The Economics of Obesity

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America is Big - The Politics of Obesity


With all eyes focused on COVID and its associated costs in lives and treasure, another much more deadly and morbid affliction threatens to sink our world.

Obesity and its prevalence have risen over decades to become something close to the norm. The Centre of Disease Control in the United States tells us that 42.4% of Americans suffer from the condition.

In 2016 the National Centre for Biotechnology Information predicted that “over 85% of adults” will be “overweight or obese by 2030”. Right on cue, we are now well over the 70% mark for over 18s.  

Given that being overweight or obese “reduces life expectancy by an average of 3 to 10 years”, according to the UK’s National Health Service, it was no great surprise to learn that US life expectancy in 2021 dropped by a full year – the  biggest drop since World War II.

Some reports attributed the decline to COVID (along with heart disease, cancer and other conditions aggravated by the virus); others noted that the signs of a crisis abounded way before the pandemic took hold.

A report in the American Medical Association Journal tells us that life expectancy in the “US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014”.

In addition, the direct costs associated with being overweight or obese were estimated to being around $500 billion five years ago. The “total cost of chronic diseases due to American obesity and overweight” was “around $1.72 trillion” at the time – or 9.3 percent of America’s total economic output that same year according to a Milken Institute research note.

Whichever way your break it down, the affliction is deadlier and more costly than smoking.

We are not dealing with a “Black Swan” unforeseen event that took the world by surprise, a la COVID. Instead, we are faced with a “Gray Rhino” – a slow moving, obvious danger that is conveniently ignored.

That it should be seems relevant, given the scale, costs and effect on life expectancy globally.

A case could be made that our health officials have fallen asleep at the wheel  on the subject a long time ago.

Habits can be very hard to change, especially in bureaucratic organisations that must deal with complex and competing stakeholder priorities. In such cases, the path of least resistance is often the safest one.

In the International Journal of Obesity, Erik Hemmingsson highlights “that much of the political disinterest” in implementing obesity prevention policies could stems from a lack of public support: the broad view, he says, is that obesity is “self-inflicted, and that individuals with obesity lack character and will-power”.

He notes that another barrier to action “is the nanny-state argument”. He adds that this argument holds some merit as “we do not want governments to be overly authoritarian”.

The idea of officials telling people how and what to eat is rightly distasteful. Government intervention in our daily diets would make average food worse. It would also grant unbearable powers of interference to the more officious in our societies to the detriment of all. 

The sense of impotence on the topic for the experts who focus on the topic is palpable. It is not just that finding a consensus on the topic of food consumption globally would require a great deal of tilting pointlessly at the windmills; it is also that the burden of implementation would fall disproportionately on national and regional governments, many of which still require their people’s support. They would bear the brunt of an inevitable political backlash.

Although there has been some stirrings, these have tended to be desultory. For instance, in 2018, a Global Action Plan on physical activity was agreed by the World Health Organisation. It included a target of a 15% relative reduction by 2030 in “the global prevalence of physical inactivity in adults and adolescents”. In 2020, COVID hit. Everyone stayed at home. Obesity barely noticed.

In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service, usually so keen to opine on myriads of health-related issues, furthers a sense of lethargy.

In line with the view that the affliction is self-inflicted, the tax-payer funded Behemoth explains the root cause of the problem succinctly: “Obesity is generally caused by eating too much and moving too little”. It rejects the genetic “it runs in my family” or “it’s in my genes” arguments. It adds, “the best way to treat obesity is to eat a healthy reduced-calorie diet and exercise regularly.”

In other word, the sufferer lacks a credible path to victimhood. It is his fault.

However, the difficulty of finding a consensus on how to deal with this “Gray Rhino” notwithstanding, there is perhaps an even simpler and yet more important barrier than bureaucratic doziness to solving the problem.

Fundamentally, at the root could be an irreconcilable conflict of interest between government and citizens.

For governments and their leadership, success is defined in the abstraction of economic growth. Few topics come close to headline GDP numbers in terms of importance.

Everything from the cost of borrowing to departmental spending depends on that number. It is the cornerstone of our modern bureaucratic, expert-led age.

“It’s the economy, stupid”, the slogan that came to define Bill Clinton 1992 election victory, neatly crystallises the point.

Central to the divergence between government and people could, then, stem from the centrality of GDP, how it is calculated and what perverse incentives it imposes on officialdom at the expense of individuals, their families and their future.

We notice that the rate of growth in GDP per capita in the United States from the early 1960s onwards tracks elegantly the rate of increase in the prevalence of obesity.

