Demi
Tue, Oct-10-06, 02:01
The Times
London, UK
10 October, 2006
Weight 13st 6lb, waist 38in. Aaargh!
Hugo Rifkind
Most men don't do diets. But what if they tried? Times2 goes online for some slimming tips
A friend of mine invented a new diet once. The weight just fell off him, in that speed-of-light, melting fashion that happens only with men, actresses and the seriously ill. “Fast work,” I said to what remained of him. Then, in a mildly intrigued, have-you-got-a-new-phone sort of way, I asked whether he was on a diet.
“I invented one,” he told me. “It’s called the eat less/do more diet. It works really well. I can’t believe that nobody has written a book about it.”
Myself, I had always followed a sort of swap-breakfast-and-chocolate-for-cigarettes diet for a few weeks when I felt that I ought to get a bit smaller. It works, too. Nobody has written a book about that, either.
People tend not to write books about male diets. Or, if they do, people tend not to buy them. “Men don’t like going to slimming clubs,” says Amanda Ursell, a nutritionist. “They don’t like the weigh-in and they don’t like the sense of community.” Men diet in an unhealthy, haphazard sort of way, almost as if they prefer to keep it a secret.
So, increasingly, like the other things that men like to do in secret, they diet online. Apparently, this is an area with phenomenal growth. The suits behind Tesco’s online eDiets reckon that about 20 per cent of their online users are men — a far higher proportion than those who attend their physical, offline classes.
WeightWatchers reckons something similar. Dr Ian Campbell, an obesity expert, made his male-orientated fatmanslim.com diet service freely available only a year ago, and claims more than 5,000 regular users.
This seems worth investigating. I’m not a large man; not really. I’m 29, 5ft 10in (178cm) and a bit over 13st (83kg), which is a size that no doctor would get particularly sniffy about. I remember, though, being 21 and a bit over 9st, and 25 and a bit over 11st. There’s a pattern here, and I sense that I’m getting too old to smoke my way out of it. It’s time to learn another way.
Monday
Feeling a bit like an explorer setting out on an expedition, and armed with a rather fine ham and cheese sandwich, I sign up to fatmanslim.com. It pulls no punches — the first thing it wants to know is my weight. I steal the girlfriend’s scales from the bathroom and discover I am 13st 6lb. Crikey.
The nice thing, though, is that this is the last I hear about my weight for a while. Fatmanslim prefers you to think about “waist loss” rather than “weight loss”. As a man who a) is motivated mainly by vanity, and b) doesn’t really know what an ounce is, this comes as something of a relief. It’s a short-lived relief, though. Following the instructions on the site, I measure my waist and discover that it is almost 38in round.
38 inches! How can this be? I nearly drop my sandwich. I wear 34in trousers. They fall down if I don’t wear a belt! This website, though, makes me measure up by my belly button, as opposed to on my hips, which is where my trousers live. And yes, I’d noticed that my belly used to be a bit narrower than my hips, and is now a bit wider, but I hadn’t realised to what extent. Damn those baggy skater styles of my youth. I’ve turned into a lardarse, and I never even noticed it happening.
I’m not alone in this. “47 inches?” wails one poster on the website’s forum. “Sh1t, I’m nearly a cube!” The poor sod has only just discovered that he isn’t Orlando Bloom.
Tuesday
Dr Campbell, the brains behind fatmanslim, has one of those authoritative Scottish voices. Listening to the Week 1 podcast on the website makes you feel as though you are being goaded into health by Jim Naughtie. One of the most important concepts that he talks about is the “hunger score”, which is a measure of how hungry you are on a scale of one to ten. You should pick a point on this scale, he says, and eat only once you reach it. I choose eight. It’s a way to ensure that you eat only when you’re hungry. Simple and effective.
But also problematic. As a rule, I eat lunch at lunchtime whether I’m hungry or not. If I had it at 4pm, I’d have to call it something else. This evening, moreover, I’m having dinner with friends. When the first course is served (smoked salmon on lovely dark bread), my hunger score is only about six. I suppose I ought to make a scene and ask everybody to hold off for an hour or two, but I don’t really have the guts. No pun intended.
