Flab fighting

I get a lot of stick from my workmates for constantly fretting about my weight. When I weighed 97kg they would say, "you don't need to lose weight, you don't look fat" even though I felt it. When I got down to 87kg, and even though I see them most days, people did notice the difference even though it was a gradual loss over 6 months or so. But my wife said, "wow you've really lost weight, but why have you still got a fat face?". Ouch.

It doesn't worry me that I always come out as obese or now just very overweight on the BMI scale which is a load of rubbish anyway when you are more rugby player build than marathon runner. However, I still feel I could improve my body strength and aerobic capacity while dropping a further 5kg+. Plus, the less weight I have to get up those Cols the better.

I've trained in gyms more on than off for about 30 years. But, the tragedy is I have learned more in the last 2 years than at any other time. Nevertheless, equipped with that new knowledge, I feel with total dedication that despite being 46 (and a quarter) I can still advance.

To drop the 10kg I followed Neil Mcteggart's diet plan. I 'met' Neil (in the internet sense) when I saw him regularly posting on the Men's Health forum - he is a PT. He seemed to offer really good [humoured] advice and was at the time shedding bodyfat in order to enter the Men's Health cover model competition in which he reached the finals (see pic).

So, I cheekily sent him an email asking him what his diet was like. He replied back and offered to send me his diet sheet which he duly did. There are some good people about and Neil is one of them. On the back of the success of the cover model comp he turned his diet sheet into The Diet Plan which he now sells for about £7.50. He also became Men's Health online fitness editor.

The most important thing I learned from Neil is how critical the timing of food intake is to weight loss. His diet plan is fairly low carb / high protein but the key to success from it is not only getting into calorie deficit but eating carbs around the workouts and limiting them at other times of day like (for me) evenings when my energy demands are so much diminished. It's that simple.

The problem I've got is that Neil's advice is very much geared to weight training and I have to adapt his plan to meet the energy demands of training that will involve a lot of cardio work, much of it on the bike. So I guess I will take in more carbs than I had done previously but again eat them around my workouts, lots before and lots after with protein for recovery. I will let you know how I get on.