Midlife Belly Troubles and the Battle of the Trousers

This November, I will complete my 57th lap around the sun.

For many of us chaps (and for ladies too, but particularly for chaps), these years between our 50s and into our 60s can feel a lot like a dash down sniper alley with the increased health risks associated with us having survived rather longer than nature had designed us to be a useful and functionally reliable procreator and therefore earn our continued place in the gene pool.

The Current State of Play

Thus far, I have scraped a clean-ish bill of health from the various tests, probes, scans and what not our splendid NHS offer to a man over 50. There are clearly some hard miles on the clock and my ever growing daily handful of tablets reflects my somewhat cavalier approach to general maintenance in the preceding decades. I can feel the first inklings of the aches and pains to come and I often fail to get in or out of a chair without an accompanying range of grunts, sighs, wheezes and other odd sounds.

That said, I am mostly continent, try to eat healthily and sort of moderate my drinking. To those of you who follow the Guns on Pegs pod, you may also be aware that I have finally quit smoking, again. I do my best to get some exercise, mainly around the shoot, but I get bored just going for a walk. To join a gym near me would necessitate an hour's drive each way and the sea is either far too cold or far too full of Emmetts to be a practical option.

At home, we have the luxury of a rather nifty exercise bike and a shiny new treadmill complete with servos and screen and all sorts of electronic wizardry but to use them on a regular basis would mean finding a new home for all the clothes hanging off them.

My problem is that I seem to have become fat. A bit of a porker to be truthful. I’ve observed, with mild surprise, last year’s trousers shrinking at the waist and have blamed inflation and cuts in living standards for the fact that I am having to purchase garments with higher numbers and more XXXXs than in previous years.

Whilst I’ve always been what might politely be termed, ‘stocky’, perhaps even ‘chunky’, in the last 5 years or so, it feels a little as though someone has pulled the orange toggle and the life-raft of belly has inflated! I know it’s my own fault. I like good food. I enjoy second helpings! I don’t eat dessert or sugary foods and make most meals from scratch and here in Cornwall, we don’t have the option for take-out food, even if I wanted it, but I do indulge myself. And whilst I certainly don’t pay much heed to NHS recommended alcohol units, I don’t spend every waking moment in the pub, swallowing delicious, creamy pints. I do however enjoy wine at home and will always stand my round when out.

My dilemma is this. With the shooting season approaching rapidly, I would really rather not have to buy a bigger outfit and would rather prefer to get a second wearing out of LAST year’s purchases. And whilst the ditching of the fags has meant I can walk uphill and talk at the same time now, I still need to consider the breathability and sweat wicking properties of clothing far more than it’s rain repelling qualities!

Fit for Season

Being fit for the season means arriving on your peg ready to go, not winded  and sweating, having to wait for the first five minutes for your glasses to de-mist. It means being more nimble on your feet to present the gun to a fast moving bird and not running out of swing room as your front fat collides with your back fat. It means not dreading pulling peg 4 at the top of the hill. It means having a shirt that does up at the neck without looking as though it should have a troop of clowns and acrobats using it as the Big Top in the off season, one that remains tucked in by the end of the drive and you don’t look like you’ve been rolled down hill by bullies. It means, perhaps most importantly, being able to glance down at your pink Guns on Pegs garters without having to move your leg to the side! And I think it also means a more enjoyable and involved day in the field.

The problem for me is that this corpulence didn’t arrive overnight. Rather it was a little by little, incremental expanding - barely noticeable at first - a result of just a few too many calories per day and a few too few moments of exercise. In hindsight, putting the weight on was far more enjoyable than the looming prospect of getting it off.

You see, there are a few issues here, first amongst them is the plethora of “get thin quick” schemes which the woo merchants and health charlatans like to promote, always with the whiff of health advice and the endorsement of a doctor of something vaguely, but not precisely, medical-ish. Miracle foods, pills and powders ‘guaranteed’ to target belly fat (or indeed whatever it was you googled last that gives you pause).

Then there are the now countless apps which, for a not inconsiderable sum of money each month, will count your steps, monitor your sleep, register heart rate and calculate your calories.

There are endless diets from fasting to keto, paleo to celebrity endorsed fruitarian nonsense all of which seem guaranteed to bring short term results and potential long term harm.

Exercise regimens aplenty - couch to 5k, chairobics, an endless array of Eastern-derived stretching and flexing, video-coached workouts, runs and cycle rides.

Now there are the ‘miracle’ drugs, Mounjaro, Ozempic, Wegovy, Orlistat to name a few, available online at a considerable investment and with rather scant knowledge of their long term effects or the reliability and sustainability of the claimed rapid early benefits.

