The Battle With The Doughboy Within.

Buck Hales

If you were to ask a Clydesdale runner why they ran, you would likely hear many reasons. But it’s equally likely that one of their reasons would involve weight control. It certainly is that for me. When I started running I gained control of my weight for the first time in my adult life—I discovered a way to battle with the dough boy within. I started to lose weight and feel great. That was over thirteen years ago. During that time I have experienced a cyclic trend of loss and gain. This trend is illustrated below. I recorded my weight on the average of every ten days over this period of time and plotted it with some revealing result. The forecast from this trend line indicates that I am going to stay the same weight. Life style changes, injuries etc. have contributed to the fluctuations. In 1989 I had a career change and gained back all the weight I lost in the first years of running. When I became a vegetarian in 1993 and adopted a high carbohydrate diet, I lost weight, but gained it back when I became injured and my mileage decreased. Despite increasing my mileage the weight wouldn't come back off. It wasn't until I actually started to monitor, and control my diet in late 1997 that I regained control of my weight. New theories about weight loss are proposed all the time. The diet that has worked for me is a low fat, high protein and moderate carbohydrate diet-- somewhere between the Dean Ornish super low fat diet, and Barry Sear's Zone diet. I think the key to losing weight is to moderate your caloric intake, avoid saturated fats and carbohydrates with a high glycemic index-- and exercise. My personal experience with fitness has taught me one important lesson: you can not control your weight with either exercise or diet alone-- you have to do both to win the battle with the doughboy within.

A common measure of fitness is the Body-Mass-Index (BMI). This measure is a modern day version of the old insurance company charts that would indicate a person who was 6'0" tall should weigh 180 pounds maximum or they are considered obese. This meausre does not take into account percent body fat or the overall fitness of the person. As larger than average athletes, Clydesdales usual fall off the top end of charts and often have BMI's in the range that is considered to be obese. But if you were to evaluate their cardiovscular fitness, you would likely find that they are more fit than vast majority of people. Recent studies from the Cooper Institute for Sports Medicine confirm this suggestion (ref). If morbity can be considered as a measure of their studies have demonstrated that BMI alone is not correlated to increase mortality. In a series of extensive studies with thousands of patients followed over 20 years, they have determined that patients with a BMI greater than 28, considered to be "obese" have a reduced incidence of morality compared to men with BMI less than 20-- if the larger men were cardiovasculary fit and the smaller men were not. Thus cardiovascular fitness is a more accurate predictor of overall well being than BMI alone. We are large athletes and we run, bike and swim. Though we may battle with the doughboy, we are likely to outlive our skinny neighbors who never exercise.