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John McDonald

By John McDonald

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” With those words last fall, supermodel Kate Moss sparked a media frenzy and a storm of accusations that she was aiding and abetting eating disorders amongst  impressionable young girls.

My own words, “eat less, exercise more,” aren’t likely to have the same impact as the size zero Moss, but it’s what I say to people who ask me how I lost weight. I tried saying “it’s the cancer,” but it didn’t go over too well, and besides, it wasn’t the truth. I really did lose a bunch of weight by exercising more and eating less, as simple as that sounds.

How much weight? I’m not exactly sure, because I tend to avoid the scales, but I’m figuring about 37 lbs. since March, 2007, when my wife and I decided to start following the Canada Food Guide.

It was the last piece of a puzzle that has been confounding me since I first gained excess weight in my late teens. It’s been a rollercoaster ride ever since, with the scales sometimes reading as high as 225 lbs. plastered onto my six-foot-tall frame.
Exercise was never quite enough. Sure, I would lose some weight, but I could not seem to sustain it. And this was while exercising to the max.

I signed up for Ironman in 1998 and 1999 and managed, through lengthy endurance workouts, to bring my weight down to below 200 lbs.

But it was my thought that after a eight-hour bike ride and a two-hour run that I could eat anything I wanted. And I did. It wouldn’t have been uncommon for me to eat three lbs. of pasta after a lengthy workout.

But stop exercising and the weight piles back on, which it did after I suffered a running injury in 2000. I got back into the game in 2004, but soon found the same thing; I could exercise until I dropped, but my weight loss didn’t seem to match my output during exercise.

Enter the food guide. I liked it right away because it never used the word diet. I liked that the guide didn’t pontificate; it would recommend lean meats and whole grains, but also allowed you to count pepperoni on a white flour crust without a whiff of criticism. What I did learn quickly was not to despair if I fell of the wagon, and I frequently did.

It may sound stupidly simple, but the food guide, for the first time in my life, gave me the basis for what someone of my age and height should be eating. Surprisingly, no one had ever told me that before.

I never thought about portion control, assuming that 140 kilometre bike rides and 20 kilometre runs would burn off everything I could throw into the furnace.

It was tough at first. Your body gets used to those super-sized helpings, and more importantly, so does your mind.  But within a year of going on the guide, I was down 10 lbs. without adding any more exercise. I dropped ten more in the following year.
Nothing succeeds like success and I dropped that last 15 or so pounds in the third year. I went from size 36 pants, down to 34, then 32. No one noticed the first 15 lbs. but they’re sure noticing now.

I’m now about 185 lbs., flirting with size 30 and for the first time since I was 14, people are using the word skinny to describe me. Not always nicely, mind you, and that’s the dichotomy of weight loss. Now some people are joking I’m too thin, that I’m suffering from manorexia.

I will admit that I have started to go below the Canada Food Guide, that is, sometimes opt out of the full number of servings allowed, but no one who saw me eating that white chocolate cheese cake the other night at Milestones would say I have an eating disorder.

Will I gain it back? I don’t like to say never, but for the first time in my life, eating a balanced diet and exercising on a regular basis, I feel like I might be able to keep it off.

john@kelowna.com
250-575-0521

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 6:26 am and is filed under John McDonald, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.