How Having a Baby Ruined My Figure (By a Man)

In the About me page, I wrote briefly about how I was driven to action because of the terrible shape I had let myself get into in my 30s. Here is the longer version of that story. I imagine it will be familiar to many men...

This picture of me and my son was taken when I was around 33. I was the proud father – but not so proud of what I looked like. But let's backtrack for a moment and talk about just how I ended up that looking like that.

People who see me nowadays are always surprised to learn that I wasn't at all athletic when I was a child. I had no interest in sports, and even if I did, I probably wouldn't have been any good at them. You see, I was a bit of a geek as a child – weak and skinny, more at home in the library than on the sports field. This meant that I tended to attract the attention of bullies and I spent a good part of my childhood being picked on and beaten up.

I got into physical training when I was a teenager as a way of stopping the bullying. Within a few years I had filled out and got quite a solid body. By the time I was 18, my life had turned around completely. Yes I was still a geek, but suddenly I was a geek with muscles and so no-one picked on me anymore. In fact, I started to get a lot of favourable attention from the opposite sex. I guess that when you're skinny, liking books and classical music makes you a nerd, but when you've got muscles it suddenly makes you "sensitive" and "cultured." Amazing!

When I was in my 20s I left home to take up a lecturing post at the University of Manchester in England. Shortly afterwards I met my future wife. We got married, bought a house, started a family, and lived happily ever after.

Not quite!

Fast-forward a few years and I was very, very unhappy. In fact, I was battling with depression. I'd let myself go down the drain and now I was paying the price.

It's a story familiar to most married men, I suppose. Complacency and contentedness set in shortly after marriage, and so I thought it was okay to neglect my body and "let myself go." In the Rocky movies, they called that phenomenon losing the "Eye of the Tiger" – and that certainly was a big part of my problem. Another was that I got sucked into the whole "rat race" of going to work, paying bills, eating, watching TV, sleeping, going to work, paying bills, eating, watching TV, sleeping...

The worst thing I did, however, was foolishly listen to other people's nonsense. You probably already know this, but the general population doesn't really have a lot of respect for being in shape. To them, it's something that you might do when you're a teenager, but it's not something that an adult, especially one with "Responsibilities", should continue. In fact, in some perverse way, many of these people actually take a twisted kind of pride in being out of shape. They wear their fat stomachs as some kind of badge, as if to show the world how happy and accomplished they are. A word they often like to use is "contented".  To people like that, an adult who continues to have a great body must not have matured and must have something wrong with them.

Growing up, I'd always seemed immune to peer pressure, but now the nonsense from people around me started to rub off on me. I began to feel guilty about the time and attention I spent on training and so I gradually stopped. It's very easy now to look back and see how insane that is, but at the time you just don't realise how it can affect you, especially when it's coming in the form of pressure from well-meaning people.

As the years went by, I noticed I was becoming more and more dissatisfied with things and with life in general. At the time, I couldn't understand where this was coming from, but with hindsight it's pretty clear that the main cause was what I was doing to my body. I was letting a huge part of my identity disintegrate and allowing it to be replaced with what other people – friends, relatives, colleagues, society in general – thought I should become.

Things seemed bad then, but that was a walk in the park compared to what was in store for me when parenthood arrived. I mentioned how society at large takes a kind of pride in being out of shape. In my opinion this gets even worse when people become parents. I've seen so many of my contemporaries happily let themselves go down the drain once they have children. It's their way of making a statement: "Hey look at me, I'm such a real man, such a great husband and father that I don't have time to exercise!" I'm embarrassed to say that I bought into this load of crap and I let myself go even further. To this day, I still can't believe I would allow myself to be influenced like this, but I did, and it's pretty scary.

What's also scary is how fast my body deteriorated. In just a few years my muscles shrank from not being worked and my whole body got swallowed by a layer of fat. (One thing I want to make clear is that my muscles did not turn to fat. This is a common myth about athletic training, but it's really nonsense that is spouted by people who don't know what they're talking about. Fat and muscle are two totally different types of tissue; muscle can't turn into fat any more than fat can turn into bone or lead can turn into gold. What happened was simply that I put on fat and lost all my muscles through a combination of poor diet and lack of exercise.)

I was desperately unhappy about what awful shape I'd let myself get into, but I felt that I was being selfish for thinking this way. And so I forced myself to act like my contemporaries who all seemed to walk around with beatific smiles fixed to their faces and telling everyone how great it was being a parent and how their children were "their hope for the future" and so on.

Even though I now looked like everyone else on the outside, inside I felt that there was something wrong with me. I couldn't understand the way so many of my friends seemed completely happy and contented (that damn word again!) to have their identities subsumed so that they were merely an extension of their children. My brain's just not wired that way and it never will be.

Trying to force myself into that life took its toll on me. You can't live for an extended time while not being true to yourself; if you try, eventually something's going to give, and it wasn't long before I found myself battling with depression. I lost interest in pretty much everything and so I stopped doing any activity whatsoever. As I got fatter and fatter, the extra load around my waist started to give me awful lower back pains. It was a vicious cycle: the lower I felt, the less care I took of myself, and that made me look and feel even worse.

A year passed quickly. Then two. I was now 20 kilograms overweight, and I'd gone from a having size-32 waist to a size-40. My face, once chiselled and angular, had become an ugly mass of puffy skin. And my hair looked awful too: strawy, patchy and lifeless.

I started to become resigned to this fate, almost believing that this was the way it should be. After all, I was now almost 35, and everyone knows that after 30 it's all downhill. But then one day, sitting on a beach, I had an epiphany. Some may say it was a mid-life crisis. Whatever you want to call it, something dramatically clicked inside my mind and told me that I was full of crap for thinking this way. The day I realised that this wasn't the way it should be was the day The Apollo Program was born, and it turned my life around. But for that story, you need to read my article, Knowing When to Say "I Suck".

P.S. This is what the two of us look like now!