At that time, 3% of the population was considered obese; it is now close to half – a percentage expansion of circa 1500%. GDP per capital rose 1900% over the same period.

In 60 years the total population of America nearly doubled to over 330 million. The overweight and obese population of the United States is greater today than the entire population of 1960s America.

Of the numbers making up Gross Domestic Product, 70% comes from what is called Personal Consumption Expenditure. In other words, out of a GDP of $ 22 Trillion, around $ 15 Trillion comes from consumption.

Around a third of that is spent on, among other things, food, restaurants, alcohol, tobacco, and healthcare. The latter, at circa 17%, is the greatest item of personal expenditure, ahead of Housing.

In short, $ 5 trillion is consumption directly linked to obesity and overweight.

We could reasonably include other items such as clothing, energy consumption and transportation as related, albeit indirectly, to our calculation.

As the National Health Service tells us, if eating less and moving more is the solution and there are no genetic reasons for the condition, dealing with the issue ought to be straight forward.

And given that there is no upside to being obese, only downsides, dealing with this “plague” should bring governments and citizens together in a rare instance of obvious shared interest.

However, using a relatively wide-spread fasting diet as a guide, which stipulates two to three days of virtually “no eating” per week, would see Personal Consumption Expenditure plummet by between 30 to 40% across three quarters of the population.

Such a national diet would equate to a fall in consumption of anything between $ 1 to $ 1.4 trillion; or an aggregate GDP fall of between 5% and 6%, on a sustained basis. By comparison, the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 saw Real GDP fall by 4.3% from peak to trough.

In the short run, such a drop, while benefiting each and every American health-wise, would throw the US administration into confusion. The longer run? It is too far removed for stakeholders to care.

Confronted between an economy that is healthy in theory and a population that is dangerously sick in practice, there is no doubt that our leaders will chose the former above the latter and stay asleep at the wheel waiting for the inevitable Gray Rhino to gallop into, to mix metaphors, our failing ship of state.

Weight Loss and Well Being with Klaudius & Alex

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In this video, Klaudius Sobczyk and I talk about weight loss, well being and much more.

Klaudius and I met sometime in 2015 as a result of a cold call. I went to see him in Frankfurt to sell him a financial product. We sat in his office and talked about geopolitics and finance.

We stayed in touch and developed a solid friendship. Klaudius gradually became interested in well-being and yoga. I only really started getting into the topic during the first lockdown.

This was the rather long March to November 2020 period, which was rather nerve-racking. The job situation was precarious and certainty hadn’t yet (and hasn’t yet) returned. However, I used the time to get back into shape by losing one third of my bodyweight, around 8 stone (close of 50 kilos)

We are hoping to have weekly sessions on the topic. Feel free to ask questions on this and much more.

The Key to Everything

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The bell tolled for western civilisation on the 1st of July 2007

Some people will point to financiers.

After all, they sold competence and instead delivered the Great Financial Disaster of 2008. The last was followed by a never ending tidal wave of Governmental incontinence, destroying trust and value in the process.

Others will finger politicians across the decades for mistaking personal for national interest; yet more will blame the rise of tech giants, social media platforms and the instant gratification it suggests as the source of all our woes.

All these might well be true – in part. However, they only skim the surface of our accelerating fall.

The final nail in the coffin of our ancient and civilised order was the introduction of the smoking ban.

In one fell swoop, man was deprived of the setting for intellectual speculation.

No longer could friends gather by the fire place, sitting on a set of Chesterfield sofas to smoke cigars accompanied by some Port wine and Brandy to speculate about, mostly, random things.

Places of discussions, fuelled by spirits, floating on heavy cigar smoke simply vanished.

No alternatives were ever provided. Bureaucrats and lawmakers seldom think about these things.

Pubs ruled themselves out almost overnight. Whilst they stopped smelling of smoke, in the process, they started stinking of everything else – of latrines, disinfectant and most of the time much worse.

It is impossible to exaggerate how far down the road our civilizational decline has travelled since that fateful decision was made.

Yesterday’s intellectual speculation is today’s conspiracy theory.

Scepticism used to be the welcome sign of an enquiring intelligence; it is now a crime.

In the field of vaccination and relating to COVID for instance, we even see dictionaries jump on the “branding” bandwagon.

Merriam Webster, America’s oldest dictionary publisher, defines as “Anti-vaxxer”, a person who opposes vaccine mandates among others. One can no longer be pro-vaccine but against forcing people to be vaccinated against their conscience.

The same is true of the “Climate”.

It no longer does to be attentive to the ones environment but look askance at the official devotion to the Mother Earth cult currently guiding the bulk of our decision makers, in particular in the field of Energy.