Wednesday
Oh, the lies. The terrible lies. For fatmanslim I am supposed to be keeping a daily “food monitor" and an “exercise monitor” — a note of all the food I eat and all the exercise I take. Had you asked me previously, I would have told you that I cycle to work every day and that I eat a banana for breakfast, a small lunch and a fairly hefty dinner.
Now that I am recording it, though, I realise that various excuses (the need to wear a suit, rain, hangovers, etc) keep me from cycling to work more than twice a week. And I often have a sandwich rather than a banana. And my lunches are frequently enormous. And I usually have some chocolate at about 4pm. And after 8pm, either I’m drunk or I’m proud of myself for not being drunk, which frankly means that all bets are off.
I am learning to hate myself. This must be what it is like to be a woman.
Thursday
It’s funny. I had never previously considered that one could resent a vending machine. It’s like having a crack dealer in the office.
One appealing thing about online dieting, says Amanda Ursell, when I call her instead of having a Dairy Milk, is the support network. “When people want to snack,” she tells me, “they log on to chat instead, and people talk them out of it.”
This, it must be said, is a problem with fatmanslim. There is a chat forum (“Bar Fatmanslim”) but it’s usually deserted. I post a message and it’s eight hours before anybody gets back to me.
So I log on to Tesco’s eDiet website. This is everything that fatmanslim is not. It isn’t free and it does tell you that you are unhealthily fat, even if you aren’t (I made a beanpole colleague sign up, as an experiment). More positively, it tells you exactly what to eat and the messageboards are quite busy.
I post on the “Mostly Men” board, which is one of the quietest ones, and receive two swift replies. “First off, you should contact eDiets,” admonishes one respondent. “Ask them to change your user name. ‘Slimhope’ gives off negative vibes.”
I’m not sure that these are my sort of people.
Friday
“The bit of their body that all blokes hate is their belly,” agrees Dr Campbell, when I call for some moral support. “And abdominal obesity is increasingly recognised as dangerous.”
The strength of his website, he reckons, is that it is non-prescriptive — it doesn’t tell you what to do. Dieting women like to be told not to eat carbohydrates after 6pm or to eat only purple foods on a Wednesday. “Blokes rebel,” he says. “So you have to let them feel that they are in charge.”
There is also a wealth of gimmicks — graphs of your size and weight fluctuations, and calculators that do obscure things with your heart rate and body mass. I learn that my “aerobic weight management zone” is 115-152 BPM. Which is nice.
Saturday
Booze. What to do about booze? “Spirits are preferable to beers and wine,” says Dr Campbell, who is the sort of doctor I like. “They give you the same alcohol kick for less stuff. Vodka with Diet Coke is better than a pint. Look, alcohol is a problem. We tend not to consider the calories. But I’m not going to tell blokes not to drink beer — it wouldn’t work. It needn’t be about going from five pints a night to one pint. Four to five pints is good. Just make up for it. If you’re going to drink more, take a 20-minute walk to the pub.”
A posting on Bar Fatmanslim has a similarly pragmatic approach. “Started at 19st, now 17,” he writes. “At less than 14st, I’d not be too arsed about some beers, mate.” Fair point.
Sunday
Curious. My waist is down to 36in but my weight is up to 13st 7lb. I suppose I have to consider this a success. Either way, I have one graph with a little line going up and another with a little line going down.
So. What have I learnt? Well, I have learnt to steer towards such things as chicken and rice, and away from such things as roast potatoes and beef. Although I suppose I knew this already. I also learnt that when we ask ourselves questions we tend to lie to make ourselves sound good. I do not cycle to work every day. I do not eat only bananas for breakfast. I do not “hardly ever drink”.
Most of all, though, I have learnt that, while thin women diet to get even thinner, it’s still only fat men who are likely to bother, online or otherwise. On both the websites I tried, I was the thinnest man by a good 4st. Still, I reckon I’ll be up there by the time I’m 40. I’ll try again then.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20029-2395677_1,00.html
Where to find the diet for you ~ click on the above link to view
London, UK
10 October, 2006
Weight 13st 6lb, waist 38in. Aaargh!
