Should Heart Attack Grill restaurant be shut as a health hazard?

First watch this.

Now read this.

And this.

And, just for good measure, this too.

Close it down? Yeah, why not?

Some, but not me, might suggest much like Silvio did to Vesuvio in The Sopranos.

Short blog, and to the point.

Suddenly, I'm 2/3 The Man I Used To Be

Look, I've been travelling too much hither and yon lately. I'm tired so I apologise now for being snitty and reproducing something I posted just now on the estimable Low Carber Forum.....

Checking through a bunch of my fave rave journals today, having seen barely a word from any of you for nearly three weeks, all I seem to be encountering is reason after reason for not engaging properly with the weight loss process.

Now, to take one example among many (and with big apologies for doing so, since I'm a real fan of the member who drug it up and threw it out there) I have no idea and less care who Tom Hanks' wife is, except she is clearly pampered, spoiled, cut off from reality, and Greek, and she will lose her big deal 15lbs that she's employing a personal trainer or something to shed on her behalf, or something; you know what I mean. Aforesaid Mrs H has gone and opened her gob about it in a public place, so she's got to deliver, otherwise she gets herself pilloried (for a UK example, take the tediously ping-ponging former telly-tart Anne Diamond).

So, those of us who - often with bloody good reason - see ourselves as fat can either not like it or not care. Actually, not caring is not true. As soon as we see ourselves as fat, we are upset, and any apparent insouciance is just a dumb denying pose.

If we don't like it, we have the choice of either engaging with the problem or paying lip service to the problem, dilettante dieting.

Me, I don't like it, at all, so I'm fixing it, with 134lbs dumped thus far - safely and healthily - in well under 8 months.

I'm no paragon and (today at least) I'm not blowing the trumpet to encourage plaudits. I don't have astonishing will-power and resolve. I'm not denying myself, making myself miserable, or having a bad time doing this thing.

It just works like this: do I want to spend a day longer than I need to worrying about and shedding this ridiculous lard? Do I want to get past all this and get on with my life? Do I want to confront and overcome the psychological issues and the piss-poor eating (and drinking) patterns which got me in this fine and greasy mess to begin with? Do I want to make some pretty damn' fundamental changes in my life to make certain I don't end up there again, again? Well, do I, or what?

The answer to all of these is a mind-numbingly obvious 'yes', and I genuinely fail to comprehend (and I accept it's my failing that I fail to comprehend) why anyone who dedicates a chunk of their precious, god-given, and frighteningly time-limited life to coming onto a forum like this and writing about their struggles with their fat condition, would find time to justify anything less than total commitment to their individual campaign, since, in my narrow and self-righteous view, anything less should be excoriated rather than tolerated.

Believe me, nobody, NOBODY, has ever been less puritanical than me. One of nature's natural cavaliers, I spit on roundhead tendencies wherever I find them, but PLEASE do something about grabbing this nettle and getting yourselves moving downwards.

The pluses in doing so are beyond number, while the negatives really hardly merit serious consideration. They are not even excuses. If they are evidence of a failure of confidence or self-esteem, I wish there was something I could do to reach every one of you and get you up, committed and moving - because I know how good you would feel getting the result I know you crave.

I really do understand about softly, softly, catchee monkee (but not, of course, Papa Nes who's quite properly skipping the 'farewell tour'). My fear is that, for any of us, such gradualism allows too much time, and thereby too many opportunities, to slip, and to justify, and to shrug off, and to fergeddaboutit.

I really do entreat you to regularly and critically examine how you're going about this thing, and to see where and how you can tighten up your act. Every pound gone is a rachetting up of your self-regard, and, since nothing ever succeeds like success, I promise your journey gets easier every day.

Don't need no credit card to ride this train. Just the power of (a little bit of self-) love.

Bloody hell! I didn't mean to, but I've just gone and writ myself a blog. Better run and post it before you all start hurling mud pies at me. Bet you're glad I came back, eh?

Well, I'm off again on Friday for a-g-e-s. But I'll have plenty of time to write....

Making Sense Of One's Self

In Charles Humming's excellent, intelligent and highly recommended new spy novel The Trinity Six, I encounter an unfamiliar quotation from Dostoyevsky, whom, we must all recognise, new a thing or two and more than most about the dark and complex workings of the human heart.

Try this on for size, and see if it doesn't speak to everyone who's got in a mess with food, drink, weight, and is now struggling with weightloss which they want to make stick:

'If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.'

I know that old Pops Staples said something similar (and none the worse for that), but I was really struck by the power of that verb; 'compel'.

We who have been held in thrall by the destructive power of our compulsions, must learn to harness that power positively to build our self-esteem and compel others to recognise what us unique and wonderful about each and every one of us, instead of carelessly, pointlessly frittering away our energy in a life-long orgy of self-destruction and delusion.

Viewed from this angle, it us clear that this thing isn't just about cutting out French fries or saying no to cake. That's looking at and treating the symptoms, whereas the causes lie elsewhere, and therein lurks the challenge.

Quite simply; if we don't engage with the underlying issues, then ultimately we will fail, and not just in respect of weightloss, but as human beings, since until that coffin lid is nailed down tight, we will never succeed in sloughing off the pupa skin of a self-obsessed and damaged childhood and emerge as mature functioning adults.

I'm willing to give it a go. How about you?

It's So Easy To Slip................

The text for today's brief sermon is take from the gospel according to St Lowell of George, and the mighty Little Feat, Sailin' Shoes album, 1972. (That being said, Good Ol' Neil - with the nearly equally mighty Crazy Horse - provides an alternative text, and asks a very profound question, for those of us who don't mind a spot of language.)

But to stay with the blessed Lowell, 'It's so easy to slip. It's so easy to fall.' How true these words are. How very true.

For truly, brothers and sisters, it is written that the devil is a wicked cunning devil and he sees deep into the frail hearts and yearnings of men with his big, red, cruel and cynical devilly eye, and he strews our paths with tares and briars, and, in my case, an innocent and unassuming bag of salt peanuts.

It happened like this. Back last Saturday, I dragged my son up to visit his grandmother in the benighted Fen Country where she has insisted on living these past thirty-odd years, probably believing it has some redeeming features (in which delusion she is mistaken, by the way). The pilgrim fathers set sail just a few miles up the road, and I bet they were heartily glad to see the back of it. I have never believed they were running away from religious persecution; they were just sick and tired of living (if such it be called) in a dump like Lincolnshire. (Now you know what Thanksgiving's really all about.)

Anyways, when we were up there, we did a supermarket run for my mother, and I picked up a few items to bring back home, including (and this is where the problem started) a couple of 200gm bags of salt peanuts, much appreciated by my slender wife, who has no need of weight loss, and can face a carbohydrate down at 20 paces.

So, this small bag of groceries was sitting on the back seat of the car, along with a bottle of Evian.

I dropped my son off at a railway station just outside London so he could get home back in the city, while I skipped around the M25 prior to heading south down to the coast.