To be open about people’s private lives no longer suffices, the individual must comply and submit openly, regardless of whether he believes what he says. Cowed, he loses his dignity and with it his sense of fun.

Long the avant-guard of “progress”, the comedian drove roughshod over every taboo. Now, he bows to pressure and apologises for the fun he brought to us. How depressing was it do see David Walliams apologising for Little Britain, the show that made him truly famous?

To dare to tread in the fertile field of enquiry now risks online cancellation, reputational destruction and physical job losses.

Looking back to “pre-smoking ban” times, the idea of “cancellation” was unknown.

A youngster nowadays would need the fancy of a Jules Verne to imagine a place by the fire where topics of any kind about anything could be broached and feed an incredible lust for debate, discussion and friendship which usually started after dinner and finished at around 4am the next morning.

In that time, cigar in one hand, glass of brandy in the other, sitting like the world was a mystery waiting to be undressed, layer by layer, problems were discussed, a handful resolved and the way home, as if by magic, always found – more or less.

And while the solutions of the night before seemed crystal clear at the time, many of them lost their contours in the cold light of day.

But what remained was a sense that whatever the problem, solutions inevitably carried with them the seeds of further complications.

This inevitably led to a certain type of humility. Interestingly, it fed a desire to delve more deeply into topics, which each in themselves made one wonder at the vastness of the universe and our place in it, engendering a love for knowledge and for life, which made everything worthwhile.

Interestingly, a good evening was only guaranteed if the group was intellectually and professionally diverse. The acceptance of alternative views was a sine qua non of a memorable evening. Few of us would have sat there, whiling away the small hours of the morning to listen to charmless political talking points.

A Greta Thunberg would have been greeted politely of course, how else, but her historical knowledge would have been prodded. It would have revealed, in a short space of time that her stance had more to do with feelings than knowledge.

And that too would have been acceptable, because her feelings would have been taken at face value. However, her absolute certainty, which is currently the preferred weapon of her allies, would have be mollified and humanised.

Humour, in this case, would have acted like a massage oil on stiff shoulders. The cigar would have slowed the cadence of her sentences and the whiskey shaved some of the stridency in her voice. She might even have found space to flirt, laugh and forget the world for a while and focus on herself and her company a little.

But alas, cigar smoking was banned. A void was created and civility fell into it.

Fine Wines, Meats and Cornucopia

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Each generation has it own challenges. That is reflected in the phrases we use.

For instance, going “over the top” meant different things to our forefathers than it does to us.

For many today, it means an extra helping of chips followed by another three extra scoops of ice-cream, all washed down with some claret.

Having “gone over the top” a great deal in my life in the field of consumption, I now find great pleasure in being able to calibrate my weight.

As I related in other articles, it has taken close to two decades for me to find the key to the door of weight stability. It is a real pleasure to be able to toy with what opening such doors reveal.

As a result, “Saturday” has now become a day of cornucopian excess. And delightful it is too. In general, I don’t eat from 4pm on Fridays until around 1.30pm to 3pm the next day.

The mornings are usually quite busy. I take the children rowing at around 8am. The drive to the club is about 30 minutes. When we get there, I help the youngish team put the boat to water. I stay to watch them row away.

So far this year, the weather has held up quite nicely. Indeed, autumn is revealing itself in its full glory. As the kiddies push off, I head to the boat house. I then sit down to write. Usually, my topics are politics, economics and world affairs. I try to get the bulk of the writing done before the children land again.

When they are done, I drive them back home. Lost in a daydream as I do, I see the feast, the wine, bacchanalia to come. I live in exuberant expectation.

So much so that even when the consumables lie in front of me, powerless and at my mercy, I sometimes playfully toy with my hunger and tease it like a tourist might a hibernating bear.

I postpone the delight until, having vanquished my desire, I open the gates and let it rule for a couple of hours.

Here is an example, last Saturday, I brought a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Domaine “Les Escondudes” 2017, along with a bottle of Moet & Chandon and two bottles of Austrian Sauvignon Blanc from Peter Skoff, an Austrian brand – surprisingly good. My cousin produced some lovely meats, in copious quantities.

I went “over the top” once again. I threw myself over it with gusto.

A fasting diet, you see, allows you to switch the guilt flick off (just for a few hours). There is nothing quite as invigorating and rehumanising as a “guilt-free lunch” spent with family and friends. Inevitably, I slide into “deep” discussions about “important things” with my cousin.

