The title is, I think, a useful adage for someone who’s been very fit in the past attempting to get themselves back into shape after a while spent being sedentary. The problem is that if you’re already aware of how to exercise and have the skills and know what going at a good healthy pace (I’m assuming you’re a runner here) feels like, it’s very, very easy indeed to go out and overdo it.

For one thing – you are much heavier. I spent a lot of time today walking around with my 21-month-old daughter in a sling (she’s teething and has been pretty unwell, poor thing) and it was rather unsettling to realise that the weight of her plus the sling – 12kg – is almost exactly the amount of weight I want to lose. Now bear in mind that walking becomes much harder and your feet get a lot heavier if you stick 12kg on your torso. That’s a lot of extra weight for out-of-shape muscles and joints to support, and a lot more impact for feet and legs to absorb. Trying to run as if you’re 75-77kg when you’re 85kg is going to put you in a world of misery and injury pretty quickly, as I’ve found too many times already.

Secondly, if you know what a “comfortable” pace feels like you’re likely to aim for that (in my case, I like cruising somewhere just under 5 minutes/km in training) because on past experience it feels right and makes the times on your watch look right. Bad idea! You just can’t do that – it has to be what’s euphemistically termed “slow recovery pace” for a good long while until your muscles and legs are used to it, and until you’ve dropped a few kilos and can have more confidence about starting to push the boat out a bit. My calf muscles are still killing me from Saturday night’s run, and that’s not surprising – but the bad thing about muscle pain that persists for too long is that it will destroy any attempt to get serious pretty quickly, as it’s just too sore to get out most nights.

At this point someone usually mentions that it’s easiest to just go to a gym. I’ve tried. I’ve tried gyms, and I hate them. I really can’t stand the places. Miserable caverns full of miserable-looking people crucifying themselves on miserable machines like something out of Metropolis, nobody (except maybe the weight training loonies) looking as if they really want to be there. I can run for maybe 20-25 minutes on a gym treadmill, 30 if I really push it out, but after about 15 minutes I just want to claw my eyes out. It’s so incredibly dull, and incredibly stuffy, and it’s not outdoors. I’d rather be out running badly in the rain than running well on a treadmill any day. Part of the joy of being a runner is being out in the open – particularly crisp winter nights, in my experience. Without that, it’s just pointless labour. So no, please. No gyms.

So what does this leave me with? Well, in all honesty, it tells me that at least until I’m down a few kilograms I shouldn’t be trying to run hard. I don’t think there’s actually much long-term benefit in running at all right now except the psychological benefit (which is significant). I’m going to try and stick with a fairly heavily calorie-restricted diet for the time being, combined with plenty of walking and activity to help things along (and provide some more wiggle room in the calorie budget for beer and curry). There’s a lot of pride-swallowing happening here. My previous maxim was that provided you’re exercising hard enough you don’t have to worry about food – but the problem with that is that over a certain weight and under a certain level of fitness you just can’t exercise hard enough to not worry about food without injuring yourself and giving up, thus perpetuating the vicious circle of slothfulness.

If you’re really interested in watching, you can try tracking my Fitbit, not that there’s much data there so far as I only got it this afternoon. If you enjoy being competitive about random physiological metrics, you’re welcome to add me as a friend.

I made a momentous decision a couple of days ago, and started logging food and counting calories. The immediate impetus for this was the rather horrifying discovery that I now weigh over 87kg, when I should really be in the low-to-mid 70s if I’m at all in a fit condtion. I felt like 87kg as well – heavy and sluggish. When you can’t comfortably pull your feet up to trim your toenails because there’s so much lard in the way, that’s a problem.