Shortly after Tristan got out, I fancied an innocent swig of life-enhancing luxury French water, and groped behind me for the bottle. Except what do we think my hand landed on instead?

And what do you think I did about it? Of course I did. Not good. Not good at all.

I shalln't say I gave in without a struggle. But I'll not pretend it was like the second Frazier -Ali rematch, either. Look, I thought about it for maybe ten seconds, felt torn, but resolved the dilemma by saying unto myself 'just the one small handful, then.'

How much self-deceit, duplicity, stupidity and hubris can one man pack into six little words? I've dealt before with the words 'just the one' (ie, 'there's no such thing as....'). Walked straight into the lamp-post, didn't I?

200 grams later, I was struggling to answer that rotten question as I eventually took a refreshing sip of cool Alpine water, washed the nutty, salty crumbs from between my teeth.

There was no justification for eating that bag of nuts. None. It was low, dishonest, self-defeating greed. Nothing more. In fact, it sucked.

In the time of this weight loss project, nearly 7 months in and 125lbs down already, this is the dumbest, baddest, downright twatist thing I've done. In the space of about forty miles, I'd consumed 1200 unnecessary calories and 50gms of unwanted carbs, plus I'd deprived the missus of part of her (very) little treat.

And, if I thought that gorging myself would make me feel good, that didn't work, either. I felt bloody lousy about it (still do).

Despite how self-demeaned I felt, somehow, I managed not to knock myself out of ketosis. Somehow, I managed not to see an immediate, irrevocable (and entirely irrational) massive gain when I stepped on the scales the next day. Above all, somehow, I managed not to eat the other bag and say to hell with it, in for a penny...

But, by goodness, I tell you this: I learned a horribly sobering lesson. I learned once again that, just as with any other addiction, it really, really is one day at a time for us food junkies. No matter how well we're sitting on top of the game, rolling along and pleased with the results, a single moment's lack of vigilance and discipline will send us sliding back toward that abyss whence cometh our fat, shame, and discomfort. Remember the Paresh principle: self-discipline, control and motivation. That's what's worked for him, and kept him slim, fit and healthy, all these years, since he decided he was fed up being a lard-arse. And it has to work for me. And it will work for you: promise.

From this minor but nevertheless shattering catastrophe I've learned that I can, and will, fall: I've done it once, and will doubtless do it again. I do not, however, give myself permission to do so.

Of course, short of wearing a full-blown pukka Opus Dei cilice, I don't know how to stop myself, but I've had my awareness heightened, and I'm not sure I appreciate being fallible. No Sir-ee, Bob. OK, it was a small sin in the scheme of things, and I'm a proper drama queen for even mentioning it, let alone dedicating an entire posting to prodding this minor incident with a stick, but the fact is that it gave me a jolt (as did that last link, by the way. Wasn't that a helluva thing? Did you see the 'special items'? Now, tell me that's not sick. Amen.). It forced me to look at myself, and I was far from pleased by what I saw. Seems that I'm only bloody human after all, and that Ol' Neil knew what he was singing about (here in an alternative version). None of which makes me feel any better, when (as Oscar Brown Jnr so memorably put it back in 1961) I still got so terribly long to go....

The Incredible Shrinking Man Speaks!

Apologies for my silence over the last couple of weeks. I know, you've enjoyed the break, and the peace. Well, fair comment.

I've been hither and yon during that time, and, apart from being fraught with the woes of the day, I've been plagued by connectivity and configuration problems which have managed to strike simultaneously at both of our netpads and also my very smart smartphone. My wife is convinced this stems from me telling Virgin Internet that we no longer required their services in our London home. Somewhere in Notting Hill or Neckar Island, Sir Richard will have pressed the FF button and uncharacteristically maliciously dumped this lot on me. I had a mate, now pretty much capo di tutti capi in the electronic games industry, who was (I think) Branson's number six employee, back when they were still operating out of a lock-up garage off the Portobello Road. I remember Pete telling me way back then 'one day the world will learn you don't fuck with Virgin.' How true.

Anyway, this hitherto pretty shiny day (just dulled over) finds me in trendy Islington, dog snoring gently at my feet, hoping this signal holds up long enough for me to get my word out into the ether, or whatever we're today calling this noumenal realm where we engage in discourse. Plato and Kant are definitely the boys today.

[And definitely is definitely the word. I recently read through a mass posting which had been promulgated by about 800 people, very few of whom had anything to say, but each of whom nonetheless insisted on saying it. They were mostly UK-domiciled, with a sprinkling from what I still quaintly refer to as The Colonies. Nearly all of their submissions included the word definitely. In nearly all of their submissions, the word definitely was spelled incorrectly: the third syllable is not supposed to rhyme with gr8, m8, or even T8 Gallery, nor is it spelled like them. Digression over. Hang the teachers and the parents.]

I have been pondering Plato's notion of perfect forms. Somewhere, if I can get away from these confusing shadows at the back of the cave, there exists a perfectly formed Freddy. However, dropping off the Greek Philosophy 101, I don't have to go searching in the realms of the universals to encounter him. He's bowling towards me, if not as fast as his little legs can carry him, then at least at a sensible lick.

The ideal form of Freddy is not Fat. I am beginning to encounter real live evidence that I am increasingly becoming unfat, and this is the most cheering news. I know I've gone on for ages about the sanctity of the scales, and the need to listen to - and understand - what they tell you, because they never, ever lie. But that's numbers and sums, and most of us are as good at sums as we are at spelling definately, mos' def.

[Incidentally, that reminds me that I need to rave about Graham Farmelo's superb biography of Paul Dirac, 'The Strangest Man', which I've only lately read. Who's Paul Dirac? Read the book!]

No, I'm getting empirical on my case, here. Look at me, folks, and behold FORMERLY Fat Freddy wearing shoes, socks, jeans, a superb denim shirt. See me opening the door to my son last night and hear him say (a month since I saw him) 'Bloody hell, dad, it really does show now.' Oh yes! I was wearing a blue polo shirt, bought on Barbados probably ten years ago - and it was actually a bit big on me!

The jeans and the shirt have to be of similar vintage, and for years I was convinced, if I thought of these things at all, that I would never wear them again.

Well, I'm jolly well wearing them now - but ONLY en passant. It can't happen too quickly that I shed this skin and move down a size more, and on and on toward target. I should have enough clothes stashed away from here on down to where I'm going at 173lbs, and when I get there, my look will be superb. My delectable threads are all waiting for me in the closets (apart from certain Armani and Versace tee-shirts surreptitiously 'borrowed' sometime ago by my wife, along with a couple of my outrageous collection of Tse cashmere sweaters. Put them back, Dear, and there will be no more said!), and I really can not wait to get into them and start strutting my stuff, for strutting I will do since my long-damaged knee is deffinitely and miraculously on the mend.

