After nine days I let the horse run free, cause the desert had turned to sea

In the year 1087, William the Conqueror found that he was too fat to ride his horse. He had also been publicly disparaged by the King of France, Phillip, who had said that William looked pregnant (this might be the first recorded bitchy comment by a gay man in history, as King Phillip may have actually been a big old queen.)

So what did King William do? He went on what historians now recognize as the first “diet” in recorded history. He changed his food intake to lose weight. As King of England, he set a precedent for his whole kingdom by recognizing that food intake was creating his huge belly, and you needed to reduce the size of your belly to be healthier.

What confused our medieval brethren about weight gain was the fact that people wouldn’t exactly get skinny when they were poor and didn’t have enough food or drink. This was mainly because they would die from thirst long before starvation, but it was also because of the types of foods they ate.

Medieval people had to boil their water for purification, and if they didn’t have food to cook, they usually didn’t have a pot to boil the water and would either not drink water and die from thirst or drink rancid water and die from whatever was in the water. The poor got the cheap foods like white breads & pastries and the fattier/non-meaty parts of the animal, so everyone saw the poor, who may have been eating less, still being fatter. No one saw someone else get really skinny from lack of food.

Sadly, due to the limitation of science at the time (they did still think the Earth was flat then and was the center of the universe), William decided that he should stay in bed. And drink alcohol. He did not recognize the caloric amounts in alcohol, only food. And as William did not keep a blog, we do not know exactly what he plan was, but at least he had a plan.

The good news seems to be that it worked somewhat, because recorded history shows that William did get back on a horse later in 1087, which was his original reason for his weight loss regime. And he was comfortable enough that he looked a little less like he was pregnant to be seen in public. We know that he got back on the horse because he died following injuries suffered when he drunkenly fell off the horse.

If that happened nowadays here in the USA, King William would just breed bigger horses to take his fat ass around the country.

I don’t plan on drinking more alcohol or sleeping all day and only drinking alcohol or riding a horse while drinking alcohol. I plan on keeping up with the treadmill and I want to start eating less. I haven’t been too good on the eating less food this week, but I know what I need to do.

I walked on the treadmill yesterday for 30 minutes and it felt good to do it. Hopefully within the next few weeks, I can do that regularly and get into running. For now, I'm just trying not to be King William.