Health and fitness

Though I hope this post will be of interest to readers, I'm writing it largely as a personal aide memoire of details which are very important to me - though that's pretty much the purpose of the whole blog. One day, I'll want to look back on this part of my life, and the blog will remind me of details I might otherwise forget.

After Christmas 2012, my weight was 13 stone, the highest it had ever been. I'd lost some weight when we first started living on Kantara, then put it back on again, started walking to try to get fitter and lighter, then got my exercise bike (and stopped the walking). I bought and read a book called "Younger Next Year" which really inspired me.

But alongside that, Grace especially became interested in new thinking about nutrition. Then I discovered High Intensity Interval Training, and we both started Intermittent Fasting. And then something happened.

My weight has been just under 11 stone for two or three months now. This morning, I'm at 10 stone 10 pounds. I've lost that two stone plus through a combination of just over an hour's cycling a week, various changes in my diet, and intermittent fasting. Grace has lost significant weight, too. She doesn't cycle, but uses a "stepper" sometimes.

As I've written here before, High Intensity Interval Training is a fairly new approach to exercise. It involves no more than three sessions a week either running or cycling, following a particular regimen.

• 5 minutes warm-up
• 30 seconds of "flat-out" cycling/running
• 90 seconds at warm-up speed
• repeated 6 to 8 times (any more than that is not recommended)

Expert proponents of HIIT say that this kind of cardiovascular, aerobic exercise is far better than jogging or the cycling equivalent. (In fact, there seems to be a lot of evidence now to suggest that jogging may be bad for you.) Many people jog or cycle to lose weight, but it's not why I do it. In fact, I doubt that the calories I burn in three, 20-minute sessions a week amount to enough to represent a significant weight loss. I do HIIT for the sake of my cardiovascular health, and over the year and a half in which I've been doing it, my blood pressure has gone down to the mid 120's over mid 60's, and my resting heart rate is around 50-55 bpm. 

The changes in our diet have evolved over the past three years, and may still be evolving, but basically amount to this. 

• avoiding polyunsaturated fats as far as possible, and eating saturated fats instead 
• eating less meat, and more vegetables and salads (not more fruit, since it contains a lot of undesirable sugar), but not shunning red meat
• cutting down intake of carbohydrates
• reducing sugar intake
• eating as many organic foods as we can
• we take a vitamin D & K supplement, and C, too, though we probably don't actually need that and may well stop when the tub's empty.

We're not stupidly strict about this. We eat out if we have to, or as a treat, happily. We treat ourselves to chocolate and ice-cream from time to time (and Grace has found a source of original milk gums!), and have croissants and jam and pains au chocolat for breakfast every now and then. We often drink wine, cider, lager, Guinness (though we're trying to cut down!) Grace sometimes makes cake or biscuits, too, though these contain butter rather than margarine, and less sugar than bought cakes do.

Intermittent fasting is probably the main reason for our weight loss, and the loss speeded up when we started this. It basically involves missing our normal breakfast; eating nothing between our last meal of one day and our lunch the next. The purpose of this is to bring about a change in one's metabolism in such a way that the body burns fat for energy, and not sugars. This results in the loss of body fat which we have experienced, and the consequent loss of weight.

IF isn't, in itself, about cutting calories, since we may eat the equivalent of three meals a day if that's we feel we need. All meals just have to be fitted into an eight-hour window, with 16 hours of fasting (7 or 8 of which will be spent in bed). I do have to say, however, that though we may have a small snack occasionally during the afternoon - a piece of cake with tea or coffee, perhaps, or a handful of mixed nuts - we never feel the need for anything more than that, so it is likely that we do consume fewer calories by missing breakfast. That's incidental, however, and not the point of the fasting. And recent evidence suggests that IF and HIIT complement each other extremely well.

Again, however, we're not strict to the point of craziness about this. If we're really too hungry to miss breakfast, then we might have toast, croissants and pains au chocolat, or even bacon, egg and tomatoes. IF isn't intended to be punishing, simply helpful. Monitoring our weight regularly means that we're can be totally in control of it.

All in all, we're both fitter and healthier than when we started life on Kantara -and we're three years older, too! "Younger next year" is a reality which we hope to maintain.

For the record

I don't expect this post to interest our general readers much, but I include it here for my own record.

I stepped on the bathroom scales this morning to see my weight at 11 stone 9 pounds. That's a whole stone lighter than on the day we took ownership of Kantara. Now I know that some people lose a lot more than a stone in two years, but the thing is that I've not done this deliberately. It has happened simply as a result of a number of changes we have made in our eating habits, and of my exercise routine, aided to some extent by the physicality of life whilst cruising, with locks, walking and so on.

Neither of us is on "a diet", but we have changed the way we eat. For a start, we have changed to eating organic food as much as possible. This is often noticeably tastier than conventionally grown foods. Fruits and veg are not prone to contamination by pesticides or manufactured fertilisers. Meat is free from the antibiotics and chemicals often found in animal feed. We are careful about what we eat, but not faddy. We eat less meat, and more vegetables and fruit, lightly steaming the veg, and often adding them raw to salads. We avoid polyunsaturated fats, and replace them with butter, coconut oil and cold-pressed rapeseed oil. Much of what we do food-wise has been evolutionary, because it felt right, not always because of conscious decisions. But we have been very influenced by one Dr Joseph Mercola, whose web articles on health matters are very convincing, and backed with considerable research.  We still eat out fairly frequently, eat chocolate, drink wine. We usually avoid eating biscuits, cakes and other sugary foods simply because we usually don't feel the need for them. On the occasions we do, we don't have guilt trips.

My exercise routine has changed over the past year. Where I used to do a 15 to 20km cycle five days a week, I now do 10km twice weekly, and High Intensity Interval Training on the other three days - on the exercise bike, a 5 minute warm-up, then 6 repeats of 30 seconds of intense cycling followed by 90 seconds of "normal" cycling. The whole routine takes just 17 minutes, plus a few for muscle stretches and "warming down". Taking expert advice, I do no special exercise for the remaining two days.

This has resulted in a number of changes. It has improved my metabolism, such that I continue to burn calories at a faster rate for some hours after my exercise, especially after the HIIT. It has increased my stamina, and built muscle. It has lowered my resting heart rate to about 60bpm, and my blood pressure to around 120-125 over 62-68. My acid reflux condition has improved to the extent that I have stopped medication, and I have had no colds or flu for the whole two years.

I do need to build some strength training into my routine, and more limbering.

I went to see the doctor when we were back in St Albans the other week. For over a year, I had experienced occasional swelling of my feet and ankles. I had asked the doctor about this, and she said it was because I wasn't walking as much as I had been when I was teaching - and this was true, despite my habit of taking occasional long walks. But lately, I had noticed that the swelling was mostly in my right foot, and I was concerned that this might be symptomatic of something that needed treatment.

When I walked into the doctor's surgery, she said, "My goodness, you look well! What can I do for you??" 

The swelling of my foot turns out to be because of the presence of some small varicose veins, the result of years of ignorantly rubbing my legs in the wrong direction when drying them.

"Younger Next Year" had a profound effect on me, and I continue to follow its principles, although my exercise routine is now different from that of the author. I certainly do not feel my 62 years! and I'm told I don't look it.

I think a lot of how I feel is down to being retired, not having the stresses of work. But I think also that for us it's a lot to do with the change to living on the boat, a major change in our lives, doing something new. The change itself has been, is, beneficial to us physically and psychologically.

It's not everybody's idea of a way of life, but we recommend it!