New millennium, new me

February-April 2000

Week 1

I have passed the first test. Often when I go through Waterloo at midnight I fall prey to temptation – a burger, a baguette, a limp pain au chocolat. But not tonight – tonight it is an orange juice, because this is the first day of the rest of my life. I have acquired a personal trainer and together we are strong.

Individually, I am not strong. In fact I am hopeless: overweight, fleshy, unfocused. Journalism is not good for you: peculiar hours, irregular meals, too much booze, and a certain rootlessness. Middle age is not good for you either, and it looms. Before it arrives, and filled with millennial fervour after reading all those glossy new-century, new-you supplements, I decided to undertake some running repairs and a touch of redefinition.

That is how I came to find myself at Matt Roberts at One (translation: Matt Roberts’s gym/health club at One Aldwych in London), signing up for a three-times-a-week, no-backsliding-allowed, three-month course that will transform me from zero to hero, from the pits to the Brad Pitts.

The attraction of Roberts’s approach, I was assured, is that it is “holistic”. The result will be not just a new physical me – desirable though that will be – but a new mental and spiritual me, too. (An annual membership fee of £1,500 and sessions with a trainer that work out at around £45 each is surely not an exorbitant price to pay for this New Beginning.)

To reach the gym, you have to walk through the bar at One Aldwych – a trendy newish hotel, bar and restaurant complex just off the Strand. It is filled with matt-black young things drinking Paraguayan beer, which has a useful dual effect: I simultaneously aspire to their suave, pencil-thin matt-blackness but despise the way an evening is being wasted in idle conversation and booze when, down below, a shiny, shimmering chrome-and-glass nirvana beckons.

My trainer, Sam Jenkins, is terrific. Didn’t Madonna once get her trainer to father her child, Sam? But he refuses to mix his work with his life, tempting though that might sometimes be. With me it is it not very tempting. Sam studied physical education and sports science at the University of Evansville in Indiana – he got a place there on a soccer scholarship – and has only recently come back from the US. (“It was great but I missed British culture, the humour and the football.” Really?)

The US is of course the birthplace of personal training, and Sam reckons it is about five years ahead of the UK. Whereas here it is still associated with celebrities – witness the recent stories about Anne Diamond and Vanessa Feltz, both of whom have employed trainers to help them lose weight and get their lives back into shape – in the US its appeal is steadily broadening and it is ceasing to be seen as the preserve of the rich and famous.

(Vaguely socially aware note: Clearly, while you do not need to have a regular slot on daytime television to get a personal trainer, you will need a fairly hefty income – I estimate that to do it properly will cost £6,000-£8,000 a year. If you feel that, by examining my psyche in this way, I am selling out to consumer-driven capitalism and should be garrotted with my own ridiculous-looking singlet, all I can do is apologise and recommend you turn immediately to the arts pages while your blood pressure gets back to normal.)

Sam asks me what my objectives are, and I weakly volunteer fitness, thinness, mental strength, all the usual stuff. He warns me not to get too obsessed by weight loss (training can actually increase your weight, but it should at least be better distributed), tests my body fat levels (31%, which, while not catastrophic, is not good), my blood pressure (not bad) and puts me through a not-too-demanding session on the treadmill to check my heart rate during exercise (high but not excessively so and he says it will come down as I exercise over the coming weeks).

So what’s the verdict? “You are are a classic middle-aged sedentary male,” he says, sounding more brutal than he perhaps intends (so much for my plan to change my life before I hit middle age). “You’re not horrendous – there are a lot of people in a worse state – but you’re not great either. You are fairly strong and I think there’s something to work with.” Gee, thanks.

Sam is also impressed by my attitude. “I have a good feeling about your motivation,” he says. “You don’t seem to be doing it because of peer-group pressure, or spouse pressure, or because everyone else is doing it. You seem to want to do it for yourself and for real. It has to be a lifestyle change, not a vanity thing – you have to want to make a change for life. You seem positive and raring to go, which is a big plus.”

