In his new book, My Year of Living Dangerously, Rodney Hide charts his emotional and physical transformation which kicked off by his agreeing to appear on Dancing with the Stars. In these extracts, he tells how and why he did it.
KEY POINTS:
Before Dancing with the Stars, Rodney Hide was a 49-year-old, binge-eating politician who hadn't done any physical activity for years and weighed in at 132kg. Terrified of making a fool of himself on the show, he exercised and dieted his way down to 115kg, losing another 8kg during filming. After the show, and after winning the Epsom seat in a hard-fought political battle, he decided to get fit and healthy and stay that way for the rest of his life."
"For most of my adult life I have been fat. I didn't play sport once I left primary school and after I stopped doing manual labour I blew up. I found I could get my weight down by not eating a few months and jogging for an hour a day, but as soon as I stopped running as a result of injury or boredom, or lost the discipline to diet, I would balloon back up - invariably bigger than ever.
"Having got my weight down after 2005 election and through Dancing with the Stars, I was determined not to put it back on. My problem was that I didn't know how to achieve that. I had the good luck to meet [Romanian decathlete and personal trainer] Chris Berindei, who provided me with just what I needed and the motivation.
"Chris explained that if I carried on working in the gym the way I was, I would become a smaller me but would still be fat. I would be a little fat guy instead of a big fat guy. He also said he could show me how to transform my body into one that was leaner and stronger. I figured that all I had to do was put my mind to it and apply the proper technique _ dancing had taught me that _ and I also wanted to see what was possible. I had talked for years about how we could transform government and the country, now I needed to know if I could do it for myself.
"I thought that if I could, I would have a better chance of introducing change on a larger scale. Chris again in his East European way, announced what my goals were. This wasn't something we discussed, he just told me what he'd decided. My targets were: to increase my strength by 50 per cent; halve my body fat to 15 per cent; and be fitter at 80 than I was now.
"I had to learn to train less but do it harder. For example, I had been doing up to two hours at a time on the bike, the rower and the crosstrainer, thinking that was the way to get fit and burn calories. Chris preferred 30 minutes, but what a 30 minutes!
"We would warm up by biking at a medium pace for ten minutes, then bike furiously for one minute, then dead slow for a minute, then furiously for another minute. Those one-minute sprints would be incredible as Chris encouraged me to go as hard as I possibly could, to keep it up, and then push even harder and never slacken until the last second had ticked by. We would do maybe ten of those splits and at the end I would be all-in. Chris would then tell me to go away and eat and rest. He explained that the intense intervals served to put extra stress on my cardiovascular system rather that just a steady pace for an hour or two. He also explained that it would elevate my metabolism all day. I certainly found that. Instead of being exhausted, I was energised.
"A cardiovascular work-out and weight training are mutually exclusive. That's because the cardiovascular work-out drains the energy you need to push weights, leaving you too depleted to do those extra sets that are so critical in stressing your muscle. The cardiovascular exercise also diverts the blood, and hence the nutrition, away from the muscles you have just worked, so you lose the benefit of the resistance work-out. Chris has me concentrating on weights because he wants to build my strength and lower my fat. On top of that I go for a light jog or a swim once or twice a week.
"I find the science and principles of Chris's training fascinating. His system is interesting because it's contradictory to what you believe, but is common sense once you think it through. The most interesting element has been the nutrition. It has taken me months to get that right and I am still improving - the bad habits of a lifetime don't disappear overnight. The aim is to eat five or six small meals a day, thereby keeping the nutrients in your blood and continuously feeding your muscles as they recover from the stress of the exercise. It's an interesting task to get to try to eat small portions. Chris's advice to me was that a meal is the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.
"The aim though, is to eat 2400 calories a day, including 200 grams of protein. A 200-gram lean steak is only 60 grams of protein so I drink protein shakes to supplement my intake and also eat a lot of egg whites, which are a great protein source. I throw away the yolks because they are too fatty and rich in cholesterol, but a six-egg omelette using only the whites is a big help with the numbers.
"Eating like this requires planning and discipline. At first, when I ate small portions I would have finished my "meal" in two seconds and be on the lookout for a top-up. I have learned that the hunger lasts for only ten minutes or so while your brain gets the message that your tummy is full. I just had to learn to eat more slowly and get through that ten-minute danger zone.
"The amazing thing is that for the first time in years I am not always hungry - which I was when I was fat. I used to eat just one or two big meals a day, but snack on junk for the rest of the day. I was always either hungry or stuffed full because I wasn't eating regularly and wasn't choosing quality food. Since following these basic nutrition principles. I have found that I have better focus, concentration and memory. Proper nutrition has proved more important than exercise in improving my overall sense of well-being.
Hide then added ocean swimming to his repertoire, training with swim coach Haydn Woolley and despite failing at his first big public swim, he learned much, he says, about how attitude can affect performance.
"As a result of working with Haydn I've learned how to respond to compliments. If a person comes up to me now and says I'm looking great I say, 'Thank you. Yes it's fantastic!' Previously, I would have said, 'Oh well I was so fat to begin with' or 'I've got a long way to go' or 'It was bloody hard'. The trouble with these responses is that they are dismissive of the person who has taken the trouble to pay you a compliment, they reinforce any negative thoughts you may have about yourself, and they do nothing to encourage someone to have a go themselves. I find that I go away from a compliment happy and positive now. I hope that the person who does me the kindness of offering the compliment in the first place does too. Haydn has taught me a lot more than swimming.
"I wonder now why I was ever fat but I think I know the answer. We love eating and it's easy to pack on some extra weight. The trouble is that when we diet, our bodies go into fat storage mode and our metabolism slows. Our minds, too, think of a diet as denial and we want to eat more.
"We find it tough not to eat and when our willpower breaks we eat too much - and the wrong stuff. We fail at the diet and get fatter, so we give up. We end up just thinking of ourselves as fat. I know I did. I just accepted it; that was the way I was and I could not imagine being anything else. And therein lies the reason why I was fat. You can't achieve anything if you can't first imagine it. I know that now. You have to be able to imagine yourself swimming across the harbour before you can ever do it. If you can't imagine it you can't succeed.
"You may imagine it and still not make it, as I did in Auckland, but you can never achieve it if you don't imagine it first. In fact you need to do better than imagine it. I realise you have to see it, feel it, touch it and know it before you even start. Once you can do that, then you can plan and work towards it, a step at a time.
"I could never imagine being anything other than fat, so there was nothing to plan or to work towards. Stories of people's miracle success just made me feel more of a failure and reinforce my view that I couldn't lose weight. The one thing I could do, was eat what I liked and enjoy more food. My typical response when reading of someone losing a hundred pounds and looking great was to cheer myself up with a Big Mac and double fries. I might not be able to lose a hundred pounds but I had the freedom to eat, unlike So-and-So who was looking fantastic."
- Detours, HoS
