Background

Bear with me, there’s a fair bit going on here.

STRENGTH AND STAMINA

Most people quite rightly view exercise as a major key to weight control. In general, so do I. But what happens when exercise itself is a problem and actually seems to make weight control worse?

I’ve had a problem for quite some years now. Definitely since adulthood, possibly a bit earlier. In essence: exercise doesn’t seem to work for me in the way it should. For most people, repeating the same activity makes it easier and less time-consuming. There’s even a simple phrase for it: “building up stamina”. I know it happens – I see it when I’m at the gym with my long-suffering boyfriend, P. He gets stronger and fitter when he goes to the gym regularly – I get more and more knackered and less and less capable of lifting the same weights or doing the same amount of time on the treadmill or bike.

I first noticed it in my last couple of years at university: walking back from the town centre became more difficult over time – and the 15-minute walk to our shared house took 30 minutes by the end of the academic year.

The same pattern repeated itself over the next few years – one job I had was a 10-minute brisk walk from the station when I started, but only 6 months later I struggled to catch the train which left 30 minutes after I finished work! Another job was about 15 minutes (up then downhill) from the nearest bus stop, but that walk took longer and longer over the time I spent there. This pattern repeated with each new job.

WEIGHT

That wasn’t the only pattern. Believe it or not, I was once a pretty small kid. At primary school, when the other girls started to go through puberty, I was nicknamed “big tits the killer” – aren’t schoolkids nice? Once I started the transition from child to adult myself, I started putting on a bit of weight.

Putting the weight on wasn’t a problem. Stopping it topping up every month was. For about a decade or so, I put on about 2lb (1kg) each month (but lost about half after the start of my period). Many women put about the same amount of weight on before their period – but my body didn’t seem to know it could let go of the weight once I hit the stage where I could celebrate not being pregnant.

Playing devil’s advocate, the weight gain could be simply due to overeating. Over a month, the net weight gain averages out at about 150kcal excess consumption per day (assuming the weight gain is 100% fat at an energy density of 9kcal per gram of fat). BUT, this suggests I ingest nearly 1300 Calories more than I need to in the week leading up to my period and about 650 Calories less than I need to during my period. I don’t eat enough chocolate to make that amount of difference!

And there’s another factor in this overeating argument: it assumes the overall balance between my energy intake and energy use remains stable. It hasn’t. My food consumption now is very different to the vast amounts of beer, curries and pizza I consumed when I was a full-time student. In fact, one of my earlier experiments proved there was little, if any, link between my food consumption and ever-increasing weight. During a 6-month contract I spent the first 3 months on a strict, 1,000 Calories per day diet. During the last 3 months, I stopped Calorie counting and went back to consuming around 2,000 Calories per day. The only difference was the amount of food I consumed, yet my rate of weight gain did not change. The only conclusion I can draw from this was that something other than the relationship between diet and exercise is a problem. I gave my GP a copy of the food & weight diary I compiled over that 6 month period in an effort to get him to at least notice I had some concerns about exactly why this weight gain didn’t seem to respond to the conventional ideas about weight and exercise, I think it got filed under “B” for bin.

THE GALLSTONES – late 2001/early 2002

After a couple of months with odd, unpredictable (but very violent) abdominal pain – often in obscure hours of the morning, I had an ultrasound scan which confirmed the presence of some pretty big gallstones. After spending a weekend in hospital getting to appreciate morphine’s role in successful pain relief, an outpatient appointment was brought forward. Once it really started taking the piss and the pain became increasingly unpredictable (and thus unavoidable), the surgeon agreed to bring the operation forward and I finally lost my gallbladder in March 2002. The A&E consultants at Anytown District General Hospital must have rejoiced at the chance to save a substantial amount of their morphine budget.

Bear with me – there’s a fair bit going on here.