So what are we going to do? (Note the “we” – this is a joint commitment; I am doing it for him as much as for myself; guilt, duty, loyalty are major motives for keeping to the plan). He says the long-term goals over the next three months (which in life-changing terms is not very long) are to lose at least two stone, to get rid of 3% of body fat, and to increase energy levels and mental sharpness.

The short-term goals will change from week to week but the first three are simple: eat five pieces of fruit a day, eliminate two snacks or substitute fruit for sandwiches and chocolate (I should have mentioned that the carbohydrate-laden Guardian food trolley parks four times a day about two feet from where I sit), drink two litres of water a day (is that possible without bursting?), cut down on alcohol by around a third (from, say, 20 units a week to 12), and exercise at least three times a week.

I volunteer to cut down on booze even more, but he thinks that might prove counter-productive – “too much of a shock to the system”. He says it is better to achieve this grand lifestyle change gradually, rather than try to become a new person (sorry, New Person) overnight. “Reasonable” and “realistic” seem to be his watchwords.

He maps out an initial fitness programme, covering three one-hour sessions a week, each supervised by him. The programme will include 25 minutes of cardiovascular work (cycling, running, rowing) three times a week, resistance work using weights machines twice a week (he says we will move on to free weights, which are harder to control, later), and flexibility training to help with strength and reduce aches. We begin in a few days and, assuming my stamina holds out, I will file fortnightly dispatches from the fitness front. We can win this together.

Week 2

It’s an attitude. I had to fly to the US the other day. This is going to sound so preachy and smug, but normally I would have drunk a couple of those small bottles of Chardonnay, eaten all the nuts on offer, snaffled bars of Toblerone, got bored, eaten some more nuts, scoffed an entire trayful of sludge (“Chicken or steak, sir” – who can tell them apart?) and fallen asleep. Well, I didnt. I ate a salad, drank water, watched a movie, read the New Yorker from cover to cover, and was moved by Horowitz playing Schubert’s Serenade in a recording made in his New York flat when he was over 80. It’s an attitude.

Ten days into life with a personal trainer, I feel transformed. I haven’t lost any weight and I’m still struggling with tempting foods (PLEASE take that chocolate cake away), but people tell me I look better, I certainly feel better, and I’ve convinced myself that my stomach is marginally less shapeless than previously.

What I am undoubtedly feeling is mentally more organised. I have more energy – except immediately after my thrice-weekly workouts – and more mental focus. I am in control, empowered, ready to take on the world. I’ve found that reducing alcohol and cutting out the snacks (eaten out of boredom rather than hunger) is easy; I’m still addicted to sweet tea and occasional biscuits, and I’m not really counting the calories. If the weight doesn’t start to reduce, I will have to be stricter with myself.

The exercise has been great. I spend 10 minutes on a walking machine that simulates cross-country skiing (no problem), 10 minutes running on a treadmill (enjoyable, though my heart rate shoots up worryingly before it stabilises), and six minutes on a bike (very dull). We’ll also be moving to the rowing machine. All these are designed to get the heart working and improve stamina levels, but I will also need to do some running outside the gym.

The other half of each one-hour session is spent on weights. Each time, we use four sets of equipment designed to build up different muscles: biceps, triceps, pecs, quads, abs, delts, traps, rhomboids and lots of other muscles I didn’t know I had.

By far the toughest is the machine where I have to lift myself up using two bars. This cruel contraption is clearly designed to show how ridiculously heavy the user is. If you can simultaneously increase your muscle tissue and reduce your body weight, this becomes a cinch. At the moment it is purgatory.

The only mistake I’ve made so far was seeing the movie American Beauty, in which Kevin Spacey plays a dysfunctional 42-year-old (the age is cruel!) whose mid-life crisis takes the form of lusting after his daughter’s best friend and working out like a maniac to impress her. It all ends in blood, sweat and tears (not necessarily in that order). Why are you doing it, someone asks the Spacey character – to increase strength or stamina? To look good naked, he replies with admirable candour. My motives are of course far less crudely physical: I want to be a more productive worker, a good citizen, a well-rounded (metaphorically speaking) human being. I’m not doing this for me, but for mankind.