First, though, some background. I was never one for sport at school. Last to be picked for football (and therefore put in goal), pretty bad at everything, never enjoyed tennis or badminton or the other individual sports my secondary school offered. I enjoyed walking (up mountains sometimes), but school didn’t offer that. After leaving university the opportunities for mountaineering weren’t really there, so I kind of gently and slowly inflated over the years until I decided to try running, at the age of 32. I can still remember huffing and puffing my way around 3.2 kilometres of Kingston streets in just under half an hour. After a while, though, it turned out I wasn’t that bad at it, and my speeds and distances went up while the weight fell off quite rapidly. I even got serious enough to start doing sprint reps up the short hill next to my block of flats to work out my maximum heart rate (about 210, which is oddly fast for my age). I’m mildly asthmatic but when my lungs are working they’re extremely strong (to the extent that when doctors stick me on the end of a spirometer their usual reaction to the numbers is “You’re.. uh.. asthmatic?”). In turn this means I’m actually quite well suited for endurance sport, something which I didn’t find out at all when I was at school and being made to play football in the rain.

It was all good fun, I ran races, I did a couple of marathons (3:38 was the faster one), a bunch of 10ks (42:30ish) and so on, I climbed slowly up the rankings in my classification, but then circumstances intervened and it all fell to bits. Since then I’ve been trying regularly to get myself back into form, and the same always happens – I’ll get to a certain point where things are starting to come together and I’m building up a base, then the whole thing will fall apart due to some minor crisis – an injury, for instance, or getting sick. The last time this happened was early this year, and to my eternal shame I ended up transferring my entry in the Zürich marathon to a colleague because I knew there was no way I’d be in a good condition to do it justice. There are few things more depressing than that.

Why worry, though? Everyone knows it’s really hard to stay fit and healthy when you’ve got a newborn baby, then a toddler needing constant attention, ruining your sleep, and bringing back every bug that’s going from nursery and obligingly passing it on to you. And beer and curry are tasty, after all. Live a little, eh? There’ll be time enough in the future to get back into shape.

But now – 87.4kg. I don’t think I’ve ever weighed more. If I didn’t care about it that would be fine, but being out of condition and heavy makes me miserable, from the T-shirts that don’t fit, to the belly, to the sore feet if I walk too far. So, time to do something, hopefully once and for all.

I went for my first run since January earlier today. It was lousy, but it’s a start. More importantly, though, I’ve moved away from the attitude I always had before that “If you put the training in, don’t worry about the calories”. In my case that simply isn’t true – during my initial run of successful running I was keeping a close eye on what I ate (having an M&S Simply Food around the corner which sold various tasty salads turned out to be a godsend), but in subsequent attempts to get back into condition I’ve not done that.

So this time I’m keeping a food log. It’s rather ambitiously suggested 1470kcal daily net as an acceptable intake if I’m going to lose weight at a reasonable rate. The first few days have gone okay, and it works quite well for me as I’m stubborn and simply won’t, say, give up beer and curry because they contain lots of calories. I can still have the beer and curry, I just have to not have something else or make sure I get a good run in to make up for it. Fundamentalism (“Oh no, I can’t possibly eat that tasty thing!”) has never worked well for me, so replacing it with bargaining makes sense.

What’s most amazing me is just how many calories some foods contain. I can now understand why students live on instant noodles – there’s no cheaper way to get hold of 460 calories. Those little chocolates in the basket at work? 50 calories each. Eat 4 and that’s 200kcal. Eat 4 twice a day, like I was probably doing, and that’s 400kcal. My usual triple-shot grande latte from Starbucks? 220 kcal, more than a seventh of my recommended daily intake for a reasonable rate of weight loss. Worst of all, I’m pretty sure that for the time being I shouldn’t eat more than one chocolate digestive per day. 78 kcal? Oy.

Anyway, it’s a good incentive to do the work to get the weight off. Once the weight’s dropped to something sane and I’ve got myself back into doing longer runs, the chocolate digestives and curry will be far less restricted. And that’s the kind of bribery I need.

Okay, that’s one incentive. The stronger incentive is wanting to cross the finish line of some major race in a reasonably respectable time. And as far as that is concerned, well, we’ll see.