Interestingly, as the day turns into the evening, and the drinks from white to deep red, my understanding of geopolitics chrysalises: I feel sharper and impressive. It is usually at that moment that the ladies slip away discreetly. Gradually the room empties until, in very little time, I am left talking loudly at Alexa – a bigger bore than me, but a much better listener, I have been told. 

The empty bottle tells me it is time for the evening to end. Steaks, sausages, corn, chips, and plenty of drink in company of technology. What a great day it has been and what an end.

The greatest feeling, however, is to know what to do the day after. Sunday has become a day of fasting too – a solitary green salad maybe, but nothing more. Monday is eating day again, which consists of a large breakfast and a light lunch. Tuesday October 27th was fasting day. Today is, as night follows day, weighing day. The perennial fear of the weighing machine has totally dissipated. I now welcome the challenge.

This morning, I was 16 stone; 224 pounds; 102.1 kilos. I have oscillated at that weight now for nearly a year. Some say that when the substance of a magic trick is discovered, it becomes mundane. To me, discovering the trick of “losing and controlling” one’s weight has only increased my delight in experiencing the magic of life. 

How Gen Z became Gen Me

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History could teach us much – if only we could spare the time. And yet, while life expectancy has more than doubled over the last 250 years, we find ourselves somehow shorn of time, oppressed by endless distractions.

An app pings; the inbox buzzes; a screen flickers; an advert interrupts; a strap line distracts and a stranger gives your comment on social media a thumbs down, starting an emotionally draining and, in the end, totally, fruitless social media brokered argument. And in what used to be communal settings such as living rooms, around dinner tables and among friends, an increasingly troubling observation: physical presence and emotional absence. The common factor?

The mobile device, a new deity, reigns supreme.

Robert Wigley, the serial entrepreneur and current Chairman of UK Finance, Britain’s banking and financial services trade association, considers humanity’s latest and potentially gravest challenge in his book Born Digital: The Story of a Distracted Generation.

With half of children’s waking hours spent in front of media devices, much of that time on social media platforms, it is worth trying to find out what they are doing and understanding why as the Oxford academic James Williams writes, “The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.”

While balancing the pros and cons of communication technologies with some dexterity, Wigley points to Big Tech and reminds us there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Indeed, the market capitalisations of Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Apple are now the same size as the combined wealth of the United Kingdom and Germany – a power in the hands of very few, god-like men as the psychologist Richard Freed calls Gates, Zuckerberg and other industry leaders.

The digital Tower of Babel they are building is erected on the finite attention spans of all who use their seductively built services.

“Our teenagers are conditioned in terms of their values by their use of technology”

In short, we are feeding these neo-Pagan gods. They serve us pleasure and distraction and we, in turn, give our time – that is to say our lives. As they grow, our individual, intellectual and political horizons shrivel at the pace of one distraction at a time down to the moment. “People are living their lives through social media to the point where we are not using social media, social media is using us” says Freddie Pearson, a psychologist.

Wigley writes that our teenagers are conditioned in terms of their values by their use of technology. He adds that all dimensions of life – from birth to old age and from work to family and friendships are increasingly predicated on ease of access, minimal commitment and ultra-convenience.

The observable result is increasing callousness and indifference. Having grown up in a society that saw commitment as a concept deconstructed with increasing alacrity since the 1960s as it was seen as a barrier to self-fulfilment, teenagers are merely accelerating what their parents started.

Teenagers, in other words, have learnt lack of commitment, self-centredness and callousness from their parents. Indeed, a 2018 Pew Survey showed that 65 per cent of children in the United States didn’t live with two married parents (up from 15 per cent in 1968).

These facts are not without consequences. As the psychiatrists Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry maintain, “children brought up with parental input and with more bonding time developed higher average IQ when compared with children who did not have the same relationships.” However, “the conditions of modern life conspire against allowing children time and space to repeatedly practice the social skills necessary to the true development of empathy.”

Its absence, according to Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, is leading to a generation that is “more generation me than generation we”, pointing to the rise of narcissism as well as “high expectations, self-esteem, thinking one is above average, and focusing on personal fears.” This is what James Williams calls “cyberchondria” based on an “unfounded escalation of concern”.

“China has become the first country to declare internet addiction a clinical disorder”

However, whilst self-indulgence and short sightedness always dwelt among us, technology allowed their emotions to take centre stage, with Big Tech and AI, like crack-dealers, replacing long term happiness with short term pleasure by feeding their victims’ habit. So serious is the issue in fact, that China became the first country to declare internet addiction a clinical disorder, according to Adam Alter, an academic at the Stern Business School.

The upshot is a generation that is increasingly isolated. Indeed, Cigna, the health service company, found that loneliness had reach “epidemic levels”.