My first report produced lots of reasonably good-natured abuse from fiends and colleagues, and two letters. The first, from the head of leisure services at Fenland District Council, told me that if an investment of £600-plus a month on a personal trainer became too much, I could join a Fenland leisure centre for £28. Well worth considering, though I have become rather hooked on my trainer Sam’s psychological support. (He says some of his clients pour out their emotional problems to him – so far, thankfully, I have resisted that. One hour just wouldn’t be long enough.)

The other letter took me to task for referring vaguely to five pieces of fruit. “Does one plum count as a piece? And how many grapes?” demanded my correspondent. Just for the record: one piece of fruit includes a whole apple, banana or pear, or a cupful of grapes.

The same correspondent thought two litres of water a day impossible and said I must have to get up throughout the night. Well, I haven’t been measuring the quantity precisely, but I have been drinking a great deal more water, without so far having my sleep disturbed. I am drinking a lot more during the intensive one-hour exercise session, and making sure I drink cups of water throughout the day in our hot, unhealthily dehydrated office. It’s really a question of substituting water for tea, coffee, cola and booze, so the overall quantity of liquid is not much changed.

I am keen to be a bit of a force for collective change, so I asked Sam for some healthy tips that everyone can follow. You see, he’s your personal trainer too. Here goes:

• Reduce fat intake to 20% of your total calories. Cut down the fatty foods – fried foods, chips and cakes.
• Eat more fruit and veg.
• Eat natural foods rather than processed foods, which are filled with sugar, salt and chemicals.
• Drink lots of water and cut down on tea and, especially, coffee. Drink two cups of coffee a day, max. (My gym is right next to a Starbucks with a comfy armchair, and this is proving a bit of a problem; my motto at the moment appears to be better latte than never. Sorry Sam.)
• Do a minimum of 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercise three times a week – running, biking, rowing, walking at a pace fast enough to get your heart rate up (don’t overdo it though, especially at first).
• Exercise will also release stress: a brisk 30-minute walk will do you a lot of good mentally and physically. Apparently, it produces endorphins, and that does you a power of good.
• Try weight training at home: cans of beans can make perfect dumb-bells (but don’t drop one of the family-sized cans on your foot).
• Try some push-ups (extremely hard work) and squats.
• Do regular stretching exercises – hamstrings, calves, chest, shoulder blades.
• Swim regularly – good cardiovascular exercise and, since it isn’t weight-bearing or impactive, excellent for people with sore joints.

I’d like to add one more tip. Make some time for yourself, turn off the lights, sit alone in a darkened room, and put on a CD of Horowitz playing Schubert or Chopin. There, you feel better already.

Week 3

A month into my new life and Sam, my personal trainer, has left me. I am heartbroken. What have I said, or done, or not done, eaten or not eaten? I have been doing my flat-stomach exercises, sit-ups morning and night, but abs sense does not appear to have made the heart grown fonder. How could he do this to me? And just because his girlfriend is visiting from Chicago for a week. Is he in this for keeps or not?

The appeal of the trainer is threefold. You go to the gum to take control of your life: to exercise properly, eat properly, drink properly, get your mind and body into some sort of harmony. You go briefly to escape: the music is that techno-ambient stuff they play in nightclubs, all spacy and trance-like – exercise as drug. Movers and shakers come (a) because they can afford it; but (b) because it is a place where they don’t have to do any moving and shaking – instead they are moved and shaken (Here we have a paradox: they are taking control of their lives by ceding control to a trainer for three hours a week; prominent in life, they choose to become anonymous in this techno-industrial environment.)

But you also go to be loved. I haven’t had this amount of attention since I was about five, when I had to leave my mother clinging and weeping (me, not my mother) to go to school. For one hour, three times a week, Sam talks to me, asks how I am, cajoles me, laughs at my jokes, flatters my ego, scribbles in a policeman’s notebook, cares. At least I thought he did.

