Devlin Brown at the water cooler: Eating and training well is more editing than rocket science

You make it seem like training and eating properly is easy, that once you know the basics it is common sense. Common sense for who? I find it impossible. Do you take your own advice and what does your training and diet look like?

There is no advice dispensed at The Water Cooler, just good old-fashioned knowledge. This column is the common-sense gift that keeps on giving. More than five years of answering serious questions, stupid questions, funny questions, and now... this question.  

This is like trying to catch out the magician. Rather than enjoy the trick and clap, you watch every move like a hawk, just waiting to shout “gotcha!”.

I’ll gladly share how I eat and train. Just be advised that anyone who mimics me is likely to become a cynical soul with little faith in humanity’s ability to self-correct. To be fair, that comes from my enjoyable years as a newspaper sub-editor, not from an over-indulgence in baby spinach.

Every morning I go out onto the streets and suburban parks. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I run. If I feel strong I’ll do the last kilometre as fast as I can. I don’t always feel strong. Tuesdays and Thursdays I walk — I don’t stroll, I walk briskly. This is my favourite as there’s so much detail out in the world that you miss while driving, riding or running.

Strength training is fundamental to my regimen. You don’t have to love it, but you must believe how important it is. I never train on machines — because the gym doesn’t have any. Everything is done with a barbell or dumbbells. My Monday-Friday split is: upper body, lower body, push, pull, lower body. This is a variation of the typical upper-body, lower-body split. I enjoy it as it gives more time to really focus on improving in certain exercises while easing up a little midweek on duration and volume. I ain’t 22.

The outcome is that every muscle is trained twice a week. This is a fairly high frequency, so naturally the intensity and volume changes according to how my body feels. Saturdays are fun days — while it used to be longer runs, now it is just about being active while having fun. I let my 14-year-old son do a rugby “hit” on me last week and I felt it for a day.

Every morning at 10am (I try to maintain a fast between supper and breakfast), I eat “overnight oats” with whey protein. A few hours later I’ll either eat leftover protein and salad from the night before or make scrambled eggs or omelettes if I have time. If there’s no time for either, I’ll order a cooked chicken and add it to a salad. If I’m still hungry, I’ll eat more.

At supper it’s always half a plate of salad, protein in the form of meat or fish, vegetables and, on some nights, a serving of sweet potato, butternut or my new favourite, any of the ancient grains. It really is easy: shop exclusively around the perimeter of the store except for wandering inland to find the grains, eggs and rice. 

There’s more flexibility on the weekends. I enjoy buttered baked potato with a braai and if the rugby is on, crisps come out and I consume hollow calories in liquid form with an intensity determined by how close the score is. At restaurants, I’ll choose protein without sticky sauce, and avoid carbohydrate sides. Be careful in restaurants, this country enjoys glazing food with sugar. My Checkers Sixty60 app has written proof of the occasional Saturday evening cheesecake order.

I don’t count calories or have a stopwatch present during my workouts. It’s not perfect, I’m not the fittest in the city and I don’t look like a Men’s Health cover model. But I am fit, I’m in good shape and my eating and training is premised on doing the right things most of the time, while trying to enjoy life.  

Don’t copy me. Do what’s right for you. We’ve only gone through this little exercise to prove that building a workout and eating plan is not rocket science. Approach it like a sub-editor: cut away the fluff, check the facts, keep the logical flow and track your changes.

Designing a training and eating routine isn’t a magic trick, though, to be fair, the Saturday night cheesecake may well be your “gotcha” moment.