Not that this jamboree is imminent. Alas, no. I've been away from the scales these last few days, so my numbers aren't going to be up to date. However, there's got still to be about 100lbs more of me than I want. Maybe a little more. But, by Jove, people are noticing the drop to date. The work done thus far (for serious weight loss IS work, no mistake) is really showing, and the supportive feedback is flowing, and this is my trumpet I'm blowing. Because it feels good, after all those negative self-esteem years when feeling good wasn't an option, except I shoved inappropriate grub in my face and poured intemperate quantities of booze down my neck (feeding not just me but my demons and my Jones). Bad shit.

One lovely old boy down at Worthing stopped me when I was out with my dog the other night, and said 'I know it's Lexie, but I'm not sure it's Freddy under that hat.' I was wearing a big hat at the time. He then got himself tied up and embarrassed when trying to compliment me on my weight loss (I was loving hearing it actually!), just in case I was actually riddled with cancer, wasting away, and was wearing the big hat because all my hair had fallen out! It gave me pleasure to put Jim's mind at rest, and I fair danced off into the night whistling a jaunty tune while Lex scanned the beach and the prom for sign of any foxes asking to be killed.

[Hunting foxes with dogs was outlawed in the UK under the Blair government. Which is fine, except nobody has explained it to the dogs. My old girl is an absolute angel. Really is, gentle, kind, pacific, and wise. Until she gets wind or sight of a fox. At that point, 30 million years of enmity erupts from somewhere way back in her doggy brain. Cats, squirrels, seagulls? Nada. Fox? Armageddon. Nature, eh?]

The nub of this ramble is this: by and large, I've been doing the right stuff so far as dumping my 224lbs of unnecessary fat is concerned. I've been seeing good and regular results, being now a bit more than 120lbs less than the nearly 400 where I started. It's just that, when I started (more accurately, when I was trying to find excuses not to start), I was convinced I was too far gone, I would just put myself on a punishing regime and get little result. Most certainly I'd never be seen by anybody else as anything other than Fat Freddy.

Frankly, if I packed it in right now and went over to maintenance at around 280lbs, I would still consider this a wonderful and astonishing result. As my wife said, and I think I shared this with you a couple of weeks ago, 'You used to be obscene. Now you're just fat.' Only I'm not going to pack it in right now. I'm riding this train all the way, and loving it.

I KNOW I'm still fat. Sometimes, I look in the huge wardrobe mirrors in the guest bedroom I use as a dressing room, and I despair at what I see - a big fat bastard, sitting on the edge of the bed surveying rolls of obnoxious lard. But then I get togged up, in better, smarter clothes than I've worn in a decayed decade, and I stand up tall, look again and things aren't too shabby after all (me? A swan? Nah, go on!).

I really don't believe people stop in their tracks any longer to look at me in astonished disgust. Instead it's just a big bloke, yes, but nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to stare at. 42" waist. (One helluva sight better than 60", n'est-ce pas?) Certainly this geezer doesn't look unhealthy, he's walking around OK, not crippled, could do with shifting a bit of weight (which of us couldn't?), but absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. In point of fact, I've cracked it!

Look, we've got nearly fifty stairs running up this four floor Regency house, with another nine steps up from the pavement to the front door. There were 60 good reasons for not coming here. I hated it. Had to haul myself physically up and down stairs using the bannisters and balustrades. Actually, I could hardly lift my foot the height of a riser - pathetic. Now, I want to go up or down stairs, I just do it. Just like that and fiddle-de-dee.

All these benefits when I've still got 100 lbs to go! As the remarkable Professor Brian Cox once helped observe, Things Can Only Get Better. I am looking forward to knocking these pesky pounds off one by one and then we'll see what's what!

[As I wrote that last paragraph, my wife came into the room carrying an old and long-forgotten pair of my dark blue chinos, a pair of really sharp black jeans I remember buying in the TRNC on Christmas Day 1999, and a couple of silly Turkish tee-shirts that I'd missed on my sweeps through the closets of this rather large house. The jeans will be great in a couple of months time. The chinos are bang on right now. The tee shirts were silly, are silly, and ever will be: but I'll probably wear them nonetheless. Couldn't have written any of this last year. By Jiminy, I like this stuff!]

How To Put Weight Back On Without Even Trying

I’ve been somewhat preoccupied these last few days. Hence my silence for which I apologise although many will doubtless be relieved. Doubtless,'twas ever thus.

Anyway, I had a nasty turn, which caused me a degree of irrational anxiety when, a week ago today, I stepped on the scales, whistling a jaunty tune and with my entirely metaphorical hat on the side of my head, when looking down, brimming with confidence and bonhomie, I was horrified to discover....that I’d put on a pound. That’s what.

Now, I know there’s a body of opinion which decries my slavish adherence to the scales, which doubtless parallels my devotion to the WMCA Good Guys’ Fabulous 57 during my rocking and rolling adolescence. I’ve seen the arguments nowhere better put than here, boldly headed Why The Scale Lies.

Only I think what’s being ‘economical with the actualité’ in this instance is that headline itself: the scales don’t lie. They report what is: nothing more. One of the things they don’t do is interpret 'it' for you. One of the things we’re constantly doing as intelligent sentient beings is receiving and processing an endless barrage of information about the world we live in. Every minute of our lives, we are wildly busy interpreting our experience of the world, and making useful sense of it. I don’t see any reason to stop doing that when we step on the scales. The scales tell us what’s happening, and it’s up to us to work out both the how and the why. So we need to pause, take a minute, and work out what it is the scales are telling us - but whatever it is, they're not lying!

Fine and dandy.

It took me another 24 hours, and the addition of another four pounds, before the penny even began to drop with me: in the meantime, I was quietly panicking. I had put on five pounds in less than 48 hours. Not right at all. Since I started down the weight loss road last June, I had only twice put on weight: firstly during my three weeks in the gastronomic heart of France, and again over Christmas and New Year. An entirely forgivable two pounds each time; easily dealt with.

This time, though, I’d changed nothing on the carb or calorific fronts ,and even (let’s be indelicate for a moment) allowing for the overall physical balance of solid inputs and outputs, this did not make sense. There was only one possible answer: I’d started soaking up water like a sponge with an Irish navvy's thirst on him. Not that I’d been dehydrated to start with; everything had been normal. I was eating and drinking to plan, and the weight was going down at a rate that all concerned parties (me, my Fat Club counsellor, the doctors, my wife and dog) were happy with. So what was going on. Intellectually I knew that this could only be water. Nothing else it could be. I knew it could be dealt with. I just didn’t know why it was happening, or how I had to deal with it, and it was scary: I’ve invested an awful lot of my psychic capital into making this weight loss work, and suddenly my mind was roaming free and coming up with

Eventually the bleedin’ obvious button lit up and throbbed. Something had changed in my little world (Don Camillo reference intended). A day or two before I woke to see the weight increase on the non-lying scales, the doctor had changed my blood pressure medication. One of my weight loss spin-off goals is that, when I get to target, I’ll have licked my blood pressure back into shape and I’ll be able to drop the pills for good. My BP has already improved significantly by the removal of what is thus far 120lbs of unsightly fat from my greatly relieved (and thereby de-stressed) frame. The medics decided they could now safely change my medication to a lighter formulation. What they forgot to mention was that they were moving me from something which had a mildly diuretic effect to a tablet which is known, in a small percentage of users, to encourage…..(you’ve guessed it)….water retention. And, by Jove, I was retaining like a parched Saharan camel at a remote desert oasis.

