UKHamlet's Blog

Lovely bones

I’m not thin. In fact I’m what some would call a BHB – big handsome bloke. That doesn’t include me, because I don’t like being big. My bigness is more to do with genetics than diet – I eat moderately and do a certain amount of exercise, including visting the gym twice a week. Still, I can’t shed those midriff pounds.

The reason for this is I convert more of my calories to fat than thin people – it’s a simple fact. The equation is easy to understand (even for skinny people) – everyone has a daily calorie burn off rate and it varies from day to day and person to person – if you consume more calories than you burn off, you will get fatter. FACT.

So, I could eat exactly the same number of calories and do exactly the same amount of exercise as a naturally skinny person, but I would burn fewer calories, therefore put on more weight, or lose less. This, of course, is a simplification, but it is in the area of accuracy and for the purposes of this article, it will suffice.

The thing is, I’m not complaining about the unfairness of this, or desirablility of being skinny, or even making excuses about my own inability to lose weight. No, I’m complaining about the sage like posturing of naturally skinny people, who want to tell me how to join their ranks. Why? Because they don’t know. They are there, they have always been there and they have no idea why or how I’m going to make that journey.

You wouldn’t ask a tall person how they got to be tall, would you? The answer is self evident – because one or both of their parents was tall. Ditto a skinny person – one or both of their parents were skinny. Both my parents were fat, ergo, so am I.

I’m about 210 pounds – big, but not huge – I’d quite like to lose about 40 pounds, but Diet and Exercise just isn’t doing it for me. So along comes a skinny person and says: it’s not so much the amount of food, but the type of food you eat. Consume only green veg and fruit and you will be skinny like me very soon. I will also probably have a massive amount of triglycerides in my blood. So skinny person #2 says: it’s not the amount of exercise you do, it’s the type of exercise you do – you need to do more/less aerobic and less/more weight training. Wrong – I just need to exercise – anything will do as long as it gets the muscles burning off calorie, otherwise I will balloon to about 280 pounds.

It’s not just naturally skinny people, it’s the gym rats too. These are people who work out because they don’t have a life, and working out works for them. It doesn’t for me – I work out, I remain fat, but I’m not going to spend 8 hours a day in the gym just because you do. Grow up, get a life and stop waving that carrot stick at me or I’ll shove up it your skinny butt.

Then there’s the XYZ diet advocates. I have a diet for you – keep your mouth closed, you can’t eat when it’s shut, but better still you can’t bore me with your inane stories about how you lost enough poundage to raise the average coastal waters by several feet. Diets don’t work as a permanent solution. They only work while you are on them. As for those “change your lifestyle” nazis – YOU change your lifestyle, I want to change my parents.

There’s only one diet that will work for me – the 10% diet – leave 10% of every meal. That’s my copyright now, and I can feel a book coming on. At least it will be written by a fat person who KNOWS how difficult it is to get skinny, not some streak who gets it all handed to them on a plate. In a manner of speaking. The trouble is, there’s only one thing worse than a skinny person telling you how to get skinny, it’s a fat person telling you.