After losing nearly a third of his body weight over the past year and reversing his type 2 diabetes diagnosis thanks to a new diet and exercise, Labour Party deputy leader Tom Watson knows exactly what he used to picture in his head to motivate himself.
“Death,” he said, without any hesitation. “I pictured death.”
Last week, by speaking out about his weight loss and its dramatic effect on his health and well-being, the British politician became an unlikely poster boy for a generation of new dieters: middle-aged men.
Illustration: June Hsu
Only 22 percent of men aged 45 to 54 in England are considered a normal weight, compared with 42 percent of men aged 25 to 34 and 31 percent aged 35 to 44. A third of men in the 45 to 54 age group in England are now obese, while an additional 46 percent are overweight, the latest statistics from the Health Survey for England showed.
Watson used to be one of them. At his heaviest, he weighed 140kg, leading to a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes in late 2015.
Reading the biographies of Labour politicians who died in their 50s made him consider his own chances of longevity.
“For me, dieting was entirely a rational decision,” he said. “I’m 51 and I want to live another 51 years.”
For example, he read up on the pioppi diet and found the work of Dr Michael Mosley, bestselling author of The Fast Diet, The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet and The Clever Gut Diet, particularly helpful.
“I read everything Mosley had ever written, and then I read the research he wrote about — hundreds of papers and commentary. I knew the exercise I’d have to do would be humiliating and the food bit would be tough,” Watson said. “It was important for me to understand why I needed to change.”
Watson’s appetite for scientific research about dieting is typical of men of his generation, Mosley said.
The UK dieting market is estimated to be worth £157 million (US$205 million) and grew 6 percent in value last year.
Mosley said he believes it is the wealth of science that has emerged, suggesting there are specific actions people can take to improve their health, that is driving middle-aged men in particular to start dieting.
“Historically, men have been less interested in their health than they are now, and dieting has been seen very much as a vanity thing, a fad or quackery, aimed at helping you slip into a little black dress,” he said. “What is new to some degree is studies showing the health benefits of particular types of diets, such as rapid weight loss and fasting diets.”
His books illuminating these studies have sold nearly two million copies worldwide.
“It’s clear now that when you lose fat, particularly gut fat, that leads to a whole range of other improvements,” Mosley said. “We have our own fate in our hands. If you’re middle-aged today, you could live well into your 90s and you don’t want to be living those last 20 years in ill health.
“Nowadays men are proud of their diets and of what they have achieved,” he added.
Tom Kerridge, 45, and his fellow celebrity chefs Si King, 50, and David Myers, 60, from The Hairy Bikers, were among the first to join this increasingly vocal group of proud and conspicuously slimmer middle-aged men.
All three chefs have sold millions of diet cookbooks off the back of their own dramatic weight loss stories, with Kerridge’s book Lose Weight for Good selling a quarter of a million copies in just eight weeks when it was published at Christmas last year.
Over the past year even the original pin-up for lad culture, Men Behaving Badly star Martin Clunes, 56, has boasted he fasted to achieve his substantial weight loss, which was not, as was rumored at the time, because he had contracted a virus.
“Men in particular have told me that they see fasting more like a sport than a traditional women’s diet,” Mosley said. “It’s seen as more than a diet — it’s seen as a challenge.”
Like Watson, Mosley was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in his 50s. It was this diagnosis that led him to present a documentary about intermittent fasting, now known as the 5:2 diet, to test whether he could reverse his diabetes by eating normally for five days a week and cutting his calories down to about 600 for two days a week.
“I genuinely wanted to know. I’d seen my dad develop type 2 diabetes and complications from that, struggle with it and die from it. I really didn’t want to go down the same road,” he said. “I was interested and intrigued.”
Viewers hoping for before and after shots of him in his underwear were disappointed.
“It wasn’t a vanity project. It was about my health before and afterwards. I was genuinely scared because type 2 diabetes is a terrible disease,” Mosley said.
Mosley’s experiment — which did successfully reverse his diabetes — was based on a study by professor Roy Taylor from Newcastle University.
“We demonstrated that type 2 diabetes wasn’t the incurable condition we had believed for decades,” Taylor said. “We showed you could take people who had type 2 diabetes and get them entirely back to normal.”
Not all patients who lose weight manage to reverse their type 2 diabetes — Taylor said that about 46 percent of those who tried in his biggest study successfully put their diabetes into remission within one year — but of those that do, men are slightly more likely to succeed than women.
“Even the 54 percent who didn’t reverse their condition ended up on far fewer tablets and had better control over their diabetes, in addition to enjoying the major benefit of weight loss,” Taylor said.
This research made a strong impression on Watson. He considered what reversing his diabetes would mean for his relationship with his children, who are aged 10 and 13.
“First, I wanted to stay alive and look after them, but also, I wanted to enjoy them growing up — running up hills with them, climbing things, chasing them in the park, being silly,” Watson said. “I found that physically quite taxing. I felt I was losing out.”
Studies suggest a significant number of middle-aged fathers in the UK might be having similar thoughts. A report by the Men’s Health Forum last year found that one in 10 men in Britain have been diagnosed with diabetes.
Obesity rates among British males are the highest in western Europe, European Society of Cardiology research showed.
Last year it ranked British men as the most obese across 47 countries, including the 28 in the EU.
Weight gain carries significant health risks for men, not least because they develop type 2 diabetes at a lower body mass index than women: 29 as opposed to 31.
“Women tend to keep their fat in places that are metabolically safe, such as the hips and thighs,” Taylor said. “A man’s excess fat tends to go inside the tummy, what is often called a beer belly. Quite often, just a very small increase in weight size, without a man obviously being fat, can be enough to push him over his personal fat threshold.”
This increase often occurs in middle age.