The phone call went through to the doctor just gone eight on Monday morning. And his decision was immediate. A new script was written and the astonishing nine pounds I’d put back on, started to flow away, like the spring at the end of Jean De Florette.

Now, this is no big deal in the doings of the world. It’s not up there with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but for those few days (indeed, really until yesterday, when I knew that things had sorted themselves out, and that I’d actually managed to lose two pounds underneath this aquatically retentive carry on), my concern was, to quote the wonderful Damon Runyon, ‘more than somewhat.’

I’m pretty certain that some people (and I’d include myself in this, during my less determined periods) would have used this as an excuse for giving up. Let’s be ungenerous: anybody trawling the weight loss forums will too often encounter whiny and self-pitying messages (cue Captain Beefheart for those so inclined) posted by people feeling overwhelmed and daunted by the stones they think they’re seeing in their pathway. It strikes me we have a duty of care to refuse to pander to these absolutely common frailties, and to take the same view demanded by those bloody, rotten scales: ‘look, it is what it is, and we just have to make sense of things and get on with it. And don’t think it’s going to be easy and not ask stuff of you, since you’re looking to change things that have become really fundamental in the constitution and make up of You.’ No one said it’s going to be easy (or if they did, they was a-lyin’ atcha, and like the Ministry of Information told us in the gloomy days of 1939 (and as I've mentioned here before), just Keep Calm And Carry On (but don’t hesitate to check in with the docs, if things aren’t running to plan).

And every day you will become stronger and more assured and assertive in being you. You must be prepared to make demands of your significant others: that they fit in with your fads, fancies and especially your refusals as you make your weary way back down. You’ll have to explain it to them, and more than once, but it really will become easier and they will come to understand more and to positively buy in whooping for joy, as they see your return to health and also to a much more manageable size.

I had a Tweet yesterday from the Dalai Lama (nice of him), which I think says it all, in 140 characters or less:

‘Genuine love should first be directed at oneself – if we do not love ourselves, how can we love others?’

This weight loss project we’ve all signed up to is very much an adult ‘me-time’, and it involves us all gradually coming to terms with the simple but astounding fact that, really, we’re each one of us all right after all. Actually, it's a key ingredient of the mix. If we don’t get that bit sorted out this time around, we’ll be yo-yoing back up in no time - fated to fatness.

And surely we’ve all got better things to do with our time?

Apropos of absolutely nothing and only for those of us with a taste for the singularly odd, a morsel from YouTube I found only yesterday, being Vivian Stanshall and Roger Ruskin-Spear in the very short-lived biG Grunt (sic), Eleven Mustachioed Daughters, lord protect us all.

Till the next time, by which times our biG GRunt induced nightmares may have stopped,

Your old pal,

Fred

It's Fat Club Tonight And Spring Is In The Air!

Another Tuesday, another meeting of Fat Club. Maybe three pounds, maybe four gone? There's still four hours before I step on them scales, with much of the trepidation the ancient Egyptian's ka must have felt when brought by Anubis into the Hall of Ma'at.

The discipline of Fat Club and the pressure to perform, to have something to show as evidence of my self denial, this is ridiculously important to me.

Even though I have my own excel spreadsheet detailing every pound lost, how many gone thus far, how many still to go, %age to target, %age total bodyweight lost, Body Mass Index, and however many other facets I can dream up to admire, record and celebrate the fact of my weight loss, I still love the validation of standing on someone else's scales, in a public place, and having them write those magic descending numbers down in my official book. Sort of validating somehow; authoritative. It just feels good. Even though it's not the only time of the week I step onto scales.

Hardly! I've never been OCD before, apart, of course, from keeping all my CDs in absolutely strict alphabetical order, but that's a straightforward and very practical thing: when you get into the multi-thousands (and I hesitate to tell you quite how many), if discs aren't filed properly, you'll either 1) spend hours searching for the tune you need to hear NOW, or 2) end up buying another copy of that album you could've sworn you had on CD but haven't wanted to play in years, or (most usually) 3) end up buying another copy of an album you already have but couldn't put your hands on just then so you convinced yourself you didn't have it after all and that you really needed it.

Sad, eh?

My son has done very well out of this third tendency over the years, particularly when I was still drinking. The combination of a bottle or two of wine, the Amazon website, a credit card, and a mouse is extremely dangerous. Most recently, he's got a double CD of Albert Ayler live in Greenwich Village on Impulse, the complete recordings version; not a cheap error on my part, dammit!

Anyway, having dealt with my long-standing bit of OCD, let me tell you about my new one: running off to the bathroom, stripping off and jumping on the scales. Three or four times a day when I'm at home, more on Tuesdays. Fat Club later, you see. Need to encourage myself toward thinness.

I know there's plenty of Jeremiahs out there who will say 'it's really not about the numbers on the scales, it's about turning useless fat into healthy muscle and improving body mass and tone, and this will inevitably slow your weight loss down, but this is a good thing really, blah-de-blah.' It's not difficult to find this attitude: it's been represented on every weight loss forum I've ever peeked in on, and there are a million build-you-uppo web sites blasting out the same news.

Which is good news, yes, but.......... the but being I really don't have the time for this. It's an alien mentality so far as I'm concerned, one which just doesn't understand the visceral shock you feel when you eventually become conscious that you really are nigh on 400lbs! Imagine waking up like James Bond in Doctor No, to find a tarantula crawling across you. Most of us are not James Bond, cold blooded killer, and would simply react by wanting that thing off of our bodies IMMEDIATELY and doing whatever it takes to get the bastard thing gone, never mind that there's a more sensible, controlled and safer way of waiting until it had gone its own leisurely way in its own spiderly time (don't scare it and it won't bite you).

Well, I feel exactly the same about my fat as most of us would about a hairy-arsed poisonous arachnoid crawling across our chest: I want it off me, and I want it off now. And once it's gone I want never to see it again. Ever!

Which is not irresponsibly to ignore the general fitness issues, and the need to build up good muscle tissue in lieu of ugly, useless fat. I can not (will not) speak for anybody else, but my view on this one is simple, albeit possibly wrong-headed, but at least I can with (some presumed)justification claim to be borrowing from the wisdom of Solomon (Ecclesiastes,3: 1-8): this here is the time for breaking down. The time for building up will follow, and it won't be ignored! First break down the fat (we just loves a spot of ketosis!), then build up the fitness. Generally raise the tone around here, if you know what I mean.

