A Farewell to Oars
....so what changed for you around 2010?
on reddit’s r/SaturatedFat, u/Routine_Cable_5656, having seen my made-up lifetime weight graph, innocently asked the million dollar question:
....so what changed for you around 2010?
and I wrote this rather extensive reply:
I'm not sure. In 2010 I was in probably the best condition of my life, and I spent three months skiing moguls (9-5, Mon-Fri, I am an obsessive..) in Chamonix, and I stopped smoking, or more accurately I shifted most of the burden of my nicotine addiction onto nicotine pills, and vastly reduced the number of cigars I smoke.
The first thing I noticed was wrong was that I developed the most terrible ache in my legs. I thought it was overtraining at the time (moguls are brutal on the legs), but it never really went away, and over the next couple of years I developed 'Chronic Fatigue Syndrome', which is just what doctors call 'all the symptoms of hypothyroidism but we don't know why, certainly there's no thyroid problem or any other problem we can detect'.
I gave up all sports except cricket, which isn't really that much exercise, and even that I was hanging on to for dear life, it was really arduous. I also completely lost the ability to drink alcohol (I'd always been a heavy drinker), the hangovers were so awful that I just had to stop, and I started sleeping thirteen hours a day. And during the day I was usually completely exhausted.
Eventually, since it was that or suicide, I decided to take thyroid drugs anyway against doctor's advice, and that worked way better than it had any right to do, almost a complete instant cure.
I never actually got a "diagnosis" of CFS, because you need to have the symptoms for six months after you first see a doctor about them, and it had taken me about a year and a half to realise that I was ill, and about five months after I first saw the doctor I fixed it myself.
No criticism of my doctor here, he was brilliant and did every test I asked for and never tried to write my problems off as psychological. And when he saw that my thyroid cure worked he became supportive and kept an eye on me with all necessary blood tests. Thanks Angus!
But it was during this time that I started reading the medical literature, and I went from: "If it worked it wouldn't be alternative medicine, it would just be medicine" (which I'm told I used to say a lot) to: "Medical 'science' is a shitshow of half-wits." (which is my current opinion)
For ten years I pretty much forgot that I was ill, although I was never quite the bouncy energetic extrovert athlete that I used to be. I did take up tennis, and played regularly, but whereas both exercise and conversation used to energise me, now they tire me, and I have only limited capacity for either.
During the pandemic, my tiredness came back (not nearly as bad though), and this time I couldn't fix it with thyroid.
So, what happened to me in 2010?
No idea really: I turned forty, I gave up smoking, I did far too much exercise, I got mysteriously ill and gave up various sports as a result.
After I gave up rowing (my main sport for years) I watched all my muscle mass turn into fat, and I decided that I'd better find out what a calorie was. After a bit of research, I got suspicious of carbohydrates and stopped eating rice and bread and pasta, which had been important sources of energy (rowers need a lot of energy!)
I also tried the Shangri-La Diet (my first ever attempt to even notice what I ate, let alone control it), a little bit of extra-light olive oil first thing every morning, which seemed like a clever hack. It worked as advertised, and some of the fat came off, but that was about the time my tiredness started to become a real problem, so I thought I'd better stop fucking about and stopped.
That was also the time I moved onto my beloved narrowboat. I couldn't run a deep fat fryer on the boat, so I started buying commercially fried chips rather than cooking chips myself in beef dripping.
In hindsight that may have been a mistake. But the timing's not quite right for that, or the Shangri-La Diet, to have been the cause of all this. The tiredness had already started (at least the ache in the legs) before I moved onto the boat. I'd already started to give up the power-endurance sports that I'd loved so much at that point.
It got much worse afterwards, though.