Will Powers

As I mentioned in the last blog, losing weight is easy. All you need is the magic ingredient..... Willpower!

When I was in my first childhood, Will Powers was a made up pop act, with a cringingly corny top 20 hit called 'Kissing with Confidence'. Nowadays, willpower is an ethereal ability that only seems to be wielded by annoying, stroppy children or annoying, stroppy celebrities. Hmm, there may be a common link there... Our lives are now more hectic than ever forcing more of us to embrace multi-tasking as a coping strategy. Unfortunately menopausal men, like all men, were not wired to parallel compute but to do one thing at a time, (in my case preferably one thing a day). The consequence of all this is that I rarely have time to vegetate (a once essential mystic yogic state for the hairier sex) let alone do some serious life planning.

Back to waisting away. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good beer belly must be in want of a diet. Although we men like to think we are stronger in thought and deed than women, when it comes to losing weight we suffer from the same failing – namely Weak Will (or Prince William to the likes of you and me).

Now a man's attempt at diet differs in many ways from that of women. For a start, cutting out cakes and chocolate tends to have a limited effect on the typical male diet: it is like a woman giving up beer and kebabs. To make a real difference we would need to eat sensibly and exercise regularly. Also, this is not a 7 day wonder, but would need to be continued for months. All the serious dietary advice (would menopausal man read anything else – of course, we only read and follow what supports our ingrained prejudices) counsels us to aim to lose only a pound or two a week. So to lose the twenty to thirty pounds I could do with losing would probably take fifteen to twenty weeks.

Being a regular bloke (though thoroughly post-modern and metrosexual), the chances of me keeping to a routine of diet and exercise for this length of time is as likely as me being mistaken for Leonardo DiCaprio (although I did look a bit like Hugh Grant about twenty years ago - or was that Huge Grant?). Why? Because it take willpower. Not the macho willpower to put my hand in a fire for a bet, or the plucky willpower to ask a girl you fancy out, but the continuous, sustained, cast-iron willpower to eat five small balanced meals a day and exercise three times a week. Every week. For twenty weeks. While living the rest of my life; working, traveling, cooking and eating with the family, socialising with friends, partying (only joking, menopausal man rarely parties outside of Christmas and birthdays, because all his menopausal mates aren't allowed to by their menopausal wives), etc.

This constant willpower is like the tortoise that beats the hare – steady and plodding vs. the quick and mercurial. Unfortunately, this Menopausal Man is more like the hare (albeit receding), with a thirst for change and excitement (within reason of course – more like the Monty Python accountant wanting to be a lion-tamer). The thought of doing the same thing day after day, week after week dampens my good intentions and I unconsciously find ways to sabotage my own plans. As living proof of this inevitability, I need only look back at the two weeks since New Year to see the wreckage of my weight loss plans scattered to the winds.

Firstly, the eating smaller, healthier meals approach lasted one day. The complexity of trying to arrange for the right snacks to be available at the right times while I was working or traveling proved too much. Have you tried finding a low fat yoghurt and a handful of nuts and dried fruit on the train to London in the rush hour? And don't say take it with me, as I am lumbered with enough high-tech (i.e. Heavy & bulky) equipment and paperwork to strain my joints as it is. And how would I keep it: a) cool, and b) unexploded? Also, the chances of breaking a client meeting with a request to find the ingredients and equipment to make a fruit smoothie mid afternoon are much slimmer than I will ever be again.

Secondly, the practicalities of exercising regularly within an irregular work, family and social schedule tax even my project management talents. Otherwise known as PMT – and if you don't thinks that's funny, I'll bust your nuts (and dried fruit).

Don't get me wrong, I like exercising, and enjoy sport – why, I have over 20 sports channels on satellite. However, there is no single time of day when I can guarantee to be awake, in the house and at the correct interval between meals that will prevent me from either fainting or throwing up. Bad planning? You're right, it was bad planning to get a wife, family and active job (active in the sense of sitting at different desks/trains/cars/planes in various cities in the UK and Europe).

So am I just a weak willed miserable loser, blaming my failings on anyone but me? No, but I am realistic in accepting that taking a strong willed approach to shrinking my gut I would probably wreck the rest of my lifestyle (family/work, etc). So I will show my will power in playing the long game, using my irregular, eccentric lack of routine to fit in bursts of Doing the Right Thing, so that over time I will eat less and exercise more. I may have lost the first skirmish, but I intend to win the war. We shall fight them on the peaches...

Waisting Away

Aaargh! Why is it that after a great 10 day break over Christmas and New Year I feel sh*t?

Three reasons stand out:

1. Being cooped up with family and relatives is a trying time for most and particularly for menopausal men. We are hoping to relax and enjoy the fruits of our last 12 months labours, only to find that the worry over presents (she doesn't know what she wants so what chance have I got!), the relatives (so that's why we only see them once a year...), and the sales shopping (are the January sales the new Christmas for many people?).
2. Going back to work gets harder the longer you are away. Rather than feeling refreshed, I spent most of my first day back blearily going through the pointless emails sent by people who worked through the holidays and wanted you to know it.
3. The Christmas bulge – you begin looking like Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas (at least in your mind's eye), and end looking like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers. It's not just the food (lots of fats and sugars with only the Brussels sprouts for fibre) and drink (I'll just finish this open bottle of Madeira before it goes off), but also the irregular trough times.

The consequence of the Christmas bulge is to accentuate the already paranoid feelings about my weight, and more particularly about my waist. There is nothing more humiliating for menopausal man than to find that the 36" waist trousers I bought last year (as I couldn't squeeze into my 34" jeans without passing out) are no longer adequate to contain my growing girth. It was humiliating, and expensive even in the sales, to have to go out and buy some 38" trousers so that I could appear in public able to both breathe and sit down without crushing my crown jewels.


While I am talking about trousers, why don't the designers realise that when menopausal men put on weight, we don't turn into the Michelin man with the fat evenly distributed about the body. No, we look as if we are we are faking pregnancy or pretending to be Santa with a cushion shoved up the jumper. Designers seem to think our legs will turn into tree trunks therefore added acres of material in a straight line between the knees and the waist like an inverted circus tent. It is certainly quite airy in there (especially after the sprouts) but I'm too old for baggies and too young for jodhpurs.


Anyway back to the waist. I did what every menopausal man does in this situation. I bought a copy of Men's Health (Special Lose-Your-Gut issue! - I kid you not) and sat down with a beer to read it. Once you get past the intimidatingly ripped gay icons and the quite explicit sex advice thoughtfully accompanied by undressed fashion models, there is loads of sensible advice on losing your flab and looking like Daniel Craig as 007. As I have always known, losing weight is just eating less and exercising more. It is amazing that a whole host of fitness magazines have built empires on just telling us this in increasingly ingenious ways (towel curls anyone?).


At the risk of demeaning the intelligence of the fairer sex (no, take your mind off Daniel Craig now) why is it that the equivalent women's "health" magazines just concentrate on diet, i.e. Eating less. Now call me simple, but selling women glossy mags full of food porn (but less than 200 calories per portion!) would only encourage me to eat more and therefore need more diet help from the magazines... (I've always been fairly skeptical but I am definitely moving on to cynicism as I get older - sorry more mature.)


The catch is that you still need a magic ingredient to lose weight. Which I will discuss in the next blog...


Essential viewing for Menopausal "Chef" Man: Heston Blumenthal: "In Search of Perfection" where he uses a blowtorch to crisp up a massive rib of beef - Primal!