Damn Seagulls

A few years ago I trained a man who weighed more than he was happy with. And this wasn’t just an aesthetic thing. His doctor had told him that his BMI was high which categorised him as obese.

During his consultation, he gave me an idea of his eating habits. Along with the convenience and takeaway foods mentioned he also announced that he ‘ate a banana every day, sometimes two.’

He then suggested that maybe he should stop eating bananas in order to cut down the amount of calories he was consuming each day.

Immediately I could identify the problem. He wanted to pass the bananas off as the one food item that was tipping the balance between him gaining weight and losing weight.

A banana has around 100 calories. So potentially he is consuming 200 calories on this tasty, nutritious, vitamin packed fruit. That is 200 calories well spent, but he didn’t want to admit that it was. He wanted to hear that the crisps and chocolate were well spent. He wanted me to tell him that 3 takeaways a week was normal and it’ll ‘save on the washing up’. But he didn’t want me to tell him how many calories are in the five pints of lager he regularly drinks at the pub.

Of course, I told him to keep the bananas. I also told him to keep some of the food that wasn’t so nutritious. After all, takeaway foods aren’t the whole problem here, it’s the amount of takeaways.

But I knew that I had to work on his attitude surrounding food much more than I had to work on his training program. He was a good trainee. In fact he has been one of the most hardworking trainees I have trained in my ten years as a PT. He was always on time. He learnt good form quickly and he would spend extra time in the gym and go for long walks on rest days.

But the bananas had left his diet. In fact most fruit had. There’s this misconception that fruit sugars are bad for us. Fruit is indeed high in natural sugar, but this enters the bloodstream at a much slower pace than refined sugar. That is why we get a sugar spike from a sweet treat and it can often be an overload on the body.

My client had targeted the banana as the problem. This is absolutely normal and very common.

It seems to be human nature to blame the one thing that is easy to get rid of rather than tackle the bigger issue.

When I lived in Scarborough there was a news report that said that the council had identified seagulls pooing in the sea as the major reason for the sea pollution in South bay. The pollution meant that the beach did not receive its blue flag award.

So if it was the seagulls causing the pollution then the public no longer had to be concerned about the chip factory that had been discharging starchy waste into the sea for the past 50 years.

Those damn seagulls. Flying around their natural habitat. Pooing.

But I understand the problem for the council. This factory is a major employer to the local community. It is important to have a thriving industry in the area.

The culling of seagulls is easier to address. We all want to believe that this will solve the pollution problem.

I have had a recent issue in not being able to come to terms with a problem. Having just bought a trendy coffee machine where I put a capsule in and out comes a silky smooth coffee I began to drink more caffeine. These capsules had an ‘intensity’ of ten which, by all accounts, is strong! I quickly became addicted to drinking this deliciously intense coffee.

By midday I was bouncing about my apartment like Michael Gove at a rave.

But recently I have been getting pretty bad headaches. At first I blamed the atmospheric pressure, then my sleeping pattern, my contact lenses, the sun, my aftershave.

I briefly considered it to be the coffee intake but I shrugged it off and brewed myself another shot of espresso. That is until Lou sat me down and had to break the news to me.

She believed it to be the coffee and told me to halve my coffee consumption and see how I feel. Of course, she was correct. I just didn’t want her to be.

The daily banana is in no way to blame for obesity. The seagull crapping in the sea isn’t to blame for not receiving a blue flag beach. And a few splashes of brut behind my ear is not the cause of my headaches.

In each case, something that we want and feel that we need is a much more contributing factor. And you can bet that in every similar scenario there is a resolution and a compromise. We don’t need to give up something that we enjoy completely.

After three years of working with me, my client changed his weight, his attitude to food and his whole life. And we did it all whilst allowing the birds to crap in the sea.