Read on: danhwilliams.com

Read time: 3 minutes

I put on +3kg of bodyweight
While walking 15 miles of coast path /day
**BUT also indulging in 3 courses of great local Cornish cuisine.

I was moving plenty.
BUT it’s nutrition that counts.
 
I now spot these ups + downs a mile off.
It was a lesson I learnt around 10 years ago..


I'm of an age where we used a weird mix of imperial and metric systems. 

• Imperial units for body measurements and distance travelled
• Metric for temperature and measurements on a page. 

So, while my desktop ruler measured 30 centimetres.
And 26 deg Celsius was a hot summer’s day. 
A really hot day in Wales.
My measurements..

 
6’ 1’’ & 13stone 10lbs

Mine is a generation on a slow transition to metric.
 
Convert those numbers to metric..
I’m ~1.85 m tall and, up until a few years ago, 87 kg. 

A consistent 13 stone 10 lbs. Whether I was..

• Lifting weights for student rugby.
• On holiday in the summer. Or later on..
• Running and cycling various combinations of triathlon.

My bodyweight did NOT change.
 
My mother, as mothers do, always told me I looked ‘skinny’.
And I was always athletically fit and active.

So, I got a shock when I first calculated my BMI.
BMI is weight (kg) / height2 (m2)

The answer => my BMI was 25.4

So what? Well, I was classed as..


OVERWEIGHT!!

Crumbs, it was a bit of a shock.
 
Right. So. A few years ago, at the start of middle age I set about running a 3rd marathon. And I did some reading.

I wanted to understand what bodyweight I should  be.
Should be to run reasonably fast.

Thinking back, we had had no direct teaching in med school on..

• Bodyweight, or
• Practical nutrition. 

We were taught about carbohydrate metabolism, energy release and the citric acid cycle. BUT not so much about carbohydrate in food or what good nutrition looks like.

 
Why not? 

That really is not clear to me. 

I remember learning about scurvy.
(which I've never seen)

Perhaps  the evidence was not there at the time,
Perhaps the evidence was not well known or
Practical nutrition was not deemed important enough.
I don't know.
 
Med school was a very long time ago!
 
And whatever the reason, about 10 years ago, I realised  I was:

• A fully trained orthopaedic surgeon 
• Dealing with the consequences of increased bodyweight every day 
• Without a basic understanding of nutrition. 

Nutrition was, and remains..


Outside my area of expertise. 

When I talk to patients..
I stick to the biomechanics of the hip and knee.
And how high body mass affects those biomechanics. 
 
BUT I do need at least a background understanding..
..of what leads to high bodyweight.
And what to do about it.

More than that, personally, I was trudging into middle age in an overweight category. Not a good place to be. A question rang in my ears..

Could it get worse from here? 

Honestly, looking at what affected my own bodyweight was a bit of a shock.
 
And this next realisation still makes me cringe.
So, please bear with me..

A moderate sized confession coming up next week.

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Good luck :)