Worryingly, Wigley points to a correlation between heavy device use and an increasing likelihood of suicides and depression among teenagers. Those “who spend more than five hours a day on electronic devices are 71 per cent more likely to have suicide risk factors than those with one hour’s use”.

In addition, constant distraction means an increasing focus on the infinite second of the now and a concomitant loss of perspective, touching all aspect of our lives from the way we interact with one another to the way we resolve our differences.

Caught in this enervating state of a never-ending present, everything is true and false simultaneously. Claims can only be tested for veracity in time, with a context anchored on an agreed intellectual framework, the shorthand for which was always understood to be tradition.

The real world, of course, is not convenient. It is as it is. Humanity and exchanges between individuals and communities create kinetic energies that fill our lives with meaning.

The latter requires a dexterous brain to recalibrate on a real-time basis its responses to life’s infinite unpredictability, in particular human interactions.

Having learnt from their parents, who often are themselves cyber-junkies, children find it increasingly difficult to speak to one another, relying instead on social media platforms, and the curated word, to exchange views.

“Humanity runs the risk of being untethered from its context”

The written word however cancels the unsaid. It leaves out an infinity of subtle but extraordinarily important, instinctively conveyed meanings. These come through the shape of a smile, a posture, a glance, or a tone that enables us to interpret accurately what is actually being meant. For this, however, there is no time, patience or empathy. Wigley adds that current teenagers “find it difficult to express even slightly controversial or non-politically correct religious or political views on mainstream social media in their own names.”

Nicholas Carr, former executive director of the Harvard Business Review, believes the consequences for our intellectual life could be enormous: “We are learning to be skilled at a superficial level” and “have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us”.

The fundamental point is simply that “you are good at what you do.” And teenagers, more than any previous generations, surf; they don’t dive.

So without depth, there can be no perspective. And without that, humanity runs the risk of being untethered from its context. This is translating in political schizophrenia, as the young, stripped of the time to delve deeply into any topic, chose the easier, uncommitted position of holding a plethora of contradicting opinions in their minds.

Not being used to old-school debates and thinking intellectual disagreements to be an intolerable infringement on the virtual universe which they inhabit, free speech is seen as an abomination. Not having been prepared to deal with disagreement, they want to cancel it.

Commitment, as a result, is increasingly seen as an imposition – a distraction from, well, distraction as it were.

Politicians have picked up on this trend and herein lies the danger. Before the rise of the attention economy, politicians needed to be consistent in their thinking to be taken seriously; now they can, via social media, hold totally inconsistent positions and legislate thus.

Thereby ensuring that the digitally driven, permanently distracted state of mind is forever transposed onto the Statute books, insuring perpetual revolution. Seeking to please all, those who ought to stand up to the tyranny of the moment are in fact enabling the deconstruction of our intellectual defences. And so belief in democracy is rapidly declining.

A society built on this kind of intellectual sand runs the risk of being washed away when a challenge comes along that requires more than just a thumbs-up on Facebook.

Live Life to the Full

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After a week away from home, I walk in. Not a sound. I take a few tentative steps into the flat. I open the door to the living room. There in total silence, my four children, each with their own devices, slouch on the sofa.

They barely notice me. For a second, a pair of eyes zeroes in on me, only to return to what it was doing just a moment ago: living in a parallel, digital world.

Very little in my blessed time as a father has been so heart-breaking. Indeed, only a few years ago, as I returned home from work, the children used to run down the corridor, arms outstretched, shouting in delight “mummy, daddy is home” as they raced to be the first to jump in my arms.

The noise that greeted me, then, was the sign of life. Something grew, stirred, laughed, talked and sometimes cried and fought in our house.

Now, the silence of the tomb greeted me.

The reaction was swift. I took all devices away and hid them – on occasions I forgot where.

First there was the sound of wailing, akin to the sound a wounded soldier might make as the surgeon amputates a lifeless limb; second came the spite of the “wish I was never born” kind; third was the accusation of hypocrisy.

The latter was not entirely false. Only a minute or so after dispatching all of their devices, they caught me on mine. Worse, I was engaged in an argument with a total stranger on Twitter. When they pointed it out, I meekly told them something about this being part of my work (it wasn’t).

Like the Climate Change activist who drives a large SUV, my rules applied to them, not to me.

My sense of guilt was nearly as heavy to bear as the realisation that the Digital World was on the cusp of stealing the life of my children before my very eyes.