Hugo Rifkind
Most men don't do diets. But what if they tried? Times2 goes online for some slimming tips
A friend of mine invented a new diet once. The weight just fell off him, in that speed-of-light, melting fashion that happens only with men, actresses and the seriously ill. “Fast work,” I said to what remained of him. Then, in a mildly intrigued, have-you-got-a-new-phone sort of way, I asked whether he was on a diet.
“I invented one,” he told me. “It’s called the eat less/do more diet. It works really well. I can’t believe that nobody has written a book about it.”
Myself, I had always followed a sort of swap-breakfast-and-chocolate-for-cigarettes diet for a few weeks when I felt that I ought to get a bit smaller. It works, too. Nobody has written a book about that, either.
People tend not to write books about male diets. Or, if they do, people tend not to buy them. “Men don’t like going to slimming clubs,” says Amanda Ursell, a nutritionist. “They don’t like the weigh-in and they don’t like the sense of community.” Men diet in an unhealthy, haphazard sort of way, almost as if they prefer to keep it a secret.
So, increasingly, like the other things that men like to do in secret, they diet online. Apparently, this is an area with phenomenal growth. The suits behind Tesco’s online eDiets reckon that about 20 per cent of their online users are men — a far higher proportion than those who attend their physical, offline classes.
WeightWatchers reckons something similar. Dr Ian Campbell, an obesity expert, made his male-orientated fatmanslim.com diet service freely available only a year ago, and claims more than 5,000 regular users.
This seems worth investigating. I’m not a large man; not really. I’m 29, 5ft 10in (178cm) and a bit over 13st (83kg), which is a size that no doctor would get particularly sniffy about. I remember, though, being 21 and a bit over 9st, and 25 and a bit over 11st. There’s a pattern here, and I sense that I’m getting too old to smoke my way out of it. It’s time to learn another way.
Monday
Feeling a bit like an explorer setting out on an expedition, and armed with a rather fine ham and cheese sandwich, I sign up to fatmanslim.com. It pulls no punches — the first thing it wants to know is my weight. I steal the girlfriend’s scales from the bathroom and discover I am 13st 6lb. Crikey.
The nice thing, though, is that this is the last I hear about my weight for a while. Fatmanslim prefers you to think about “waist loss” rather than “weight loss”. As a man who a) is motivated mainly by vanity, and b) doesn’t really know what an ounce is, this comes as something of a relief. It’s a short-lived relief, though. Following the instructions on the site, I measure my waist and discover that it is almost 38in round.
38 inches! How can this be? I nearly drop my sandwich. I wear 34in trousers. They fall down if I don’t wear a belt! This website, though, makes me measure up by my belly button, as opposed to on my hips, which is where my trousers live. And yes, I’d noticed that my belly used to be a bit narrower than my hips, and is now a bit wider, but I hadn’t realised to what extent. Damn those baggy skater styles of my youth. I’ve turned into a lardarse, and I never even noticed it happening.
I’m not alone in this. “47 inches?” wails one poster on the website’s forum. “Sh1t, I’m nearly a cube!” The poor sod has only just discovered that he isn’t Orlando Bloom.
Tuesday
Dr Campbell, the brains behind fatmanslim, has one of those authoritative Scottish voices. Listening to the Week 1 podcast on the website makes you feel as though you are being goaded into health by Jim Naughtie. One of the most important concepts that he talks about is the “hunger score”, which is a measure of how hungry you are on a scale of one to ten. You should pick a point on this scale, he says, and eat only once you reach it. I choose eight. It’s a way to ensure that you eat only when you’re hungry. Simple and effective.
But also problematic. As a rule, I eat lunch at lunchtime whether I’m hungry or not. If I had it at 4pm, I’d have to call it something else. This evening, moreover, I’m having dinner with friends. When the first course is served (smoked salmon on lovely dark bread), my hunger score is only about six. I suppose I ought to make a scene and ask everybody to hold off for an hour or two, but I don’t really have the guts. No pun intended.