When I started this weight loss thing, I must admit to being well-irked when my wife told me that a friend had said to her that my weight had gone too far, that I hadn't thought through what I was doing in terms of shedding it, and that it was bound to fail, didn't understand about portion control, and would probably cause myself irreparable health damage en route. Talk about Jeremiahs, eh? Massively encouraging.

This really upset and angered me at the time well-meaning though it doubtless was. In fact, right from before I ever actually started down the LighterLife path because, I had my cunning plan all laid out. You see, I've long accepted (though admittedly not always practised) the age-old maxim that 'failing to plan is planning to fail.

At the risk of repeating myself, I went the radical LL food replacement route because: 1) I needed a clear break from my existing pattern of eating (and drinking): 2) I needed a diet that would kick-start me quickly so I'd be seeing immediate results that would hook in my competitive spirit and reward my effort (or abstinence): and 3) it would enable me to move swiftly to the point where my weight actually registered on the excellent home scales I was too damned heavy to use (thereby, as it proved, opening the door to my ongoing and awfully-OCD weighathons). This last point meant that, if I wished, I'd be able to step back as soon as possible from total immersion in the LL route, and assume responsibility for managing my own weight loss. In other words the exact opposite of what my friend seems to have assumed.

Mine's really not a complicated plan as plans go. Hardly a patch on Operation Overlord, for instance, but it suits my purpose, is working pretty well, and I'm just about 20lbs away from bringing one of its next not-at-all-complicated elements into play: exercise.

My stupid ex-doctor told me shortly before I sacked him and me when I was still 400lbs that I should swim every day. In the Channel? In a gale? In midwinter? After you, doc. Anyone with a brain cell could tell that this wasn't going to happen. Down in the garage, I have my bike. I'm not riding it now because my weight is still be sufficient to possibly blow the tyres out but more importantly, and much more indelicately, there is the plain unavoidability of what Fugmeister Ed Sanders once referred to as 'the testicular torture inherent in the Levi problem', more accurately in this case in 'the saddle problem': all that weight bearing down on a sensitive point squeezed on a cycle saddle? Eye-wateringly nasty.

[Mention of The Fugs leads me into the following trumpet-blowing detour. Last night, watching University Challenge, one of the questions began 'Which 1956 poem begins with the words...' whereupon I immediately started reciting in perfect time with Paxman, 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, I saw the best minds of my generation rot.' I was delighted to be able to not just answer the question, but do so before the bloody thing had even been asked. Evidence of a magnificently and properly mis-spent youth!]

Back to the plan.

In about six weeks time, I'll haul the bike into the back of the car, and take it round to the local bike shop, Michael's Cycles (which is an emporium of all things on two-wheels, straight out of my 50's childhood, unchanged and immaculate). I'll get them to give it the sort of thoroughgoing service that only a bike a decade ignored in the back of a garage ever requires, and, if we're sitting comfortably, then I'll begin. One of the many deep joys of living on the West Worthing sea front is having direct access to about four or five miles of dedicated, flat, traffic-free cycle path right outside running up and down the promenade. About five years ago I was peeved when the council spent a couple of hundred grand putting it in, but I'm certainly going to get a return on my tax-money this year.

It strikes me that the prom and I are going to extend and deepen our relationship big style over the next while (my hitherto dodgy - but gradually improving - right knee permitting), which should bring limitless beneficial effects as I continue my long old downward route towards landing in weight loss target heaven.

As that holy place approaches, I shall gradually start to address the many other bits of my body requiring attention, and shift my mass so that the 173lbs I will be, comprises more muscle and less fat. I accept that I will never, ever be Mr Apollo, can never hope to 'wrestle poodles and win', no more would I wish to, crikey, no. But I will be slim, fit, and healthy (the long list of nasty illnesses I haven't got surprises and delights me: how have I managed to get away with it?), and this will all be happening for me soon. Because I'll be making it happen.

In fact, it's already happening a little bit more every day. Each ounce lost makes its contribution, by taking away another little bit of the stress I've forced my body endure all these years. Day by day, I'm getting well.

If you're doing what you need to do to shed your own lard too, then so are you. We deserve congratulation, so let's give each other the clap we deserve. That could have been better expressed, but you know what I mean.

I've lately taken to peeking in mirrors. Not exactly sneaking admiring sideways glances, let along asking 'who is the fairest of us all?', but at least acknowledging the things are there. This is after years of pointedly ignoring them (a clever trick, since we have some very large mirrors in our places; mentally blanked them out. Didn't WANT to see what was filling the frame). Sometimes now, when I look in the really huge eight-foot tall, ten foot wide mirrors on the doors of the spare bedroom wardrobe, I see quite a decently proportioned bloke, not too damaged for his age, decent head of hair, reasonable face.

Other times I see a big lardy lump of unremitting fat bastard. My difficulty is in controlling which me I happen to see at any given time: can't do it. The one thing I know for sure is that, whichever image I see, I won't tolerate it getting any bigger - ever again. And I'm genuinely determined to be seeing less of me in the future.

The annoying thing is the 'to see ourselves as others see us' bit. While I spend most of the time being pleased with the way things are going, and friends can say (as one did the other week having just returned from three months 'out east', 'where's the rest of you, then?', everybody else who sees me still sees a big fat dollop who ought to take himself in hand and get sorted. They don't know what I've done already and that, by George, there ain't no stopping me now. Let's face it, we know from bitter and humiliating experience that people don't want to see big fat folk all over the place, taking up too much room. Here's a secret, neither do I for that matter. Nothing so damning and condemnatory as a recent convert, is there? But really, none of us needs be fat any longer. We have the power to fix it. Just got to tap in, get the strength.

The excellent Mama Sebo and I pondered this in-the-world's-eyes perception problem some while ago, that maybe we should all wear large badges announcing to the world 'You think I'm fat now? Blimey but you should have seen me 6 months ago!' Because that's pretty much how long I've been doing this now. My one regret is that I didn't start earlier.

Correct that: my regret is that I wasn't able to - couldn't persuade myself to - start earlier. Water under the bridge: I started when I did, and it's going well - 116lbs less than I used to be, 108lbs more than I want to be, but moving forward. Maybe I'll get a result when I do my daily scheduled definitive 7pm weigh this evening - that's the one that really counts for me, what do I way before supper time?

Then it'll be 8pm and off with the chaps at Fat Club, to compare notes and congratulate each other on another week of incremental success. Get some nicely reduced numbers inscribed in my book, evidence that I'm gradually winning this war: we're away from the beaches now, and pressing on into the Normandy countryside, with no stopping until we've trampled this fat thing in the mud once and for all.