By coincidence I came across “Born Digital: The Story of a Distracted Generation”. The book, now a best seller, was written by Robert “Bob” Wigley, the Chairman of UK Finance, a trade association for the UK banking and financial services sector. He was on the board of the Bank of England during the 2008 Financial Crisis among other things. “Society is distracted”, he writes.

“Our attention has been hijacked by the tsunami of smart devices and tech companies”, he says, adding “as a father of three teenage sons, I observed my children’s relationships with their smart-phones, gaming consoles, and laptops and began to wonder what the implications were for their brains, personalities, and lives”.

The book, itself, meanders elegantly into the new paradigm’s harmful effects and benefits. It also dives into the motivations of industry participants and gives us a glimpse of a new and fast developing workplace reality for the generation that was born with smart phones in its hands.

A crucial observation came from a GlobalWebIndex survey. Generation Z, born in the late 1990s and early 2000s spends over seven hours a day online, spilt roughly between smart-phones and laptops – more time than they spend with family, friends or even sleeping.

Further, the book covers the rise in self-harm, loneliness, cyber-bullying as well as some of the remedies.

There are efforts afoot to pass legislation that would require social media users to prove who they are. There are discussions on where the liability for cyber harm falls.

For instance, could the Social Media manager rather than the company itself be held personally liable for the harm done to children on their platforms?

However, as with many things, waiting for the government and various bureaucratic organisations to act in the right way with the alacrity required, whilst your child turns into a young adult, seems a suboptimal solution to say the least.

The most important aspect of the book is that it clarifies and aggregates the issues that emanate from this relatively new Digital paradigm. At the core, though, it is a wake-up call.

As such, it is difficult to overstate how important Robert Wigley’s book has been for both my family and me. It has simply saved our lives.

As state above, Generation Z spends over seven hours on devices. When I read that it seems self-evident. However, what about me?

I checked my own phone. Staggeringly, my average was over six hours per day. If I added that with the time spent on my laptop and on devices other than my phones, it would have probably been a good 14 hours in total.

My usage, and with it my state of distractedness, was probably greater than that of my children, by a country mile.

The technology, as Bob says, has some very positive aspects to it and, with the best will in the world, cannot be either ignored or un-invented.

However, the book gave me the tools to understand that I needed to act within the universe I could control and establishing patterns that would be palatable to my wife and four children.

As a result, we set rules.

There would be “exclusion zones” in which no devices were permitted: no smart-phone, laptop, or tablet would be allowed in any bedrooms, parental included, at any time.

No devices could be used or played with at the breakfast, lunch or dinner table.

For all evening meals, we would sit-down and wait for all the members of the family to be seated before starting and get up when all were done.

In addition, access to games would be restricted to one hour in the evenings subject to homework, music and sports being done.

For me, specifically, there would be no mobile phone usage at the weekend at all. I promised myself to make no exceptions.

We have implemented these rules and largely stuck by them over the last year.

My weekly average fell from over 6 hours to around 30 minutes a day.

The upshot is a staggering injection of extra life. I have rediscovered the joy of reading, writing, speaking in full sentences to my close ones.

Interestingly, the less I used the devices, the less I cared about them. The deep emotional claims Big Tech made hitherto on my life vanished. Spending time on Social Media became an alien concept.

In short, like so much in life, it is accepting personal responsibility, eschewing its delegation to third parties such as parliaments, governments or lobby groups that will free you and your family from their grip.

The solution to Big Tech’s growing influence is consciously, as Gwyneth Paltrow would say, decoupling yourself from its platforms.

In so doing, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and more would turn into utilities as exciting as gas pipeline businesses.

By setting boundaries on your usage of such platforms, you are increasing the value of your time. There is so much to gain from living life in the real world and very little from feeding Big Tech’s insatiable appetite for your time on this planet.

Implementing small changes and sticking to them on this front will save yourself and your loved ones a great deal of life. Small changes, huge upside: That’s got to be the deal of the century.

Learning From Defeat

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Rowing usually brings the nation good news. Over the last 40 years, even in dark times, such as the 1996 Atlanta Games, when Great Britain ranked 36th behind North Korea, Algeria and Ethiopia, the sport could be counted on to give us moments of intense pride.

We have to go back to the 1980 Olympics to find a failure to win Gold in rowing. The Games that year were held in Moscow. Then much of the West boycotted the games as a protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In short, rowing has long been one of our most successful sports.

At the Tokyo Games, the team’s aim was to win four and rank first on the global ranking tables, a position we have held since 2008. The team failed in these twin objectives: we won no gold and now rank 14th.

Failure on such a scale brings with it recriminations.

Some will blame the athletes, others the coaches.

