Lessons from a weight loss journey
BRENDAN REID is a former radio broadcaster who endured bullying and teasing while growing up in small-town NZ, due to his weight.
As he grew up he struggled to lose the weight, despite a huge amount of effort.
In 2015 a meeting with a gym instructor changed his perspective; he has since lost more than 50kg and turned his life around.
The Fat Ginger Nerd details his story and includes his insights into NZ’s obesity issues.
The book is unique in that it’s written by an ordinary person, not a doctor, scientist or nutritionist with healthcare qualifications.
We asked Reid some questions:
Who is The Fat Ginger Nerd? The old me. It is a concatenation of the three things I used to get the most grief for while I was growing up. Two of these things still apply now, and I imagine in a few more years I’ll be down to just one. It is self-deprecating, but no more or less deprecating than it was when other people used to call me these things back in the day.
Why did you write the book? I began writing back in early 2016 as I was in search of an outlet I needed at the time, to help me come to terms with what was happening to me, as it was happening. In my head this was important, the fulfilment of an impossible dream that I had carried with me since childhood. So I began keeping a journal to help me process things along the way.
Later after my original success story was featured on the Diet Doctor website in early 2017, a few people suggested that I expand that story into a book, and at that time I didn’t really think I had it in me. But by 2018 I had been journaling for a couple of years, and that’s when I realised for the first time that I had the beginnings of something that could become a book one day.
You say it took around five years to write, and around 40 years to live.
If you measure from when I began writing my journal to when I first submitted a completed manuscript, then yes, it was five years, from March 2016 through to March 2021. The 40 years is a reference to the coverage of my life. It covers my first 40 years in all the various ways that it was affected by my health and my weight, and I finish that story shortly before my 40th birthday.
Why a chapter about video games? It’s as much about the life lessons I learned from those video games as it is about the video games themselves,
and the purpose that those video games served for me, as a kind of coping mechanism. You could take out the video games and replace them with stories of things like drugs and alcohol if you wanted. But I’ve never been into any of that; for me, my coping mechanism was video games.
What can we expect from you in the future?
I’m not sure. I’d love to travel a bit more, I didn’t do much of that when I was younger, partly because of the way I was, and yet now that I’ve lost the weight, I’ve only had a couple of years to explore those sorts of travel opportunities before Covid shut everything down again anyway.
You mention your studies in health coaching and nutrition. Do you plan to do anything with those?
Not directly, at least as far as health coaching is concerned. There’s an issue of scaling there in my mind: with traditional coaching, I can only directly help one person at a time. But with the book, I can indirectly help potentially so many more, all at once. Rather than be out there on the front line myself, I’m more than happy for the book to be used as a tool in the toolbox of other health coaches.
What would you like to see change about the standard dietary advice of today?
I’d like to see better recognition of the fact that the scope of our guidelines only extends as far as healthy people, ie. those without any chronic metabolic conditions. Unfortunately, at least two-thirds of New Zealand adults now have at least one such metabolic condition (overweight/obesity), which effectively makes the guidelines irrelevant to most NZers, since the sources behind the guidelines don’t consider any of the evidence that looks at treating any of these conditions through our diet, though we also know it’s our diet that drives these conditions in the first place.