The Fatslayer Chronicles

I’ve hit another plateau and despite my best efforts I’ve not budged an ounce in the past two weeks. It’s a good job I’m taking a sensible long-term approach to this healthy-living malarkey, or I’d have sawn off a leg by now just to see some movement on the damn scales.

Psychologically, it helps that I’ve been watching The Biggest Loser UK, and have seen empirical evidence that weight-loss is a perverse and capricious phenomenon, which doesn’t obey any of the normal laws of physics.

Every day those contestants work out for five hours in the gym. They eat a sensible, balanced diet. They drink their water. They get plenty of sleep.

Yet despite these efforts, they each experience weeks when they don’t lose an ounce, or when they even gain weight.

It just doesn’t make sense, and the crushing sense of disbelief and bewilderment is etched on their faces. They simply don’t understand what’s gone wrong, and why the scales have cheated them out of their well-deserved reward.

The experts tell us that it’s the inflamed muscles retaining water, or muscle weighing more than fat, or hormonal imbalances causing fluid retention, or the body storing it’s available energy stores, or any one of a hundred reasons why action doesn’t lead to an equal and opposite reaction.

Whatever the reason, the conclusion is clear – where weigh-loss is concerned, it’s not just a simple case of cause and effect, and action and reaction. It doesn’t necessarily follow  - although it SHOULD! - that if a person consumes less calories than s/he burns, s/he will lose weight, guaranteed.

That simplistic view is just a load of bollocks!

The body is senseless, illogical, unpredictable, and untrustworthy. It lies. It breaks the rules – not to mention the heart! Eventually, and over a considerable period of time, it WILL knuckle down and start playing by the rules, but in the short term it’s stubborn.

 I know that if I was pitched into the middle of sub-Saharan Africa in the middle of a famine, the chances are good that even with MY stubborn metabolism and erratic fat-burning track-record I’d be thin eventually. Starvation would eventually whittle away even my impressive fat-stores.

So yes, the laws of physics apply – but only in slow-motion and over a long time frame (though maybe it wouldn’t feel so slow if I was actually starving to death. Perspective is everything!)

For those of us not (thankfully) living in near-starvation conditions in the African wastelands, weight loss is going to be slow and haphazard and unpredictable.  There are going to be days and weeks – maybe even months! – when there’s no tangible or obvious reward.

At those times it just comes down to patience and determination, and trusting in the natural laws. Mother Nature may be slow and work to her own timetable, but she does always win the fat battle in the end.