And then there are the scare tactics from the NHS and health charities like the British Heart Foundation, laying out the uncomfortable facts that “lowering your weight can help reduce your risk of developing serious disease”. Facts that are hard to deny!

I do not deny these facts, not one little bit! And whilst my main target of magically losing 4 or 5 notches off my belt is predominantly to take up less space on the planet and feel more comfortable in my clothes, the health benefits are unquestionable. The problem is that none of the solutions address the reality of being large. It feels sometimes that all of the options are presented by people who already do a thing and are perplexed and bewildered by anyone who doesn’t. There are barriers to entry that need addressing before you can start.

Run, Fatboy Run!

From a purely mechanical standpoint, exercising as a bigger person can be uncomfortable and possibly damaging and whilst there is ample advice to ‘start small and build up’ psychologically, we all want to see fairly immediate results. And it is the psychological aspects of weight loss that are often overlooked in the mainstream. I suppose they just aren’t sexy or profitable, unlike a flashy ad with a glitzy celebrity endorsing a superfood and a new monthly-subscription workout routine. But it is our underlying personal relationship with food, exercise and general lifestyle that needs addressing and modifying, before we can start to progress to a programme suited to achieving our aims.

Society today has been taught to dismiss, tease and even pity the overweight, the knee-jerk reaction is ‘eat less and exercise more, fatty!’ and even the NHS has treated overweight and obesity as self inflicted and have suggested withholding treatments until people can lose weight and sort themselves out. Just this year, the Independent ran a story highlighting a third of English NHS areas and multiple Welsh treatment boards blocking access to knee and hip replacement surgery to obese patients. There is much talk of the NHS prescribing the new weight-loss drugs in an attempt to tackle the ‘problem of obesity’.

I know I would enjoy my day in the field more if I was 5 stone lighter but I want that result now. I shy away from an hour a day walking or on the treadmill because I don’t want to be pointed at, sweaty and chafed raw. I don’t want to join a gym because for one, there isn’t one within an hours drive of home and two, see above! There is a local swimming pool but I won’t take my shirt off to work in the garden, let alone parade around indoors with strangers. I know I should reduce my calorie intake but a lifetime of cooking for a housefull and a childhood of leaving nothing on your plate is hard to shrug off. The pleasure of sharing a glass of wine in the evening with my wife or a couple of pints at the local is a social engagement I am loath to break.

Reading a piece by American psychologist Rodney Luster PhD, writing in Psychology Today, he discusses some research work done by Bouton and Swartzentruber in 1991 looking at why we fail at dieting. They proposed that 

“renewal and reinstatement are two such ways in which conditioned responses recover, meaning, under certain conditions, we can resurrect those old habitual ways of behaving—in this case, overeating from scarcity as an example, where once initiated (renewal), the behavior may increase in frequency (reinstatement), happening with more regularity (Bouton and Swartzentruber, 1991). Renewal and reinstatement of former habits are about the recovery (resurrection) of formerly extinguished behaviors, and this is termed relapse phenomenon "

- (Bouton and Swartzentruber, 1991; Podlesnik et al., 2017).

So it is these underlying behaviours and attitudes that need addressing before change in habit and diet can really be expected to be long lasting and beneficial over time. He suggests engaging with cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) to first understand our relationship with our diet and our attitudes to ourselves and to consider disruptive introspection, asking yourself “why do I want a second helping? Yes it may taste good, but I’ve already eaten so what else is at work here that has me reaching for seconds?” Such self examination may help us to begin to understand our behaviour and once we understand what is motivating or driving us, perhaps we can chart a path to alter the behaviour to free the opportunities for the results we wish for.

This may all sound a little navel gazing but perhaps it is worth a second look before we are cajoled and bullied into spending hard earned cash on short term fads and unproven claims. If we haven’t at least checked the foundations, we perhaps shouldn’t try to radically remodel the house.

I for one am resigning myself to possibly requiring a slightly wider pair of breaks this season. But by applying the CBT mindset, I have started to visualise myself as ‘not a smoker’ when all of my adult life and especially in past attempts to quit I was still, in my head, a 'smoker denied of cigarettes'. And I think the same approach is needed with food and ale. I need to investigate that relationship and address why I want a second helping or open another bottle before I embark on restrictions that simply leave me feeling oddly resentful and hard done by.

Next year, I want to wear this year’s outfit in the line and the year after that, maybe last year’s!

If any of you want to join me on the journey, reach out and let’s try to turn this corner together.