This weekend sees the start of Men’s Health Week – time to consider that two thirds of men in the UK are either overweight or clinically obese. But it is extremely difficult to get men to fight the flab. The solution may lie with encouraging whole families to tackle the problem together. HILARIE STELFOX reports on the members of one Huddersfield family who have done just that and lost more than eight stones between them
RECENT research by a slimming organisation has found that men are just as worried about being overweight as women but much less likely to do anything about it.
“Government figures show that two out of three men are overweight or obese and yet they are reluctant to seek help,” says Melanie Jaffier, who manages the Huddersfield team of consultants for Slimming World.
“We know the men who join our groups have usually been encouraged or persuaded to come along by a woman – their wife, mum, sister or friend,” she added. “They see slimming organisations as a woman’s thing.”
However, when men do decide to fight the battle of the bulge they are often spectacularly successful.
“Our research shows they lose weight faster than women,” said Melanie.
During Men’s Health Week, health promotion groups and slimming organisations will be stressing the importance of adopting a healthy diet for life. One way to effect change is to encourage whole families to tackle weight issues together.
The Boyes family from Honley has already discovered that supporting each other to lose weight and become healthier really works. Mum and dad, Mandy and Clive Boyes, joined a Slimming World group in Berry Brow five years ago after Mandy’s father suffered a massive heart attack. Since then they have lost four-and-a-half stones between them.
Clive, 57, says he only joined to support Mandy, 52, who wanted to tackle her weight problem because she had discovered that she had high cholesterol levels like her father. Despite the fact that Clive’s share of the weight loss was two stones he hadn’t believed he’d had a weight problem.
A survey of overweight men has found that up to one quarter are in denial over their weight – a statistic that is supported by Clive and Mandy’s son Michael, 27, now also a Slimming World member.
“I was 19 stones 8lbs,” says Michael, “but I didn’t think I had a problem. I was going to the gym most nights and running so I thought I was fit. But it was hurting my legs.”
In the end, however, it was vanity and the thought of looking fat in a suit at his sister’s wedding that got him through the door of the slimming class.
“He didn’t want to wear a bed sheet again,” said mum Mandy. “He’d had to wear a massive shirt to his brother’s wedding.”
Michael, who started attending the class with his parents earlier this year and is the youngest male attendee, took just 20 weeks to shed nearly five stones. His waist dropped from 42 to just 34 inches. Today he still goes to the gym and has found that running no longer gives him leg pain. In fact, he’s feeling so much better that he took part in the Hull 10K run in May and will be running the Leeds 10K event this month, with the York 10k to come in July and the Great North Run in September. He has also started doing the Greenhead Park Run on Saturday mornings.
“I feel miles better,” said Michael. “I was eating far too much rubbish and eating in between meals,” he added. “I wasn’t eating enough at mealtimes, and snacking all day instead.
“I’m quite goal-driven so I keep myself going that way.”
Michael not only keeps a computer file of his weight loss but he has also been through the family’s larder and labelled all foods according to the Slimming World ‘syns’ system, which allows dieters 15 ‘syns’ a day on top of ‘free foods.’
His ‘bloke approach’ to slimming means that he is incredibly single-minded and in the early days of weight loss he cut out all alcohol and the sort of fatty foods he used to live on. “I did a lot of cardio work in the gym to speed up the weight loss,” he said.
“He uses a marker pen and writes the syn count on everything so we know exactly what we’re eating and what we can have,” said Mandy.
According to Melanie, who runs the Berry Brow group attended by the Boyes, Michael is “an inspiration” to others in the class.
Clive, who works for an agricultural merchant, has stayed within his goal weight of 11st 13lbs and is now maintaining his weight – as such he doesn’t pay class fees.
Mandy, a former child minder who now works at an after school and holiday club, was 13stones 9lbs when she began slimming and is now 11stones 2lbs – dropping from a dress size 18/20 to a 12/14. She would like to lose a few more pounds but even losing two stones has had a major impact on her health.
Her cholesterol levels have dropped to normal.
Michael, now a much healthier 15stones 3lbs for his 6ft 2ins frame, says he’s happy with his current weight and his new diet. “I take huge salad lunch boxes to work. You get a lot of attention when people see you eating all that but still losing weight,” he explained. “I also eat a lot of fruit whereas I didn’t before.”
Mandy said: “We now try to eat as a family whenever we can and make more of an effort to sit down together and eat the same meal.
“Michael has learned to cook and uses Slimming World recipes on-line or from the magazines..”
Both Mandy and Clive say that losing weight gave them a new lease of life. “We had become a bit boring,” she says. “We never did anything, we used to stay in all the time. We’d get breathless going up the stairs. Now we like to get out and go walking.”
Theirs is a success story, but all three members of the family know that they need to remain vigilant. “You can’t get complacent or all the weight creeps back on again,” says Mandy, who feels to have struggled more than the men.
They will, they say, continue going to their slimming class because they have so clearly seen the benefits of slimming together.
“The class is great,” says Clive. “But it was difficult the first time we went. One of the men who used to go with his wife is a soldier and said walking into the room the first time was more nerve wracking than going on a tour of duty in Northern Ireland.”
As Slimming World group leader Lynda Thwaites says: “Men just need a little extra nudge in the right direction and it’s usually a woman who drags them along.”
