Bobby White is currently a goal keeper for the Great Britain Handball Team and for the last two years has been training full time for the 2012 Olympic Games in London...
My journey began with food. I have always been an active individual, playing as a football goal keeper for many years, among other sports. I took the opportunity to study Sport and Exercise Science at university where I learned a great deal about the body and how it adapts to exercise and what happens when you don’t.
One day in our health class, I was shocked to find out that when we recorded our body fat percentage (total percentage of fat stored in the body) mine was higher than I ever anticipated scoring, in the ‘bad’ range. I couldn’t understand why it was so high when I was such an active individual.
I was 19-years-old, living on my own and living the typical university experience so it didn’t take long for me to figure it out. I wasn’t supplying my body with the right food and nutrition; I drank too much alcohol, ate the wrong things and had irregular meal times and sleep patterns, despite being active six days a week. I didn’t like being in this unhealthy state and that I was not anywhere near a ‘good’ range for the fat percentage test, so I decided to do something about it.
I believe education is the key, and understanding more about food and my body was a turning point for me. If you know how to prepare the right foods, when to eat, and what physical training you need, you’re more likely be inclined to adopt a healthier lifestyle. I took steps to educate myself and succeeded in changing my lifestyle.
Five years down the line and I was in a position to seize a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to represent Great Britain as a handball goal keeper. I had kept myself in good shape; my eating habits had transformed and I kept drinking alcohol to a minimum. Had I not made those key lifestyle changes then maybe I wouldn’t have made it through four tough selection phases and two years of intense training and be two-and-a-half years from competing at the biggest sporting spectacle in the world.
Today I am privileged to have the support of some of the best nutrition and lifestyle coaching in the country as part of our training programme, but it all started with me. Body fat percentage testing is available at your local gym.
Bobby White´s story is an interesting one as he has only been playing Handball since January 2008. Along with seven of his team mates, Bobby was selected from over 2,500 athletes that applied for the 2007 Sporting Giants Talent Identification Programme (TID) which was led by UK Sport and the English Institute for Sport...
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Comments
I think it's iluminating that Bobby White's journey began with a Sports Science degree.
I find that people whose work/research brings them in touch with the information and issues at stake tend to adopt healthier lifestyles. I had a cousin visiting over the weekend and he's a cardiologist, in his presence, even my usually low fat diet goes down a few notches!
The problem is that for the vast majority of the population there is nothing really to trigger such a lightbulb moment as Bobby had, unless of course someone has a heart attack, but that's a bit drastic.
This seems to be a problem amongst most people - we dont realise what we eat. Originally coming from up north (i wont name the place in case my relatives read this...) people simply do not realise what they are eating. Its all to easy to eat fish and chips, full sugar coke and cheap carbohydrate foods that fill us up. Without the education and social opportunities to become more aware arent we destined to continually over-eat and get ill.
As a society we should begin to look at how social-class affects our opportunities to have a healthy life style and then do something to help the less fortunate amongst us.