There's a strengthening light today, and a clear scent of something new on the warm south westerly air. The first snowdrops are starting to open in the garden. These last couple of nights, a blackbird has been singing his little heart out when Lexie and I have been out around midnight, because a dog has her grands et petits besoins, as the French so delicately put it, you know. The year is renewing itself, same as I am. Winter won't be done with us yet, even in our sheltered littoral micro-climate (though I hope, if it has to come back, that it spares our blackbird who deserves his summer). But you get a strong sense of the spring that is coming. That's when I'll be out there pedalling my bike along that prom like a good (and slimmer) 'un.

What will you be doing to celebrate your spring, because it's going to be joyous being lighter and healthier than last year?

Even starting with real commitment today, you'll be in time to make a difference, so don't hang about: get to it and start getting healthy.

I'm really looking forward to Fat Club tonight. No question but a bit of positive group reinforcement works a treat, and will help anyone toward their goal. It's helping me. If you can find a way of getting some for yourself, I strongly recommend it.

Till the next time,

Your old pal,

Fred


PS Couldn't wait. Sneaked an early look on the scales. Another pound gone. Which means a five-pound week. Deep joy, deep joy!

THERE'S PLENTY MORE FISH IN THE SEA - NOT! [Not About Slimming - But Instead About Healthy Eating - And This Really Is So Important]

Forgive me if I go off-topic in this particular post, but I am angry, and I want you to become angry too. Wherever you live, this story affects you, because different versions of it are being played out around the world as attempts are made to balance fish conservation, sustainability, consumer demand, and commercial fishing.

Over the last three evenings, TV viewers in the UK have been shocked by TV chef (River Cottage) Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's latest programme, Hugh's Fish Fight.

Rather than his usual bucolic slant on living in the West Country, producing or catching all his own food and cooking it well, this short series opened with him out on the cold North Sea on a Scottish trawler, where he revealed how the scandal of the ill-conceived European Union Common Fisheries Policy results in nearly half the fish caught off our shores being thrown back into the seas, dead, with video to prove it.

Under the policy, quotas are set limiting how much of a particular species can be caught. These quotas determine the harvest for each nation, and this filters down to the level of each individual boat. Every skipper knows, for instance, how much haddock he is allowed to land in a year. These levels are set to preserve fish stocks in the North Sea. Surely this is a good thing?

The problem is that no-one's explained it to the fish.

The fisherman has no idea, when he casts his nets over the side, what he's going to haul up. By the time the catch hits the deck, it's either dead or dying. Now if a 15lb cod, say, happens to land on the deck of a boat that has already landed its annual quota of cod, the crew have no option but to throw that already dead fish back in the sea. To land it is a criminal offence, and the quotas are rigidly policed.

The film showed nearly half the catch going over the side, trawl after trawl. This was good fish that could feed people. The argument is that the quota system as presently set is unsustainable and ends up depleting the fish stocks it was intended to protect.

The solution is not that fishermen are looking for an unrestricted free for all, but that the policy must be reset so they are allowed to land what they catch, ending the scandal of the so-called discard and bycatch. The expect to be restricted in other ways: number of days fishing per annum, gross weight of catch per annum, whatever. For our part, we must start to change our eating habits which result in the greater part of the fish we presently eat being taken from just a handful of species, while the oceans abound with vast numbers of species we could eat just as happily - particularly if they too moved to more sustainable methods of fishing, and if we were prepared to learn the simple lesson of 'eat what gets caught' rather than insisting on the very few fish we already know. There's plenty good eating, new flavours, textures, recipes, waiting to be found - and it's protein rich, carb free and healthy.

So, I'm asking you to go to the Fish Fight website and sign the petition which will go to the EU and let them know we are disgusted with what they are allowing to happen in their waters. You can do this wherever you live, and the buggers need to be told. There is video on the site of discard being dumped overboard: it makes me feel sad, sick and angry to watch. As I look out of my window onto the English Channel this morning, I can see a couple of small trawlers working a mile or so offshore. Having seen the programme, I now understand why we'll often find dead fish down on the shoreline, and why our seagulls are getting so large: somewhere between 40 and 60% of what I am watching being caught will be dumped back in the water in minutes.

This is wrong and must be stopped.

Of course, the final programme went to Brussels where Hugh tried to button-hole the politicians and commissioners asking them to revisit their policy.

The arrogance of their patronising responses was itself a disgrace. I wanted to take a dead cod and slap it round the faces particularly of the Belgian who told Hugh he was a dreamer who ought to wake up, and the Dane who denied that discard even happened. Well it does. We've seen the evidence, and it must be stopped. And these shits really need to be reminded who it is they work for, so they really do deserve to be told.

Go to the Fish Fight site, please, and register your objection.

Thanks for your time today.

Back to the slimming stuff soon.

Your very incensed old pal,

Fred

WHAT ABOUT ME?

I don’t have any fear whatsoever about how I will behave when I approach my target and start lifting my foot from the diet pedal.

It’s going to be manageable, because I know my head is now sufficiently together that I’ll be able to control the transition from a very low calorie intake to a moderate and reasonable, well balanced, carb-sensitive intake ( and hopefully without me becoming too obsessive about the thing). What I’ve learned is the simple and undeniable lesson of the scales: whenever that figure shows an increase, however small that be, then it’s up to me to control the input until the issue is resolved. Nothing more complicated than that. Is it?

However, one thought that’s nagging me is this: given that I reach my target, and I maintain that successfully and painlessly for a while, say, for instance, I go on holiday, eat reasonably but perhaps a little more freely than usual, and get back to discover a ten or twelve pound gain. Yes, I’m confident that I could adjust my behaviour and pull that weight down, but I’m worrying about what my body might at that stage be telling me. Ultimately, I’m worrying about what my body might already once have told me, a message I might not have been prepared to receive and understand.

And I’ll say right here that if some of what follows appears to contradict in part what I wrote slagging nutritionists in my last post, well, that’s how it is. When I write these things I’m usually feeling white hot and passionate, an evangelist for my cause (which is ultimately, selfishly, focussed primarily upon my own weight loss and reclaiming my own health: how could it be otherwise, though I’m happy for everyone that reads my rantings to reclaim their own health as enthusiastically as I race toward my goals). The trouble is that, enflamed though I be, much of the time I’m groping my way in the dark, armed only with scraps of (frequently imprecise or conflicting) information to guide me, the experience of having gone through this process once before and knowing the what (if not the how) of the likeliest pitfalls, the determination not to have to endure this again for ANY reason, and an intelligent instinct which I just hope isn’t leading me astray….

So, what’s this caginess all about? Why am I coming among you today less than Bible-thumpingly positive than usual?

Because I’m a bit worried and a trifle scared, and it’s time I owned up to it because it’s a fear that isn’t going to go away, I don’t know if it’s really real, or whether I’ve managed to convince myself there’s a bogieman in the cupboard. But I am worried in case there really is a bogieman in the cupboard. My cupboard.

