Steven’s old personal trainer from his Flex gym days, Adam, had a bit of a mantra that Steven managed to buy into. Whether it be encouragement to increase the speed on the treadmill, or a push for another couple of reps on the lat pulldown machine, Adam would urge: “Come on Mr Neary. Let’s get rid of our massive bellies and get ourselves fitter.”
I think the concept of “fitter” may have been a bit obscure to Steven, but he certainly got the idea of what a massive belly looks like. Embarrassingly so, at times. One of the Iceland delivery men is greeted each Saturday with; “Hello Jim. How’s your massive belly?” As Jim’s belly routinely nestles on the tray with our order in, he can hardly quibble at this description, but it’s a trifle awkward. Massive bellies have become a normal part of Steven’s description of people, as much as their sex and hair colour; “Buster is a man with no hair and a massive belly from Lip Up Fatty.”
In tune as Steven is to the size of other people’s bellies, he doesn’t apply the same analysis to his own and over the past few months, his belly has verged into massive territory. I’ve been having chats with the support workers about what we can do about it, but the tricky bit has always been how to get Steven to understand the importance of belly reduction. The message has to be very clear and very inclusive.
To show how an unclear message can go terribly wrong, there is a good example from a recent Top of the Pops marathon. Steven has been familiar with The Beautiful South song, “You Keep It All In” all his life. He would place it in his top three of all Beautiful South songs. He loves the video, especially the bit where Brianna Corrigan slaps the penguin. It reminds Steven of the time in 1995 that Auntie Rose offered him a chocolate wafer, “Would you like a Penguin, Steven? No? Well, buggar you then.” His recall of her directness always makes him chuckle. Anyway, the song came on Top of the Pops and as we sang along, the support worker said, “It is a problem if you keep it all in. The stress builds up and you might die.” Aaaagh. Immediately, Steven panicked. “Steven Neary’s not going to keep it all in and he’ll die.” In trying to reassure him, the problem was the word “it”. What is it that is being kept in? We couldn’t find an explanation that Steven could get his head around and what followed was an hour or so of deep anxiety. We didn’t want to make the same mistake when discussing diets.
Fortunately, we could make it inclusive. Des, the support worker, has been talking about doing something with his own weight, although it would take a huge stretch to consider Des’s belly fell into the massive category. My own belly is still recovering from the hernia surgery and my half hearted attempts to get back into my pre-hernia trousers. I’ve had to accept that my bodybuilding days with a six pack are long gone, but that doesn’t mean I’m consigned to live the rest of my life with elasticated waistbands.
So yesterday, we had a team meeting: me, Steven and Des. I started by announcing that all three of us had expanded bellies and then fell back on Adam’s old motivational speech. I’m not sure if it was the nostalgia value, but Steven got on board. Then we got on to the nitty gritty of discussing reduction in certain intakes, with particular emphasis on chocolate and garlic bread. What seemed to help was not saying that we have to cut things out completely, but cutting down and changing the timings of certain foods was easier to buy into. For example, about 9pm, Steven likes “a lovely surprise.” It’s not the best timing because he has his surprise and then goes straight to bed. So Des suggested that he has his lovely surprise with his lunch and much to my surprise, Steven seemed enamoured with this new plan.
It took me back to when Steven was in the ATU. Their position was that Steven was “greedy” about food. I thought that was both judgemental and wrong. Steven approaches food like everything else in life and sees the finishing of a plate of food as task completion. A CD cannot be cut off mid song. A conversation cannot be interrupted by a phone ringing. The consumption of food, I think he frames the same way: it’s a task to complete. I cooked a roast on Easter Sunday and I could hear Steven gagging over the 5 sprouts on the plate, but it wouldn’t occur to him not to eat them.
Let’s see how it goes. Vanity works for me and Des, but Steven needs a different motivation. And there will probably be ongoing questions. After the team meeting, Steven went off to his bedroom to reflect and 10 minutes later, he came into my room with the concern; “Steven Neary can still be fitter and have Green Pringles on Christmas Day?”
With any luck, by the end of the summer, I’ll be able to post some photos of the three of us back into our pre massive belly trousers.
Perhaps we’ll be wearing belts.
Love, Belief and Balls 