In his absence, Lucy has been looking after me. Lucy is a former international swimmer and has been putting me through my paces in the pool. For about 30 years, I have been labouring under the delusion that I was rather good at breaststroke. Once, in Greece, I swam out too far and found the current against me. A Shelleyan death beckoned, but my trusty breaststroke got me home. Now I discover I can’t do it after all: the stroke is too fast, the legs insufficiently extended, the breathing all wrong, and my head never goes in the water, which strains the neck. It has to change, Lucy says.

But start to think about it – about how to breathe and pull your arms back at the same time – and the whole thing disintegrates. I am currently at the disintegration stage and will not be visiting Greece this summer. Lucy has explained the theory, but the practice, especially the breathing, is harder. I keep inhaling under water with disastrous results: I used to be able to do about 30 lengths (very slowly, frequent stops); I can now do about half a length before spluttering to a stop.

But the darkest hour etc etc. I know it will be worth it in the end. And I look great in the new goggles, don’t you think? Film critic Peter Bradshaw, photographed last year at his local lido, pioneered this trend in Guardian writers appearing in swimming apparel, and I think it coukd be a real circulation-booster. There are apparently moves to extend it soon to the comment pages.

Happily, my front crawl is faring better: just adding goggles, slowing down the stroke and not waving my head about wildly has improved it by about 30%.

Swimming is extremely hard work – halfway through these one-hour sessions I was really tired – but it is reckoned to be a superb way of exercising: all the muscle groups get used and it is good cardiovascular exercise too. Here are a few tips, courtesy of Lucy:

• Unlearning bad habits is tough, so it’s worth teaching children to swim properly.
• Try to swim for half an hour two or three times a week.
• Goggles – to help you swim in, rather than worn on top of your head to look sporty.
• Breathing properly is the key to swimming well – practise your breathing at the side of the pool, dipping your head in and out of the water to establish a pattern.
• Running in the pool – with your feet off the ground – is a good form of non-impactive exercise.
• Using a float and going up and down the pool by just kicking legs will strengthen your muscles. It’s tiring, though: I had a long walk one afternoon after one of these sessions and found it very hard going, my legs almost seizing up.

Lucy is tough on fat – and tough on the causes of fat. Having discovered that one Saturday I ate sausages for lunch and pizza for dinner, she gave me a daily food and drink chart to fill in, asking me what I ate, whether I was hungry, and whether I enjoyed it. Filling in the form was such a chore that I was inclined to eat nothing, but that approach is a disaster since your blood sugar level falls and you then stuff yourself in a bid for instant energy.

Little and often is the preferred routine: a hearty, healthy breakfast (muesli rather than bacon and black pudding, naturally); mid-morning fruit; a jacket potato and salad lunch; mid-afternoon fruit (take those giant-sized Mars bars away); fish or chicken in the evening, with fruit salad and yoghurt (preferably one of those enzyme-filled biological ones).

My foot sheets of course looked nothing like this. Lucy said I ate too much too late (she suggests eating little or nothing after 8pm); I had a box of popcorn at the cinema (nutritionally not too bad except for the high salt levels); and had stuffed nuts and olives at a party (nuts are only good if you eat them straight from the shells. Lucy said I should give up coffee completely, cut out sugar in tea, eat less bread – it’s more fattening than you think – and spread the butter very thinly.

Look, thanks Lucy, but perhaps two-coffees-max Sam wasn’t so bad after all.

Week 4

First, the sensational news: I have lost half a stone. Well, OK, 6lb if you want to be picky. Now, admittedly, 6lb is less than 3% of my original weight, but it’s a start. The news would have been even more heartening but for a weekend spent in Vienna, where gyms have barely oenetrated – Jörg Haider’s jogging obsession is not shared by his fellow countrymen – and eery menu is a death trap. How the Viennese manage to waltz eludes me; it’s a miracle they can walk.

Everything comes soaked in butter or garlic saucel meat – grilled, griddled, cuttled and ocassionally raw – appears to be obligatory; and strudles and tortes (there should be a law against them) are a way of life. All the hard work of the oast six weeks swam before my eyes – and promptly drowned. My food charts make X-certificate reading.