“Men often become less active in their mid-20s and 30s,” Taylor said. “Due to the pressures of family and work, they stop doing competitive sport or playing football or other team games, for example.”
“Then there is a tendency for weight to increase and unfortunately, in Britain, the average adult increases in weight half a kilogram every year from the age of 20 up to about 70. So you can see why type 2 diabetes, a disease of too much fat in the liver and pancreas, comes about in middle years,” he said.
Overweight middle-aged men face other health problems. One in 20 cancer cases in the UK are linked to being overweight or obese, with obesity cited by the journal Cancer Research as the UK’s biggest cause of cancer after smoking.
A recent study by University College London found that people who have a high BMI are more likely to develop dementia.
Even when a man manages to stay relatively healthy in middle age, the general trend for weight gain among his peer group might make him feel anxious and force him to reconsider his own masculinity, said professor Victor Seidler, a sociologist at Goldsmiths, University of London.
“In midlife, you don’t have the energy you used to have. Even if you don’t get ill, people you know may get ill,” Seidler said. “Suddenly the way you’ve been living as a man, which you took for granted, has a question mark.”
A three-year survey of 300,000 adults by the UK Office for National Statistics in 2016 found that, compared with everyone else in the UK, middle-aged men are the least happy, have the lowest levels of life satisfaction and the highest levels of anxiety.
Books such as Mosley’s enable middle-aged men to privately read the latest scientific research without ever opening up about their anxieties to a doctor or making themselves feel vulnerable, Seidler said.
“You’re not supposed to die when you’re 50. How do you respond to the possibility that you might? You want to feel, as a guy, that you can do something about it, in a traditionally masculine sort of way,” he said.
Taking action, Seidler said, is an important way for men of that generation to deal with their feelings of anxiety.
Mark Briant runs MobFit, a popular health and wellness consultancy based in London. Two-thirds of his male clients are middle-aged men, and he sees thousands of them each year.
“The middle-aged men we see tend to spend more time than other clients doing their own research into the science of a healthy diet, and they get really into it,” Briant said. “They take control of the cooking at home, tend to become a little bit obsessive about what they eat and tie in nutrition stuff with pursuits like triathlons and ultra marathons.”
Despite their age, these men do not like the idea of aging.
“They really want to cling on to their youth and maintain their muscle mass,” he said.
“They have realized that their body is what will make them feel young or old in the future. They want to optimize their health for an extra five to 10 years and be in their prime for longer,” Briant said.
It is partly an ego thing, he said, but also partly a challenge — the question on their minds is: How long can they stay in shape?
Dr Matthew Hall, University of Derby associate academic and editor of the Journal of Gender Studies, said that men in their 40s and 50s today live in a more image-conscious society than previous generations.
“There is an expectation now that middle-aged men should look after themselves, rather than simply being sloths,” Hall said.
He said he thinks men can be more open about dieting when they follow regimes linked to specific scientific research because it is seen as more masculine.
“As a rule of thumb, dieting is coded as a more feminine activity. If men participate in feminine activities, they need to frame it in a way that gives them permission to do it. Scientific markers tend to be coded as male,” Hall said.
Men might also take pride in excelling at the technical challenges of dieting — the precision and monitoring involved — and see it as a sporting endeavor, he said.
One of the ways Watson kept himself motivated was to set realistic targets and then track his weight loss and exercise using a fitness app on his phone.
“I’d go to bed at night and do a review in my head, try to tell myself I’d done all right that day,” he said.
Gradually, monitoring his progress started to feel similar to competing in a computer game.
“I’ve been a video gamer since the 1980s and my approach was definitely gaming theory applied to the self,” Watson said. “When I walked 20,000 steps in one day, it felt like winning an extra prize on a video game.”
In total he has lost 44kg.
“I get emotional when I think about the difference it has made to the time I spend with my children,” he said. “They are very, very proud of me — they tell me that — and we just have more fun now. We run around a lot more. I do handstands in the deep end of the pool and swing them around. I’m more playful around them.”
He has cut out sugar completely and confesses he misses drinking Guinness.
“Not the taste as much as having a craic with pals,” Watson said.
He said that his middle-aged male friends have either tried to compete with him — telling him how far they can run or how many bench presses they can do — or quietly followed his example, telling themselves “if Tom can do it, so can I.”
Speaking out about his weight loss publicly made him feel vulnerable, but now he is glad he did it.
“I think there are more men nowadays who feel confident talking about their feelings in relation to their health and well-being, but not enough,” Watson said.
He has since had hundreds of e-mails — all positive, he said — from fellow type 2 diabetics.
“I feel very, very responsible for trying to get other type 2 diabetics into remission. I feel I need to help them to do that,” Watson said. “I am aware that not everyone has the time or inclination to read 150 pieces of research about how they can reverse their condition.”
He thinks there are holes in regulation, particularly around the design and packaging of food, and said he is disgusted that certain global corporations — “companies like Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola” — are allowed to sponsor major sporting events.
He is no longer worried about his weight though.
“Now, I’m more worried about my strength, fitness, stamina and wellbeing,” he said.
He conducted almost the entire half-hour interview with the Observer on his morning walk to work, and has noticed that his mind is clearer since he changed his diet.
“That has been the biggest and most unexpected benefit for me,” Watson said.
“It’s like a brain fog has been lifted. My memory is better. My mental acuity is sharper. I can reach for words quicker. I have never been this calm before, especially in my working life, and if you look at the Labour Party at the moment, that’s surprising,” he said.
His outlook on the future has also changed.
“I didn’t start this diet thinking about my old age, I started it to stay alive, but now I really do want to live for another 51 years,” Watson said.
With those final hopeful words, he marches off to start a new day. This is one middle-aged man, it seems, who is no longer thinking about how soon he will die, but how long he will live.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs