Post-Nuptial Consumption

Well, this is a bit embarrassing. As a health and fitness professional, I spend most of my time motivating other people to exercise, eat healthily and make positive lifestyle changes (some call it nagging, whatever). I am pretty good at it; with a lot of happy clients getting fitter, stronger, leaner, faster and indeed, happier!

The embarrassing bit is that my own personal goals have fallen by the wayside; I’ve become a bit.. complacent. For fitness, I’ve relied on the exercise I get from training my clients, it’s an active job and absolutely helps to keep me fit but it’s definitely not effective for meeting my own goals.

More embarrassing than that is a syndrome that I’m going to call ‘post-nuptial consumption’. This can be defined by weight gain through excess celebrating after becoming Mrs Egg. It started with gin cocktails and pub dinners on our mini-moon, then the celebrating every time a friend comes to visit, now it’s just Friday and I’m married so why not raise a glass?

Back in the day I used to celebrate stuff with a press up endurance test or step reps, now it’s two bottles of merlot and a Chinese takeaway. Disaster. Really poor nutritional choices and lack of proper exercise has snuck up on me like a ninja and I hadn’t even realised because I’m always so busy thinking about training and nutrition, just not actually doing it.

As most of you know, I have one major health stumbling block: I’m a glutton. I love the food. All the food. I also have a (self-diagnosed) physiological mutation where I lack the feeling of being full. I combat this by trying to only put on my plate what I think I should eat. My beautiful wife who has the metabolism of a gazelle has a different problem. She likes to think she's a glutton, filling her plate to her heart's content and ordering copious volumes of food. She then can't eat it, and palms it off to me, the person who can't bear to see food wasted. 

You know when you weigh yourself after having a huge dinner the night before and despite gaining a bit, you think "ahh it's just food weight in my gut"? Well I've been doing that for two months and just came to the conclusion that I can't now have almost a stone of old food sitting festering in my colon. It's time for action.

First step: excel spreadsheet, obviously. 

What I've got is a 16 week training plan taking me to the Vale of York Half Marathon in September, via three triathlons. The first 10 weeks include a nutritional plan and very conservative weight target to take me back to race weight without starving myself of any of the food I need for the increased training volume.