One of Neil Young’s greatest songs is The Needle And The Damage Done, which is Old Neil’s song about Crazy Horse’s Danny Whitten’s descent into heroin addiction and ultimately death. (The video, by the way, is taken from The Johnny Cash Show in 1971). Well, there’s no way I’m claiming parity with any of that, but there are words which keep going round inside my head, with a rising, interrogative inflection: ‘the diet and the damage done?’ I wonder……

We all know that most weight loss projects crash and burn. Either people don’t get where that wanted to be, or they get there and yo-yo back to and usually beyond where they started from. People like me, in fact. I eventually ended up a sickening 84lbs heavier than before I started shedding weight. There’s plenty of research out there suggests this happens to more than 90% of slimmers, with all the weight and more coming back after a period (typically between two and five years), and with that increase increasing each time we complete the circle. OK, so this time I have to be in the less than 10% that succeed; that’s obvious. Same for you, right?

So how can we make sure that happens for us?

For a start, we need to make certain that, while we’re on our way down, we do not use our diet programme either to lift us out of or immunise ourselves from our regular daily life, using it as an excuse to disengage. Instead we would do better to be upfront about it and consciously integrate our diet into (and thereby fundamentally amend) our established way of life. You know, the same one that got us fat to start with!

For instance, look on any weight loss forum, and you’ll see panicky messages like one I saw yesterday which said, ‘I’m doing the Atkins diet, but my boyfriend wants to take me to an Italian restaurant on Saturday. What can I do?’ We all recently had a bout of heart (and conscience) searching over how we would handle the Christmas / New Year festivities. These seemingly big events are really part of what we do, regularly: there’s nothing big deal or exceptional about them, except they appear to rub up against and threaten the strict dietary precepts we’re struggling to maintain, whereas in reality it’s just a management and information thing, non-threatening and easily dealt with.

OK, so we might have an issue here regarding perspective that needs to be addressed. Because what it suggests is that we haven’t yet successfully completed the shift in our perception, understanding and feelings regarding food in order to have completely changed and rebalanced our relationship with food. I suspect that most of us (me included) never will; not completely. We’ll never be rid of our addictions and instead must prepare ourselves for a lifetime not of abstinence, nor of denial, but rather of vigilance and care.

Otherwise when your foot does come off the control pedal, we’ll just drift back to our old ways and we’ll start to gain again, and we’ll be back with the same old lies, justifications and delusions. Pointless. It’s like the worry I’ve had about VLC diets like LighterLife (much as it’s been wonderful for me), where you get isolated from normal eating for the abstinent period of your weight loss, and it’s then up to your counsellor to help manage you back to a new and dramatically improved eating regime as you gradually (and often gingerly) step away from the powders.

It more and more strikes me that managing that transference, if I dare borrow and mangle a concept from classical Freudian psychiatry, back to sustainable, healthy moderate eating is by far the hardest part of the jigsaw: also the most important. But are we perhaps playing a game where the dice are loaded, and not in our favour?

I’ve written at length before, and doubtless will again, that a major key to successful weight loss is much more to do with what’s going on in your head than what’s going in your mouth. How? Well, what you put in your mouth is a direct function of the decisions and choices you make in your head. You choose what to eat, and it helps if you understand why you make those choices, both the good ones and the really bloody disastrous ones. Of course, the trouble is that some of what goes on in there is really deep-rooted and unconscious. It’s unsettling to realise that there is little more occluded from us than things going on inside our own brains, and that we are being driven to action by forces which are inside ourselves and frequently battling against our own perceived better interests. Having written that last sentence, I look at the word ‘unsettling’ and decide that’s one of my all time great understatements. This stuff is scary.

We can each of us analyse it plus or minus to the best of our own abilities, but really being confident you’ve got this one licked requires a degree of self-knowledge only a few of us can muster, or probably would want; and even then we might be missing a really crucial trick, as we’ll see later. On the top layer, then, I am confident, so far as it is within my control, that I’ll be able to manage, but equally I know it’s very likely to be an ongoing struggle. I’m certain I’ll never be able to let slip the reins, kick back and relax (don’t do it!). Back to the Paresh Principle, mentioned at length in earlier posts: my mate Paresh has maintained his weight all these years by SDCM, self- control, discipline, and motivation, and it’s a pattern I know I have to emulate. It’s the only way I can even hope to keep those demons secure in the corral and prevent myself from laying down more fat stocks all over again.

I have to stress that what we end up eating is one of a large and inter-related number of lifestyle choices, including becoming less sedentary, and we have to become much more conscious of how they’re inter-related and the way consequences of one chunk of behaviour manifest themselves elsewhere.

Successful long-term maintenance of weight loss requires that we understand how to avoid putting ourselves unprepared into situations with the potential to start us spiralling out of control. For my part, there are things I will avoid for the rest of my life, from MacDonalds to alcohol and umpteen unsavoury stops in between. Except, truth to tell, every second Saturday morning around 10am, I pull into MacDonalds at Eye, just outside Peterborough. en route to visiting my mother. I invariably order up a large coffee, no milk, no sugar. And that’s all. Their coffee (in the UK, at least) is very good, and it’s a convenient place on the journey to pause for a minute or two. I certainly never hear myself ordering up a Big Breakfast or a Sausage and Egg MacMuffin to accompany my tasty beverage. I simply don’t want their foul food. It doesn’t cross my mind that I might. It’s a useful little test, though. Long may I continue passing it!

But I seem to be avoiding talking about this bogieman, don’t I? I’ll press on. Bear with me.

So, you have to change your behaviour to lose weight, and amend your lifestyle to keep it off. I have advocated, and still do, radical dieting, because I believe it’s important for our fat person’s self-esteem and motivation to pile in hard and see ongoing and substantial results in a reasonably short period of time. As I wrote in my last blog, with the 224 lbs I had to lose (just over half gone, now!), it would have taken me a decade at the rate a nutritionist advised to reach the weight she was telling me I needed to be. Didn’t make sense. Hence I continue to walk (or rather trot down) the radical road. I also mentioned in my last blog that I’d had really nasty pancreatitis some years ago. I was told at the time that the pain levels associated with that particular illness are as bad as it gets, on a par with (quote) ‘some cancers and major abdominal gun-shot wounds.’ Pain relief was something of an issue. The staff at the first hospital I was in were incredibly stingy with the injections because they didn’t want me to get addicted to morphine, irrespective of the fact that I was suffering in mortal agony I can not begin to describe. When I was transferred away from their dubious care to the hospital which actually cured me, and to which I am ever indebted, the attitude was ‘you’re in agony and will be for some time while we get you sorted out. Take all the pain relief you need. We’ll deal later with any problems arising.’ It’s a similar deal with the diet: get the weight gone, tackle the lifestyle changes to help ensure it works. Kushti?

So what is it I’m worrying about with this ‘the diet and the damage done’ stuff?