Much of the responsibility for this ostensible debacle will be laid at the door of “the people in charge”, who oversaw the changing of the management guard at what has been considered an inopportune time.

Jurgen Groebler

Since Jürgen Gröbler’s, Great Britain’s erstwhile legendary rowing coach, arrival on our shores after the collapse of the Eastern Block in 1990, 18 gold medals were won.

Not all can be attributed to Gröbler (in photo above).

Indeed, two of Great Britain’s most memorable wins were in fact akin to acts of rebellion against the Teuton’s centralising tendencies:

The first was the “Chariot-of-fire”-style victory in the coxed-pair of Greg and Johnny Searle, coxed by Garry Herbert, whose tears on the podium immortalised the moment; the second was our first win in the Eight, rowing’s “blue ribbon” event, since 1912, at the 2000 Sydney Games.

In both cases, the crews decided to distance themselves physically from Jürgen Gröbler to implement their own vision.

Both crews took a gamble and won. All rejoiced. Their decision was vindicated. On the other hand, had they come in second, they would have been blamed for having had the temerity of thinking differently.

Be that as it may, in the main, Jürgen Gröbler oversaw a complete overhaul of the rowing system during his time in charge.

He transformed a system based on local, not to say parochial, loyalties into a properly functioning national system with incredible depth, backed by impressive financial (for the sport of rowing) resources.

In short, he turned quixotic perennial silver medallists into mechanised gold medal winners. For a generation of rowers, whatever his shortcomings, he was their Oracle.

So why change?

Broadly speaking, it has to do with age and timing. Jürgen Gröbler is 74. He quite rightly decided against committing until 2024.

By then, he would be President Biden’s age and might make just as much sense.

In fact, much of the mystique surrounding Jürgen Gröbler is misplaced in that no-one could ever really be sure they understood what he said. Indeed, what he was given as talent in the coaching field was fairly taken away in the linguistic one.

The only thing you knew as an athlete was that “more power” was always better. And to get “more power”, you had to lift “more weights” and “row more miles”.

Time, however, waits for no one. As legendary athlete Sir Steve Redgrave said: “Not everyone can carry on for ever”.

Just as Manchester United’s performance dropped when Sir Alex Ferguson retired, so the Great British Olympic team’s form dipped when the cornerstone of their success followed suit.

Interestingly, though, we can perhaps read too much into the change. Facts are what they are but interpreting them properly is the wise man’s duty.

First, after the Rio Games, the overwhelming majority of rowers retired. The team had to be rebuilt from the top down and a new crop of talent found. In the end, eight rowing teams ended in the top four; two made the podium. In other words, our young team, in the new set up, is “there or thereabouts” in the words of Mark Davies, Chairman of British Rowing.

Further, the margins of victory in rowing have been exceedingly tight. Across all the seven men’s events, the aggregate difference between Gold and Silver over the last twenty years has been half of one Usain Bolt 100 metre sprint. 

Second, the world of sports was divided between countries which had tough COVID restrictions and others that had none. This led to some unusual results. The New Zealand Eight was not good enough to quality directly for the Olympic Games in 2019; after 18 months of restriction free training, the Kiwis romped home with the gold.

Other rowing super-powers such as Germany, the United States and Canada did poorly. Greece, on the other hand, won her first Olympic Gold since Antiquity. Australia and New Zealand, two countries in which restrictions were either light or non-existent, ended up topping the table.

Restrictions, in team sports, seem to have had an impact. Indeed, when routines are changed, these can have a much greater impact on results than a timely managerial transition. COVID forced these on many nations but not all.

For the rowers themselves though, these games will haunt them for the rest of their lives. There is no worse feeling as an athlete than to miss out so publicly.

Rowers are known in the main for being straightforward, unpretentious and open. They train long hours without fuss. This they do in the hope of glory. Their quest is the podium’s highest step once every four years.

Their greatest pride is to hear our National Anthem echo across the lakes and rivers over which they compete, before fading back into anonymity.

Missing out will mean endless hours of wrestling with a deeply felt sense of humiliation. The feeling of shame for having let down the country will never quite wash away.

When you value your life based on the results of one race, failing feels like the end. As Greg Searle MBE, Britain’s 1992 gold medal winner said, “They will need to know that their character is not defined by the result of one race. Life is more than that.”

However, the cruelty of sports is that the fleeting disappointment of millions is concentrated into the lifeblood of the handful of athletes for whom the final race meant everything. Let us hope, they learn what needs to be learnt for these defeats and come back to win in 2024 for our and their sake.

