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Walking is a man’s best friend

Men and guts. This is not a consideration of courage, as in: no guts no glory. I had an editor once who lived by that motto; interesting fellow to work for.

I’m thinking of that protuberant, insistent bit of body which cannot be hidden. There’s no rebuke to a diet ill followed, an eating plan that didn’t survive its first encounter with chocolate, the surreptitious midnight snack, the spouse-­absent lunch, the side-plate bread, the biscuit comfort food, than the sight in the mirror at shower time of the unadorned male gut.

I’ve struggled manfully with this manful burden all my life. I once weighed well over 100kg. Beer, bachelorhood and long reading in bountiful cafes contributed to being, as Gareth Evans once kindly pointed out to me, shaped like a pear. I wasn’t mortified.

I was always in principle planning to do something about it. But I would go to the pub with Tony Abbott, who played first-grade rugby, whereas I played first-grade sloth.

Then 30 years ago, a combination of the disciplines of married life, mere self-respect and some stern medical talking to, led me to lose 20kgs and take up daily walking.

Does eating less or moving more get weight off? The consensus is: eating less. But I think a key to keeping weight off is exercising daily. Ten years ago I lost another 10kg. That’s stayed off, too.

Bob Carr has always been a fanatical walker and as a young man was rail thin. He wrote an illuminating piece recently about new research that showed astonishingly diverse health benefits not only from daily walking, but from vigorous walking, about 5.5km per hour or better.

I have a 6.2km route just near home, up and down several hills, which I do in about an hour and 10 minutes.

There have been months when I’ve been absolutely fanatical about doing that walk every day, if necessary at 10 at night. I suffer from an Irish predilection for extremism. In the days when I drank, I did so seriously, or perhaps frivolously, but it was a febrile frivolity with a remarkably serious air of commitment – drink to oblivion.

The big trick for me was to get the addictive, compulsive, neurotic and fixated elements of my personality working in some measure in my favour. Daily exercise is satisfyingly addictive. If I walk 6km every day I feel pretty good, and I can’t bear to miss it.

But if I don’t walk for five or six days, then I really don’t want to walk. It’s a hurdle just to get off the couch.

That first walk is critical. Carr is doing a public service with his ambulatory evangelism. In ways far too mysterious for me to unravel, exercise, so long as it doesn’t result in injury or death, reliably makes you feel good.

Walking is brilliant because you can start where you can start – 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 500m, a kilometre. Start, then build slowly.

My conundrum is, according to website calculators, I am now at the perfect weight for my height and age. The websites tell me not to lose any more weight. But there is still this intractable, though modest by historic standards, gut. And excessive girth is itself a health risk. Turning gut into muscle for those past our first youth is pretty demanding.

Eighty is the new 60, 70 the new 50 and so on. But weights are harder than walks and easier to get wrong. But I’m determined: I’ve had a gutful!