But Vienna was an aberration and the fightback has begun, with boxing the latest weapon in the fitness war: more punch, less paunch. Now, there may be some who think it ridiculous that I should be trying out boxing on the health pages; shouldn’t it, they might aver, be on the anti-health pages? All I ca say is that this is a form of boxing (sometimes called “boxercise”) that minimises the danger of injury; you get all the “fun” of boxing with none of the fury (not to mention brain damage).

My personal trainer, Sam, and I have been sparring more or less since the beginning. He stands there with large pads on his hands, which I pummel waering boxing gloves. He showed me how to jab with the left (if that’s your weaker hand) and save your right for the bigger punches. Boxing is good exercise – with lots of leg and body movement – and an excellent way of releasing aggression. It’s tiring – because you have to move and punch at the same time, so everything is being used simultaneously – but also rewarding in a way that conventional exercise isn’t.

The treadmill can, as everyone who has used a gym knows, get pretty dull, no matter how diverting the boy bands cavorting round on MTV are. Boxing provides a way of varying the exercise, interacting with someone else, and setting goals – not just increasing stamina, but becoming a better technical boxer (punching is more about body positioning than hand or arm power, and it is way to assess how well you are doing it).

When Sam left me for his girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, I cooked up a little scheme – to take him to a boxing gym where he could pit his skills against a proper boxer. Which is how last week we came to be standing in the ring at Jimmy McDonnell’s boxing gum (slogan: “Get fit and don’t get hit”) in London;s Camden Town.

Jimmy was a world-class fighter in the late 1980s, won a European championship at featherweight and fought for two world titles. He now trains some of the UK’s best professional boxers, some gifted amateurs and a varied bunch who are training to get fit or to explore some mythic notion of masculinity. Women are welcome here too, by the way, and plenty show up: they enjoy the release of aggression, can learn self-defence and are particularly attracted by kick-boxing.

My hope was that Jimmy would show Sam the ropes, and lots of the canvas too. But it didn’t work out that way. Instead, Sam and I did all the fitness stuff, danced around the ring punching Jimmy’s mitts (he would occasionally give you a friendly cuff around the head and tell you to keep your guard up) and then sparred with each other (body punches only).

We did four three-minute rounds (a workout for regulars would last 10 rounds or more; a workout for pros could be three or four hours) and it was utterly draining. This is anaerobic (as well as aerobic) exercise: the action is so fast and unrelenting that there isn’t enough oxygen for the body (at least this body) to recover. After 12 minutes I was out on my feet. I spent the last couple of minutes limply punching (nudging actually) a punchbag. The judges made the bag the winner on points. Sam, needless to say, survived the ordeal much better. So much for revenge.

Without necessarily donning the gloves and entering the ring, there are several things everyone can learn from boxers and apply to their own fitness regimes:

• Discipline. Boxers may damage themselves in the ring, but on the whole they don’t damage themselves outside it (until their careers are over anyway). “Don’t put bad oil in a good engine” is Jimmy’s dictum. Avoid drink, drugs and cigarettes, and watch your diet. Jimmy insists he has never sworn, smoked, tasted alcohol, taken drugs, or consorted with any woman other than his wife; his only vice, he says, is telling lies.
• Jog to build up your stamina (but check with the doctor first if you have any history of heart trouble).
• Skipping is a good form of cardiovascular exercise and a way of building up leg strength.
• Try circuit training: a series of short, intensive exercises designed to get your heart rate up. These might include press-ups, lunges (taking a stride forward and letting your trailing knee almost touch the floor), squat thrusts (jumping up from a squatting position), sit-ups, skipping, and running on the spot. Spend five minutes or so warming up and stretching; then do each for 30 seconds, with 30-second rests between them; go through all the routines twice, so that your heart rate is raised for around 20 minutes in all. This combination of exercises combines aerobics with resistance work, needs no equipment, and can be done in the privacy of your bedroom.
• Put the theme from Rocky on your CD player and shadow box in front of your bedroom mirror. It will raise your heart rate and teach you to be light on your feet. You will look ridiculous, but who cares? After all, nobody ever laughs at Lennox Lewis.

