Excaloricate
For four years, Marcus's commute had been thirty steps. Bed to kitchen to desk and back. He liked it. His back hurt less, he saw his kids in the morning, and his Slack response time was the best on the team.
He also weighed 15 kg more than he had on his last office badge photo.
It had crept in slowly, the way these things do. Two kilos one year, four the next, five the year after that. By the time his wife held up a picture of him at a friend's wedding and laughed — not unkindly, just startled — he had been telling himself for two years that he'd deal with it "after the next project shipped." There was always a next project.
The thing nobody told him about working from home
Marcus thought the problem was the food. The fridge being ten feet away, the kettle that lived next to a tin of biscuits, the leftover pizza in the drawer he opened "just to check." So he cleaned out the kitchen. Three weeks later he had not lost weight. He had just bought worse snacks for the cupboard above his desk.
The actual issue was harder to see. In his office years he had been walking around 6,000 steps a day without trying — train station, hallways, coffee runs, lunch to the salad place, the long way back. WFH had quietly cut that to about 800. He was not eating much more than he used to. He was just moving four-fifths less than his old amount, and his body had noticed three years before he had.
What he tried that didn't work
A list, in order, with the reason each one failed:
- Intermittent fasting. Worked for two weeks. Broke down when his daughter wanted pancakes on a Saturday.
- A treadmill desk. Returned after eleven days. He couldn't type code on it.
- A strict 1,800 kcal cap. Held for four days. Binged on the fifth. Felt awful. Quit.
- A six-month gym membership. Visited four times.
None of these were stupid ideas. They just all assumed he could bolt a new daily routine onto a life that already had no slack in it. He had a job, two kids, and a marriage. There was no slot to insert a 5 a.m. gym trip into.
What actually shifted
The change, when it came, was small and unglamorous. He started doing two things.
First, he logged every snack — not every meal, just the snacks — for a month. Just to see. The pattern that fell out was that he ate around 700 unaccounted kilocalories between 2 p.m. and the end of work most days. Cookies, cheese, the kids' leftovers, "just one" handful of nuts that was really four. He hadn't been eating big dinners. He had been eating an entire extra meal nobody had named.
Second, he turned his 1:1s into walking meetings. AirPods in, laptop closed, around the block. Forty minutes, three times a week. It put around 4,000 steps back into his day without requiring him to invent any new time.
That was the whole intervention. No diet. No gym membership. No new app for his wife to roll her eyes at.
A year and a bit later
Marcus dropped the 15 kg over roughly fourteen months. The first 5 came off in the first three months, mostly water and the easy fat that goes when you stop unconsciously eating cookies. The next 10 took a long time, including a few months in the middle where the number didn't move at all. He didn't change jobs, move house, or start lifting weights. He never set foot in the gym he was still paying for.
When his wife asked what had finally clicked, he said it took him a while to figure out, but the answer was that he hadn't been overeating. He had stopped moving and stopped paying attention, and the two things had compounded quietly for four years before anyone noticed.