The Pursuit of Happiness

by
The Pursuit of Happiness

It is often said that the genius of America’s founding fathers was to have crystallised the essence of life on earth by defining three unalienable rights:

“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Had they declared that every man, woman and child had the right “to happiness” rather than its pursuit, their declaration would have been dismissed as a Utopian document of little intrinsic value.

The story below is about its pursuit.

One year ago, the first Corona lockdown hit our shores. Millions, like me, found themselves on furlough.

So large were the numbers across the land that the Human Resource departments of most companies could no longer muster that usual manufactured ounce of empathy.

It was just bad news all around. Worse, few knew where things would lead.

As I wrote in time for Christmas last year, there were few good options.

To make matters worse, I caught a glimpse of a fat, middle aged man, looking tired and hungry in the reflection of his local bakery’s shop front.

That old man was me. My heart sank. There I was; the old glory gone, if it was ever there.

The Olympic Games, the World Championships, the Boat Races were an eternity away. The illusion that I still had a little bit of that swagger left was cruelly shattered.

However, in the time it took me to walk from the bakery back home, I made a determination. I would lose the surplus weight.

That was a full year ago. The daily routine was set in my mind: early rise; short jogs to start with; two days fasting a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays).

The rules were set in stone. There was no deviation. Suddenly, the former habits of the Olympian kicked in. Everything seemed to fall into place. From April to June, I was increasingly convinced that I would be beach ready for the summer.

Then on the 17th of June 2020, I stood on the scales – for the first time in decades. My heart broke. After two months of intense dieting, I still was over 21 stone (over 134 kilos). My race weight had been 15.10 stone (100 kilos). How big had I become?

The answer to that question was best left unanswered.

The beach would definitely have to wait.

But progressively, the weight came off. In fact, the rate of loss was truly exhilarating. As I wrote in my previous article, from June 17th to December 11th 2020, I lost ¾ stone, or close to 5 kilos, per month on average.

It felt great. Happiness seemed only a few months away. Months turned to weeks and then days. On Christmas day, I patted myself on the back – the best present ever.

Indeed, I was back to 16.3 stone (103.5 kilos). With a 6’8’’ frame, I was now officially slim. I still had a few more pounds to go to reach 15.10 stone (100 kilos). But who was counting?

It turned out that I was.

However, it was going to be easy. I just had to keep the machine humming. The momentum was behind me. I was now used to the deprivations, such as they were.

I even started to imagine dipping below 15.10 stone (100 kilos). I would aim to go to 15.5 stone to buy myself a cushion of security for the inevitable and much missed evenings-out-with-friends.

It took a month to lose a handful of pounds and reach that milestone. Happiness was deferred a little but within touching distance it seemed.

No doubt, it would manifest itself on the screen of the scales. But then, other than a couple of dips below the 100 kilo barrier, I stabilised.

Weighing days became increasingly frustrating as the scales refused to budge. Each fasting day became a burden. Joy was seeping out of the process. My moods darkened.

What to do?

The answer, the only one I could conceive off, having in my youth been trained by Jurgen Groebler, the legendary East German coach who brought more gold to these shores than Sir Francis Drake, was to increase the intensity.

As a result, to the Tuesdays and Thursdays, Sundays were added. From a two day fast a week, my routine became a three day fast a week.

The jogs had already increased from an initial 10 to 15 minutes to a current 90 minutes. And yet, still the scales refused to move, stubbornly stuck between 15.9 and 16 stone (99.7 to 101.5 kilos).

My eating days became shorter too. After a usually copious, by my new standards, breakfast, my lunches shrank to salads and my evening meals to watching my children eat the sausages I would have loved to have.

Given how little actual happiness I felt knowing that I reached my initial goals, I wondered whether what I was experiencing was not something related to the beginnings of what some might call an eating disorder.

After all, there I was, having lost around one third of my body weight, feeling light on my toes and sharp in my movements, but simultaneously petrified of losing control.

Standing still, metaphorically speaking, is surprisingly more mentally draining that walking down the weight hill.

The trick it would seem, perhaps, is to accept the natural floor below which nature won’t allow you to go. In other words, there is no need to increase the intensity or knuckling down in order to reach what is in fact a completely arbitrary target.

I will probably have to face the facts that my natural weight is a little higher, but not too much, than I had imagined.

It will require a mental reset and an ability to trust that the discipline that allowed me to shed the weight will remain at my disposal in the well-being armoury. I have decided that I am indeed happy with the achievement and can’t believe I can now see my toes (and more).

Which is just as well given that the pubs are re-opening soon. Here is to another pursuit that will fill me with a great deal of happiness.