Week 5

The fitness report is a little slimmer this week – two columns instead of three. This is either a clever typographical joke – as I get smaller, so does the space – or a reflection of the fact that I have less and less to say. I leave you to decide which.

If this was the London Marathon, I would be passing the Isle of Dogs. Now it becomes a slog and the reps become truly repetitious. I have just come from a one-hour “boxercise” class – a bit of boxing and lots of circuit training – where I was probably the least fit person in a group of 20. There is a lesson here: as you get fitter and look for new ways to exercise, you continually come across people who are even fitter than you. This could be inspiring or depressing; at present, I plump for the latter.

It is odd to be an interloper in this world of the fit: lithe people in lycra who inhabit mechanised subterranean caves and watch MTV (is there any gym in Britain tuned in to the BBC or ITV?) Training, the effort to keep up, takes over your life: each week I try to work out with Sam, my trainer, three times, run three times and do two boxercise classes. I am left with mountains of laundry and virtually no time to do anything else, yet it doesn’t seem enough. I’m still bottom of the class.

I am also worried about the dehumanising effect of working out. I saw an overweight, disconsolate-looking man on the train the other evening drinking a little bottle of gin and tonic, and had an urge to remonstrate with him for this public display of weakness. In my quest for physical and mental perfection, for manifest purpose, I am becoming intolerant of the messiness and inconsequentiality of life. This may be how fascism begins.

Back in the gym, I am transformed (OK, showing moderate improvement). I can now run on the treadmill for 20 minutes without collapsing in a wheezing heap; do pull-ups on that infernal machine (a hang-over from the Spanish Inquisition?) that makes you lift half your weight; do press-ups for the first time in my life. Believe you can do it and you can. “Mind over matter”, as Sam says ad nauseam (nausea sometimes being the operative word).

My back has been objecting, so I had a massage from Jo, head therapist at the health club. Most of the regulars have a weekly massage, which eases aches, strengthens muscles and leaves you feeling relaxed. Jo said my shoulders were knotted from sitting in front of a screen, but that regular massage could rectify the problem. Henceforth I may try to sneak in without Sam seeing me and head straight for the massage room.

Another benefit of my posh gym is that you get to see the in-house doctor, who, if you can bear to know the results, will subject you to a “biological terrain assessment”. Dr Bannock puts samples of urine, blood and saliva into test tube-type containers which are connected to a laptop. The computer whirs and bleeps (I panic but Dr B says it always does this) and prints out a diagram of how your cells are performing – a kind of ordinance survey map for your biological terrain.

My results were mixed. Dr Bannock said I had a biological age of 33, which is encouraging since I am 42 (in Gymworld, clocks and calendars can be conquered, time can be tamed). But there were valleys as well as peaks: body too acidic; digestive system stressed (he says I eat too fast and don’t eat enough fruit and veg); kidneys stressed (drink more water!); adrenal glands stressed (so I lack energy); circulatory system stressed. My body is having to work too hard to keep the show on the road: the terrain needs a little landscaping.

Dr Bannock has several key principles, which I offer here with no consultation fee:

• Eat like the French: take your time, digest it well, relax. Don’t eat and drink at the same time.
• Graze rather than gorge.
• Eat like a king at breakfast, a prince at lunchtime and a pauper in the evening.
• Don’t just drink lots of water, drink good water: he suggests Volvic.
• Eat lots of fruit (especially first thing), veg, fibre, soluble oats, and other grains and seeds. Get protein from fish or white meat. Eat organic foods. Eat brown bread, rice and pasta, rather than white.
• With alcohol, worry more about frequency than quantity: the occasional blowout is OK; drinking every night is not. Red wine is better than white, and avoid rubbish.
• Drink herbal tea rather than tea and coffee where possible.
• Exercise frequently to keep the heart, muscles and bones in good order – use it or lose it!

