MY STORY SO FAR

CHAPTER 1 

There I was, 50 years old, getting close to 51, minding my own business, fighting the good fight, a 'bit overweight' but getting by. Basically, like almost everyone in that position, blithely ignoring all the signs and warnings.

Then one evening in October I find myself in a car smash, (my fault), trapped in the wreckage, with what looks like smoke coming up from under the bonnet.... Suspecting this meant fire on the way, I experienced that 'moment' when you think it may well be all over, and then think "Well what was that all about, and was it worth it??"

Nothing caught fire, the firemen cut me out, and I actually walked to the ambulance, went to A & E, was not admitted, and ended back at home that same night. A narrow escape that left me thinking................

In the final analysis, the result of the thinking was to decide that I had effectively acquired a 'second chance', and that I had better get this one right, there was no reason to think I might ever get another one!

The first step was to check what I actually weighed – not proud to find it was over 27½ stone (or 386 pounds, or 175 kilos), so Stage 1 would have to be to sort that out pronto. Now many years ago I had a brush with the Cambridge Diet, short term gains, but horrible eating, followed soon by not being able to stomach it any more, return to usual food, end up putting on more weight than I lost. An all too familiar story with these sorts of ‘crash diets’ – you end up crashing………

So next decision was that this could NOT be done using fad diets, proprietary ‘special meals’, meal alternatives or anything like that. If this was to stick, it had to be by changing to a type of eating that I was happy to live with for the rest of my life.

Then I met an old friend who told me about one of his mates who had been given a type of tablet by his Doctor that were helping him lose weight. Now I didn’t want to resort to diet suppressants or anything like that, and certainly not surgery like gastric bands, but I thought it might be worth at least finding out what these were all about. So I saw my own Doc, who explained that these tablets (called Xenical) were simply a way of stopping the ‘gut’ from absorbing a lot of the ‘fat’ in your diet. We decided to give them a try, although he did warn me about certain side effects……. Basically, when that fat was ‘not absorbed’ it decided from time to time that it needed to find an ‘emergency exit’ in a hurry…need I say more!!! This puts many people off from using them, but I took the alternative approach. It seemed to me that what was taking the ‘emergency exit’ was not entirely pleasant in nature – and it was probably an extremely good thing that it was no longer being absorbed. So I decided that the best course of action was to change my diet until there was as little as possible of this to be rejected, and effectively used the tablets to show whether this was being successful. When it obviously was in the end, I stopped using the tablets because I no longer needed to – they had nothing to work on!

By now I had cut out snacks, crisps etc; cut right down on chocolate; stayed out of any ‘fast food’ outlets; cut out ‘ready meals’ and gone over wherever possible to fresh food and vegetables, and more fruit. (More details in the ' How I do it now ' pages, and in the ‘Eating’ section of WEIGHT.) The weight started to shift very quickly at first, only to be expected as there was so much 'to spare'... Chapter 2