16/02/26 🖼

 Ok so I put a painting on the top to indicate its a post that will start explaining what the final solution is. As i have said its long. 

I guess weight gain started when I became more sedentary i.e. driving and stopped playing sports and I guess or rather know when I started to eat a lot more junk food. I guess between mid 80s to early 2000s I didn't really try to deliberately lose weight but there would be times it would drop. Kind of naturally I guess but more I had other things on my mind and didn't eat. 

Around 2000 I hurt my back at work and from memory I was around 100kgs somewhere I'd love to be now but it those days it was devastating. 

I had genuinely hurt myself but the insurance company etc made it so hard I decided I was all in and had a year off on almost full pay. 

During that time I went all out I milked that insurance for everything, Chiro, Massage and a full membership to the best gym in town because over the year I was going to get fit and lose weight. I know now why it was hard but at the same time I enjoyed it and for the most part I felt good. 

Basically it was a low calorie diet with only a basic watch on the calories using a weight watchers book and whatever it said on the packaging. I was also doing a lot of walking and I mean a lot, probably 25000 steps every day and if I missed a day I hurt. 

After a year I had lost 15kg and was super fit and ready to work which I did with no problem although they kind of made it hard to start with all their restrictions but eventually they gave up caring.  The weight started to come back slowly due to stopping exercise so much and eating more junk food. I couldn't really cook in those days so a lot of food was instant or take away or very basic carby foods.

So what has this to do with the final solution? Well this lesson was probably more about what not to do and what I learnt about how diets work. 

So people say Calorie restriction diets work because calories in calories out blah blah and technically yes they do but there are some real fundamental problems. 

lets say you're eating 1800 calories a day which is not much for a grown man so you have a deficit of I don't know 800. That sounds great you'll burn 800 calories a day and the fat will melt off right? 

The answer in a very Australian way is Yeah nah kind of, technically some fat comes off well a very small amount and def not 800 calories worth. Why you ask and that's a good question, for starters the 1800 calories you are eating most likely contain a lot of carbohydrates I mean one of my favorite go to snacks was pretzels, a bag of those salty crispy treats that "Only had 150 calories" was like crack to a junkie I loved them. But they are basically sugar or wheats etc which get readily converted to sugar in your body. Sugar is energy and your body loves that, in fact I joke about 'Crack' but sugar is exactly that to your system. 

So while your body is eating all those yummy carbs any fat you eat which will of course be minimal because 'Calorie counting' will be put away for another day. When your body is using sugar for energy it is not interested in converting fat to energy that is too hard so what does it do? It makes you feel fucking hungry because it wants more sugar. As i was exercising so much it had little choice but to burn some fat along the way hence the 15kg drop but in reality i was fucking starving all the time and the only way to calm that feeling was more carbs. "ooh and apple is only 100 calories yay" but also a lot of fucking sugar, yes I'd get the rush but the crash would come soon enough. It would be at least another 10 years until I learn why calorie restriction doesn't work, well I guess you could say "isn't a sustainable solution" but at that time i thought it was the only way.