Wednesday
Oh, the lies. The terrible lies. For fatmanslim I am supposed to be keeping a daily “food monitor" and an “exercise monitor” — a note of all the food I eat and all the exercise I take. Had you asked me previously, I would have told you that I cycle to work every day and that I eat a banana for breakfast, a small lunch and a fairly hefty dinner.
Now that I am recording it, though, I realise that various excuses (the need to wear a suit, rain, hangovers, etc) keep me from cycling to work more than twice a week. And I often have a sandwich rather than a banana. And my lunches are frequently enormous. And I usually have some chocolate at about 4pm. And after 8pm, either I’m drunk or I’m proud of myself for not being drunk, which frankly means that all bets are off.
I am learning to hate myself. This must be what it is like to be a woman.
Thursday
It’s funny. I had never previously considered that one could resent a vending machine. It’s like having a crack dealer in the office.
One appealing thing about online dieting, says Amanda Ursell, when I call her instead of having a Dairy Milk, is the support network. “When people want to snack,” she tells me, “they log on to chat instead, and people talk them out of it.”
This, it must be said, is a problem with fatmanslim. There is a chat forum (“Bar Fatmanslim”) but it’s usually deserted. I post a message and it’s eight hours before anybody gets back to me.
So I log on to Tesco’s eDiet website. This is everything that fatmanslim is not. It isn’t free and it does tell you that you are unhealthily fat, even if you aren’t (I made a beanpole colleague sign up, as an experiment). More positively, it tells you exactly what to eat and the messageboards are quite busy.
I post on the “Mostly Men” board, which is one of the quietest ones, and receive two swift replies. “First off, you should contact eDiets,” admonishes one respondent. “Ask them to change your user name. ‘Slimhope’ gives off negative vibes.”
I’m not sure that these are my sort of people.
Friday
“The bit of their body that all blokes hate is their belly,” agrees Dr Campbell, when I call for some moral support. “And abdominal obesity is increasingly recognised as dangerous.”
The strength of his website, he reckons, is that it is non-prescriptive — it doesn’t tell you what to do. Dieting women like to be told not to eat carbohydrates after 6pm or to eat only purple foods on a Wednesday. “Blokes rebel,” he says. “So you have to let them feel that they are in charge.”
There is also a wealth of gimmicks — graphs of your size and weight fluctuations, and calculators that do obscure things with your heart rate and body mass. I learn that my “aerobic weight management zone” is 115-152 BPM. Which is nice.
Saturday
Booze. What to do about booze? “Spirits are preferable to beers and wine,” says Dr Campbell, who is the sort of doctor I like. “They give you the same alcohol kick for less stuff. Vodka with Diet Coke is better than a pint. Look, alcohol is a problem. We tend not to consider the calories. But I’m not going to tell blokes not to drink beer — it wouldn’t work. It needn’t be about going from five pints a night to one pint. Four to five pints is good. Just make up for it. If you’re going to drink more, take a 20-minute walk to the pub.”
A posting on Bar Fatmanslim has a similarly pragmatic approach. “Started at 19st, now 17,” he writes. “At less than 14st, I’d not be too arsed about some beers, mate.” Fair point.
Sunday
Curious. My waist is down to 36in but my weight is up to 13st 7lb. I suppose I have to consider this a success. Either way, I have one graph with a little line going up and another with a little line going down.
So. What have I learnt? Well, I have learnt to steer towards such things as chicken and rice, and away from such things as roast potatoes and beef. Although I suppose I knew this already. I also learnt that when we ask ourselves questions we tend to lie to make ourselves sound good. I do not cycle to work every day. I do not eat only bananas for breakfast. I do not “hardly ever drink”.
Most of all, though, I have learnt that, while thin women diet to get even thinner, it’s still only fat men who are likely to bother, online or otherwise. On both the websites I tried, I was the thinnest man by a good 4st. Still, I reckon I’ll be up there by the time I’m 40. I’ll try again then.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20029-2395677_1,00.html
Where to find the diet for you ~ click on the above link to view