Week 6

Sam Jenkins writes: Stephen is indisposed this week and has asked me to write his fitness column. He is feeling a little irked that people are not taking what he likes to see as his spiritual odyssey seriously: one colleague questioned his mental well-being when he admitted last time to feeling a kind of latent fascism; two friends thought the exercise kick was a substitute for a sex life; and the Guardian’s editor said he was evidently having a mid-life crisis. If he wasn’t depressed before, he certainly is now. He also took his liking for boxercise a little too far and did a few rounds in the ring: he now has a throbbing head, a tender nose and a bruised ego.

He wanted me to tell you what a model client he has been and how I see the role of the personal trainer. The former is broadly true: he’s had his emotional ups and downs but most of the time has been committed and enthusiastic. After 10 weeks, he is in much better shape physically and is now able to do things that were unimaginable at the beginning. He went on a 40-minute run last week – further than he’d run for 20 years – and said he felt he could have run for another 40.

Exercising regularly is like anything: the better you become at it, the more you tend to enjoy it. Exercise will become a habit, and then a habit you don’t want to do without. Sometimes it can become an obsession. I don’t advocate this; my philosophy on exercise and nutrition is the same as that for life in general – moderation in all things. It’s important not to be obsessed by weight loss or the way you look: it’s how you feel that counts, and feeling good means a balanced diet and a sufficient amount of exercise.

You will feel the benefit almost as soon as you start training, but it could be a couple of months before you start to see a major change. Training makes you feel more self-confident and more alive. Some people don’t realise that until they start doing it; they come purely for the weight loss or muscle gain, but I try to get away from that and emphasise the way you feel mentally as well as physically.

It’s important to see clients regularly, say twice or three times a week. If you meet regularly, you are more at ease with each other and it’s more productive. You can get to know people well, maybe even socialise with them, but you have to realise where to draw the line. I’ve never dated any of my clients and I’m keen to keep it that way.

The important thing is to remember the objectives you have set. Seeing a client mustn’t just become an opportunity to chat and gossip, though there may be times when the client has had a really bad day and you have to be supportive and willing to talk. But you shouldn’t get too close; you have to keep a lid on the relationship. It shouldn’t go beyond professional boundaries.

Meeting a client for the first time is like a blind date. It’s not someone you meet through a shared interest – most clients and trainers are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of age, income and status – but that’s one of the interesting things. First appearances can be deceptive: sometimes I’ve disliked a client on first meeting but come to like them later. Problems only arise if the client thinks he knows it all or is not sufficiently committed, or if he looks down on you or treats you as a servant. It has to be a relationship of equals; after all, the gym is a great leveller.

I’d originally wanted to be a footballer and was an apprentice at Shrewsbury Town but that didn’t work out (I was never quite quick enough) and I went to the US on a soccer scholarship. I’d always kept myself fit, and got interested in coaching and personal training over there. I like to think it’s because I want to help people; anyone who is just doing it for himself is eventually going to be found out.

After finishing my degree in physical education I worked as a trainer in the US, before moving back to the UK two years ago. We lag behind the US in the acceptance of training: here it’s viewed as a rich person’s toy and some people are embarrassed to tell their friends they’ve got a trainer, but in the US it is much more accepted – go to Central Park and you will see 50 trainers at work. There are more training companies and training-based gyms, and there is more in-home training and group exercise.

It’s important for a trainer not to have too many clients or to do too many sessions in a row. I try to treat each client as if they are my first of the day. That’s hard to do when you are tired, but you have to remember why they’re coming – they’re coming for help and advice and they expect you to be on form. Sometimes it’s hard: if I do eight people in a day it gets tough. You can burn out and feel yourself thinking, “I don’t want to deal with these people any more”; some days you go home at night and you just can’t bear to be nice to your friends and flatmates. Perhaps I should get a personal trainer too.

Week 7

It’s over. My three months is up. I’m on my own. You will first want the facts. I’ve lost a stone; my body fat is down from 32% to 25%; my resting heart rate is down from 86 to 68 beats per minutes; my blood pressure is the same – high but not worryingly so. That is good progress, but by no means the end of the story. Ideally I ought to lose another 20lb, reduce my body fat to around 20%, and get my resting heart rate down to the low 60s.

