Devlin Brown at the water cooler: Treat yourself well with a healthy dose of honesty

I have this friend I see once in a while, and she is in incredible shape. She orders big meals with mashed potato and dessert, and even drinks wine. It’s impossible to look like her and eat like that. Do you think she is doing it to torture me, and then goes home to run on the treadmill for three hours?

This reminds me of a comedy video doing the rounds about a decade ago where two women try to outdo each other on how little they order at a restaurant — just to spite the other. 

Human dynamics would be highly entertaining to a superior intelligence observing our infantile behaviour. It’s not just former high school besties. The bromance of the year has imploded in spectacular fashion, with the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man partaking in some kind of a 2025 remake of Talladega Nights. Will Ferrell and John C Reilly are no doubt taking notes. And the world’s stability is at stake. It’s terrifying.

Back to your friend. She may be that person. But, unfortunately, The Water Cooler is here to tell you that yes, she can eat like that and still be in incredible shape. She need not stuff her face to grind you the wrong way and then head home to hours of torture in the wee morning hours, grinning at her evil plan.

People become experts in all sorts of things unrelated to their careers: cooking, sewing, shooting, fishing, soccer, rugby, dancing, and much more, yet, for some reason, at least once every two months and most certainly every New Year’s Day, they seek out the magic pill to “being in shape”. As if they don’t know.

Just like fly fishing works on a set of rules, fundamentals that must be in place, before the flair of the fisherman comes into play, being “in shape” follows the same logic. Before we talk about diet styles, food types, exercise design and frequency, we need to strip away every layer of the onion until we get to the core: honesty. 

Barring those who genuinely have medical conditions related to overactive or underactive thyroids, hormonal imbalances, diabetes or other conditions that absolutely need medical intervention, honesty is the primary ingredient. What does this mean?

I have not asked my wife for permission to write this and so if I am still married by the time this goes to print, consider it a nod at the strength of our union. She and I eat the same diet, live in the same house, train with the same philosophy, together, and at a similar intensity.

I am in good shape, flat stomach and have an athletic physique when compared to “the average man”.

She, too, is in incredible shape, except that her body fat is far lower for a woman than mine is for a man. Her arms are like those mannequin things in biology classes — insertions and striations on full display.

When we order takeouts she almost always chooses pizza, with extra mozzarella! She loves cheese cake and crème brûlée. At a restaurant she will order whatever she wants. Why? Because she is so honest with herself that she knows that meal or treat is just that — a treat and not the foundation, or norm, of her diet.

We decided to track things and got an identical smartwatch. Every day she does between 13,000 and 20,000 steps — not for exercise but because she chooses to walk and move between working. I do between 5,000 and 10,000.

When she buys rusks, she has one with her coffee. I have the box. She’ll have a chocolate biscuit as a treat. I’ll eat the box by 2pm. We were given exotic slabs of chocolate by an international guest. Hers lasted from February to April, mine lasted from 10am to 1pm. 

Honesty means I cannot have these things in my house. She can, but it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t. She walks around, year-round, in lean condition because 95% of the time she is eating exactly as she should, in moderation, and is moving around a lot more than the average person — over and above actual “training”.

It reminds me of my late grandmother, herself never a kilogram overweight at any point in her life. “Devlin, eat to live. Don’t live to eat.” As my wife proves, you can do that and still enjoy food, and life. The doughnut won’t make you overweight. Eating all the doughnuts all the time will.