My Struggle

A man who has no sense of history is like a man who has no ears or no eyes.

I thought I'd extend my graph to include the rest of my life.

Since I hardly gave my weight a moment's thought for forty years, this is tricky, so I have made up some numbers:

At the start of the pandemic in 2020, I was having an argument with a friend, in which I asserted that if you just ate what you liked when you liked and didn't think about your weight, it would find a stable point and stay there.

She was sceptical. So we measured my weight on the scales in Christ's Boathouse, and it was 93kg. (I was actually quite surprised that it wasn’t 13 1/2 stone any more, but I figured that middle aged spread is a thing….) All through the pandemic we checked occasionally, and it was usually roughly that. Exactly a year later, we checked, and it was 93kg again.

I've checked those scales and they under-read by about 0.75 kg compared to my own set of scales, so call my weight on April Fool's day 2020 and 2021 93.75kg

I also checked my weight last Christmas on those same scales, and it was 97kg (so 97.75 in terms of the international standard ‘scales in John’s galley’ system), which was the point at which I thought 'Yikes!' and started researching the causes of obesity.

Earlier than that is even murkier.

I've found a couple of spreadsheets from rowing days (for power-to-weight calculations for crew selection), which list my weight as 85 kilos.

And I remember 13 1/2 stone, BMI 27, as being 'my weight'. That's also 85 kilos. I was always rather amused to be called ‘overweight’. Further proof that doctors don’t know what they’re talking about, as if we needed any.

(Most doctors. My actual GP gave me a full physical on the only occasion that I saw him, when I’d dropped off his list for non-attendance and had to re-register, and said he thought I was one of the healthiest men he’d ever met. )

As I remember that weight was very stable. I once spent three months skiing, living in a hotel that served pasta, cheese, meatballs and wine for every meal, and then cycled across France for a month, sleeping rough and living on wine and cigars and baguettes (and the occasional meal from the Red Guide when I passed one). When I came home I was so thin you could see my internal organs.

Within a couple of months I was back to normal at 13 1/2 stone. And quite a lot happier about it, I’d felt distinctly weedy and had been reluctant to get into fights.

That's one reason why I've always believed in set-point/lipostat-type theories of obesity.

So let's say I weighed 85 kilos from the point where I hit my full growth at about 25 years old until I was 40, when all the trouble started.

The only other weight measurement I remember is when I joined my college rowing club at 18 years old after the captain and a girl I liked got me drunk enough to sign up for early morning outings.

They weighed me and said "10 1/2 stone, too light for a rower and too heavy for a cox". And then made me row anyway!

It tells you something, I think, that rowers were required to be heavy in 1989. Cambridge University understands perfectly well about power/weight ratios. No one was fat. The only reason that a man might be heavy was because he had lots of muscle mass.

So let's say 66.67 kilos on 01/01/89.

Before that, Christ knows. Mum remembers that I was a big baby (I was her first, women remember these things), so let's say 4kgs on 18th July 1970.

And nine months before that, I imagine my weight was fairly negligible

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