Sam, my personal trainer, has kindly sent me on my way with an action plan. This will mean working out twice at weekends, combining half an hour of cardiovascular training with half an hour of weights; once in the week, with 25 minutes of cardiovascular and 20 minutes of upper-body work; and running twice a week for 30-40 minutes each time.

He emphasises that what counts is the intensity at which you train. You have to push yourself; get your heart rate up to, in my case, 150 to 165 beats per minute (this figure will vary according to age); introduce “speed-play” into the running, injecting short bursts to raise the heart rate. Rest assured that I will do it all – scout’s honour.

So, some conlcusions. It has certainly been worthwhile and I’ve gone sufficiently far down the road to want to carry on with the journey. I’ve really enjoyed locating, if not quite uncovering, my stomach muscles. I realise now that booze is, mentally and physically, very bad news: I’m down from 20-plus units a week at the start to maybe five a week now. Drink should be an occasional pleasure, not a daily standby. It’s a treat, not part of the routine for getting through the day.

I haven’t quite worked out diet yet. I have muesli for breakfast, eat much more fruit, spread little or no butter on toast, and eat smaller, more sensible meals through the day, but I still find it hard to kick biscuits, sugar, muffins and, worst of all, cheese. (Although, if cheese is so bad for you, why do you never see fat mice?) The real problem is that I don’t have the imagination to plan a diet, and so end up eating endless rubs of tuna pasta, which isn’t even that healthy.

What I don’t do any more is have any really large meals. I now never feel bloated after eating. One course rather than three; water rather than wine; say no to rolls; avoid desserts. It isn’t puritanism; it’s pragmatism – your body quickly gets used to the new regime, and sitting down to a three-course meal with half a bottle of wine would now be anathema.

I still don’t drink enough water. A litre and a half a day really is a lot; you spend your whole day wondering where the next bottle of Evian is going to come from. (Consumer note: the small bottles are wildly overpriced, so get organised and buy a supply of large bottles from a super market. [Hypocrisy note: I never do this, but ut doesn’t stop me passing on the advice.])

Motive: I’ve tried to convince myself that my urge to train, to get thinner and fitter, hasn’t been driven by narcissism. No doubt that plays a part, but I don’t think narcissism would be enough to keep you going. The real pay-off is control, physical and mental. We eat and drink too much, get fat and unfit, out of boredom, laziness, indiscipline and perhaps a sense of failure. Reversing the process is all about empowerment.

We complicate life to a ridiculous degree: the gym is a place where all the frustrations are stripped away and life is reduced to something simple and linear. Exercise is about your psyche rather than your body, so perhaps it is a form of spiritual narcissism. (Note to publishers: I am very happy to flesh this out in a short, money-spinning self-help book called something like Reclaiming the Self.)

Sam’s point was always “How do you feel?” not “How do you look?” Lose weight at your own speed; don’t be a slave to the scales; don’t diet just for the sake of it. Your well-being and performance in training are the best guides to how things are going. I don’t feel I’ve got much stronger over the three months – my left side is still much weaker than my right, for example. What has improved considerably, thanks to all the cardiovascular work and my more efficient heart, is my running. I now feel in control when I run, and that’s when it becomes fun.

Now I must leave Sam: my friend, guide and taskmaster for the past three months. A colleague suggested that I write a follow-up series called “Piling it all back on” – a fortnightly exploration of decadence that he thinks would be far more popular than my advocacy of the ascetic. But it would also be an insult to Sam. He says that if I fall by the wayside now, he will have failed. As we said at the beginning, this change is for life.

The intention henceforth is to eat well, drink plenty of water, drink less tea (and coffee only occasionally), eat lots of fruit (five portions a day, remember), drink alcohol for occasional pleasure and not as a regular pick-me-up, go to the gym three times a week, run at least twice a week, keep up the boxercise (but avoid fights), and use the new-found fitness to be more mentally focused (physical health ought to have a spiritual purpose).

I’ll stay in touch with Sam, too. Next season he is playing for a football club close to where I live and is going to come for the occasional (light) pre-match lunch. So you see, it’s a happy ending. Or do I mean beginning?

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