If you had seen me 5-6 years ago, you may or may not recognise me now. Aside from the fact I actually had hair on my head back then (it was receding, but it was still there), my health and lifestyle choices were very different, and as a result I presented as a very different person. Back then I was 15-20kg heavier, and my diet revolved largely around chocolate. And when I say it revolved around chocolate I don’t mean in the “hanging out for a chocolate bar” kind of way, I mean in the “every second thing I eat is chocolate” kind of way. My day used to go something like this: have breakfast (half a dozen weetbix and milk), go to work, have a milo, head out at about 10 and get a hot chocolate and a couple of chocolate truffles, 
have lunch, get a couple of chocolate coated orange slices on my way back from lunch, more milo and various snacks, stop at the supermarket on the way home to get stuff for dinner or whatever else I needed and buy a chocolate bar to snack on, have something easy and oversized for dinner, then have chocolate ice cream (sometimes with chocolate topping) for dessert. Writing this now it seems ridiculous, but that was honestly my diet most days. In between my chocolate fixes the food I ate was generally quick and easy, often revolving around microwave or oven reheated meals, excessive amounts of pasta, servings of meat that were far bigger than I needed and regular doses of McDonalds or pizza. Through this diet, and a lack of physical exercise beyond a social basketball roster, my weight and my waist size continued to increase, as did my ability to deflect it with jokes like “I don’t have a six pack, I have the whole keg”.
So what changed? In late 2011 I realised that things were getting a bit out of hand. I’ll spare you the unpleasant details, but suffice to say the health impacts were starting to become undeniable and something needed to change. I’d toyed with gym memberships and other health ideas in the past, but never had the motivation or commitment to actually follow through. It was always easier, and in the short term cheaper, to procrastinate and make excuses. But it had finally reached the point 
where I needed to make the choice to do something about it or things were only going to get worse. A friend and I went around a couple of the new 24 hour gyms that were popping up in town, and ended signing up to the nearby Anytime Fitness because it included a free custom program to get us started. I had no idea what I was doing so that sounded like a good deal to me. My friend and I started going 3 days a week, working through the program we had been given. I realised very quickly how weak and unfit I was, as I would struggle to get through the warm-up on the treadmill and the weights I used were always at the lighter end of the stack. While on one hand I knew I was out of shape, at another level I’d always thought of myself as being relatively fit and strong, so being confronted with evidence which proved I wasn’t either fit or strong was a bit of a wake-up call for me.
After a while my friend and I worked together (with some help from an ex-PT friend of his) to desig
n another program which got us to the gym a bit more often and challenged us a bit more. I started doing my own research and going into sports and supplement stores to learn more about how I could get fitter and stronger, and one of the things I learned very quickly was that you can’t out-train bad nutrition. Going to the gym was all well and good, but what I was eating and drinking had to change. From that point on I started looking at my diet, culling through the various online miracle diets and working on gaining an understanding of what my body needed and the best ways to get it. Over the past few years I have continued on this journey of learning more about exercise and nutrition, trying different things along the way and doing my best to find what works best for me and my body. It hasn’t always been easy, and there have been times where things have stalled or gone backwards, but I’ve learned that these challenges are part of the journey.
So why am I telling you all this? Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and sell you my miracle “one size fits all” workout plan or some diet which will change the world, there’s far too much of that going on already. What I’m hoping to do over the next couple of weeks is share with you some of the things I have learned on my journey which can hopefully help you on yours. I’m not a personal trainer or dietician; I make no claims to have any qualification in this other than my own personal experience, but what I have found is that by following a few simple rules you can start to make small changes in your life which will add up to big changes over time. Over the next few weeks I’m going to look at some rules for training, some rules for nutrition, and some more general rules for staying motivated and focused that I hope you’ll find useful. I can’t offer you a magic “six weeks to a six pack”, but hopefully by sharing my story and my experience I can help you on your journey to ongoing, sustainable, healthy change.
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