What I got wrong in two years — and what it cost me

There is a reason this page exists. When I started, the thing I could not find anywhere was somebody in my situation saying plainly: here is what I tried, here is where it went wrong, here is what it cost me. Everything was either a success story or a warning written by somebody who had never worked a rota.

So this is my list. Seven of them, in the order they hurt.

Early on I took advice from a man online. His method was simple: if the weight is not coming off fast enough, drop the calories again. So I did, and then again, and again, until I was eating around 1800 calories a day while doing physical work on my feet all shift.

It worked. The fat came off. That is exactly why it is worth writing down — because a result is not the same as a good decision. A sensible cut for me would have landed around 2500, and the extra 700 bought me nothing except months of grinding hunger.

What it cost: months of being hungry at every hour of the day, sleeping badly, and being harder to live with than I should have been.

What replaced it: my own number, worked out from my own weight and my own job, cut slowly. The whole story is in cutting too low on somebody else's advice.

Years earlier I decided to put on muscle, and my method was: eat a lot. No app, no numbers, nothing written down. Just more food, constantly.

The scale moved. It moved by more than twelve kilos in about three months, and most of what it moved was not muscle. I could not see what was going in, so I could not see it going wrong — my clothes told me, and by then it was far too late.

What it cost: a long, joyless cut afterwards to take back off what I had put on in a hurry.

What replaced it: about two kilos a month, tracked every day, protein fixed and fat capped. Slower, and nothing to dread at the end of it. That is the slow bulk at nearly fifty.

I tried it properly once. Came home from a night, slept a few hours, got up and went to the gym because the plan said it was a training day and I did not want to lose the session.

Nothing dramatic happened. I did not get injured and I did not feel ill. I simply sat there like a zombie: no desire to be there, no strength, numbers well down, staring at the floor between sets. Time passed and some weight moved. It achieved nothing.

What it cost: the recovery I needed for the days after the block, spent on a session that was not training.

What replaced it: one good session on the day the block starts, while I am still rested, and nothing at all until it is over. The four rules are in training through a block of nights.

This one is quieter and it lasted longer. After a block of nights I would come back and try to squeeze in the sessions I had missed, because on paper the week was short.

Two nights do not cost two days. They cost me about five, and trying to fit four sessions into what is left of a week like that just means walking into the next block already behind. The missed sessions are gone. Chasing them starts the next hole.

What it cost: weeks where I trained more and progressed less.

What replaced it: I resume as normal and write the lost sessions off. Two sessions in a bad week, done properly, beat four crammed in.

For a while I treated the will to train as something that had to be there before I went. After a physical shift it is not there. That is the normal state, not a bad day.

If I had kept waiting for it, I would have trained a handful of times a year.

What it cost: sessions I skipped for a reason that was never going to change on its own.

What replaced it: I go without asking myself the question, and the will turns up somewhere in the middle of the session. Every time. That is the whole trick.

For a long time I read every tired day as a decision between a full session and nothing. Framed like that, nothing wins most evenings after a shift.

There is a third option, and it is the one that fixed my consistency: go, drop the weight, cut it short, chase a pump, do something. A light session beats no session, and it keeps the habit intact.

What it cost: about a session a week for months, thrown away on a question that was wrong.

What replaced it: I miss a session once or twice a month now instead of once a week. Train or rest is the wrong question.

My last mistake is the one I would least have guessed. I used to drink coffee well into the afternoon and evening, and I got away with it for years for one simple reason: I fell asleep perfectly well.

That was the trap. Falling asleep and sleeping well are two different problems. I fell asleep fine and woke up less rested, then blamed the rota, the job, my age — anything but the cup. It took months of watching myself to connect the two.

What it cost: months of worse sleep, on a rota that already makes sleep the hardest part.

What replaced it: the last coffee is six hours before I plan to sleep, without exception. Everything else I take, and what I dropped, is in supplements when your bedtime moves every week.

Reading the list back, they are not seven separate errors. They are the same three, wearing different clothes.

• I used somebody else's number instead of my own. The stranger's calories, the plan that said train today. Neither of them knew my weight, my shift or my week.
• I stopped measuring. The bulk with no app, the coffee I never connected to the mornings. When nothing is written down, you find out from your clothes and your mood, months late.
• I tried to be a hero on the worst day. The session in the middle of the nights, the week where I chased what the nights took. That is the one that costs the most and looks the most like discipline.

And here is the part I would want somebody to tell me at the start: not one of these undid my progress. I am still here, two years in, stronger than when I started. The only thing that actually undoes it is stopping — and the most dangerous mistakes above are the ones that make you feel like a failure, because that is the feeling that makes people quit.

Get it wrong, notice, change the one thing, keep turning up.