. My best options are swimming and group/team activities. It’s been a tough trying to find one of these options that still fit into my horrendous commute.

I was very fortunate to meet the team from Peak XV Fitness at the Ascot Wedding show while I was on the Staggered booth. I was immediately taken aback by their considered and caring attitude – I has met another “wedding fitness” team at the Excel show who were very very über-fitness (the kind of people you meet at gyms who are the poster children and basically make you feel ashamed that you are not, and will likely never be like them) and made me totally anxious about engaging with a dedicated fitness programme.

Having got home from the fair, I trawled through the plethora of contact details that you invariably pick up at these things. Coming across the Peak XV Fitness details I decided to look them up again – I was interested to see that they had some sessions based in-line with my commute route. A few emails and I was soon signed up.

My particular arrangement started with a session with Steve Hines, to go over my nutrition and goals. We started with some measurements, establishing my current waist, weight & height (and therefore BMI), and using an odd device that looked like Captain Hook’s Sunday best hand, measured areas of my body to establish my total percentage body fat. We then went through these readings, and from them could establish where I carried the fat on my body. These are used as indicators as to likely external factors that contribute to where the fat is being deposited.

This was a really interesting part of the session for me – I have a background in medical science and so was waiting for a point where I would be forced to “cry bullshit” on the explanations. However, I couldn’t – I knew all the stuff he was telling me, but had never considered all the complex dependencies and relationships each area had on each other. It was somewhat a revelation, I can tell you. Steve explains everything in a really good way, and even if you didn’t know anything it would all make sense very quickly. Although this was a nutrition appointment, it was much more balanced, more holistic than I had expected. It was as much about understanding lifestyle as it was the food you eat. As I quickly learnt, both are closely connected.

We didn’t even start with food – and when we did come to that aspect we found that my diet was actually not too bad (I have managed to lose 3 stone using calorie-control alone). What was off was composition (which affected my blood sugar), portions (too big) and proportions (the wrong ratio of food types).

I left the session with a sense of enthusiasm, excitement and purpose – I was not given hard and fast rules, but principles and insight that I could now apply. I could not use the session as a crutch – the changes will have to be my choices and I have to be responsible for that. This was a big change coming from the slimming club side of things where you can follow simple rules, but also use those rules as an excuse.

STD

Image courtesy of Companhia Athletica

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