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...