I’m concerned that I might, in my ignorance, have exposed myself to a couple of significant problems, most particularly that I might have done some long-term damage to my metabolism as a result of switching on the so-called starvation response. Since I have now twice severely restricted my calorific input, this handy primeval survival mechanism has, presumably, kicked in and as a result my body no longer needs the, say, 2500 calories it once required every day in order just to maintain a steady weight. The problem is, if this mechanism is in operation, I don’t know how to switch the bloody thing off again when I approach my target! So, target is achieved, I resume regular eating, and, even allowing for SCDM, I come out of my comfortable ketosis and, as a direct effect of the continuing starvation response, I wake up to encounter an ongoing and nigh irresistible heightened craving for highly calorific and probably sweet foods? Is this what I have to look forward to?

Given that I’ve already done this weight loss thing once, and then stupidly increased my weight subsequently, could it be that my dang fool metabolism never reset itself back to its default position? Was that in itself sufficient to open once and for all an unclosable door and to propel me through it to ongoing record fat and weight gain?

To extend my paranoia even further, could it have now happened that, by engaging in a second bout of radical weight loss for a lengthy period, I might have depressed my metabolism still further from an already low level? And how reduced is reduced, anyway?

I don’t know, and I don’t really know that I want to know. [Yes, I do. Ed] I do, however, know that it’s of significant concern to me, and in the dark moments it’s just not the same as hearing my reassuring confident, competent gastroenterology consultant all those years ago telling me not just relax and that we’d ‘deal later with any problems arising.’

Everything I said at the beginning of this about how I was confident I could manage to maintain once I reached target? Whistling in the dark, really. I’m absolutely not prepared to let myself yo-yo, but could this end up being a real struggle for the rest of my life? My homo sapiens head is definitely in the right place to get the weight lost once and for all, but could it be that there are things happening deep down in my lizard brain which are working away trying to subvert my good, conscious determined intentions. And how the hell do I fix that one? Got a pill, anybody? [Note to self: much more research called for. Get digging! In the alternative, see below.]

I used to have an Irish consultant geriatrician friend who counselled her heavy old customers that ‘there were no fat people in Belsen, you know’, which I translate as meaning ‘eat less, you greedy gobshite’. Very to the point – and downright tasteless - some doctors can be; but that was her regular line, so I report it. (Which reminds me of a joke I was told by a nurse whilst she was curing me of the pancreatitis: Q. What’s the difference between god and a doctor? A. God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.). I also used to have as a client a charitable organisation which provided residential care for elderly Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps, many of whom I met over the years. I remember only one of them being fat. The rest were frail, elderly, but quite evidently regular-sized. Surely – apart from every other consideration - their dietary privations, over an inconceivably longer period than mine, were incredibly worse than what I am voluntarily putting myself through: their starvation responses would very much have been switched on. Am I worrying myself about nothing? Then again, my father-in-law survived the Soviet Gulags (wasn’t the last century a corker, eh?). It was every bit as bad as you’d read in Solzhenitsyn (if anybody these days still read Solzhenitsyn. We should). Now, Władek, bless him, did have weight issues and he eventually developed diabetes. Lived in freedom until he was 84. But equally I met plenty of his old Polish Air Force pals who never plumped up, and these were blokes that loved to eat and who certainly knew how to drink. Polish spirit, anyone?

Where to turn? So I continue worrying…. but I remain completely determined to do whatever it takes to avoid that accursed weight gain rebound. Remember, one of the aims of this blog is to hunt down effective strategies to ‘kiss goodbye to yo-yo you. Yo-yo me, too! And this point’s really got me pondering.

Then again, it appears there is a serious body issue beyond my control which, irrespective of my intention and behaviour, is likely to determine whether or not I’m going to start piling the pounds back on despite my will. According to a study recently published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, we’re talking here about my levels of the appetite-related hormones leptin and ghrelin. Which is interesting because I’ve only lately learned that I have leptin and ghrelin at all.

Now, however, I am absolutely desperate to have low leptin and high ghrelin. They are this year’s must-have levels. Quandry: should I rush round to the doctor now and get my bloods done? Can’t do anything about it, but at least I’d know where I stand (or fall). As Neil Young’s compadre Stephen Stills wrote all those years ago, ‘paranoia strikes deep’!

Apparently we each respond to this potential rebound thing in a way which is ‘predetermined by (our) own characteristics.’ Handy.

Ana Belén Crujeiras, lead author of the study and a doctor at the University Hospital Complex of Santiago tells us that ‘Some obese or overweight patients who gain more weight following a diet could even be identified before they embark on their weight-loss therapy, just by looking at their plasma levels of these hormones.’

Now she tells me. So much, potentially, for my good intentions….

Doctor Crujeiras goes on to explain that more exhaustive studies in the future should result in the ability to design individual weight loss programmes which would guarantee no more yo-yoing, assuming the punters ate sensibly thereafter. I.e., like what I’ve already committed to do (is there anyone up there listening?).

Which is all gung-ho and jolly dee for the future but, bloody hell, WHAT ABOUT ME?

Till next time,

Your panicky old pal,

Fred

I Demand A Refund!

Going out on Saturday morning, pulling a couple of discs from the shelves to play in the car, happened upon Curtis Mayfield doing a live session for BBC Radio 1, back in 1990 (a collectors' rarity, it was nice just now to see the price its going for on Amazon, given that I picked up my copy in a charity shop - how on earth did it find it's way there? Surely, it would only ever have been bought by a fellow collector, and our records do not end up in charity shops. Ever. - for £1 or £1.50). Everything was going fine until we came upon that great song from the Superfly soundtrack, Freddie's Dead. I know it's different from Freddy's Dead, but most unsettling nevertheless. When I got back home, just felt I had to immerse myself in blaxploitation soundtracks for a while: I believe it's rather good for one's soul periodically so to do, so down I most definitely got. Good God, y'all.

In yesterday's Sunday Times, there was a lengthy feature on the work of the 'grandfather of the paleolithic diet' Arthur De Vany, accompanied by a very interesting set of photographs of a naked young cave-woman, who was obviously doing well on the diet. I'd give you a link to the online version of the Sunday Times, but Rupert don't allow no free looks no more. I notice that Arthur charges for access to most of his site too. I know the guy's got a lot of credibility regarding his ideas and that, and that he is an astonishing physical specimen for any age let alone 72, but I'm not sure there's that much taste around, judging by the photos (those jeans, those shoes, etc). That shouldn't make any difference, I know, but it does. It's the way I'm wired, I suppose. However, I really must retract them claws and say that I was intrigued by what I read and look forward to diving into his recent book The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging (a title straight out of the school of Ted Nicholas, but there you go). I suppose there's a bit inside me that doesn't feel comfortable with the rah-rah of marketing hucksterism: as soon as I see people trying to employ the well-honed techniques on me, I start to get very suspicious about how else they might be trying to manipulate me. Maybe I was born paranoid, or was it growing up through the Cold War, or perhaps I never quite got over reading The Hidden Persuaders at the age of 14. Whatever, I respond better when people talk reasonably to me, and get my quills raised when they shout.

I was talking very reasonably one night last week with a consultant surgeon working with the illnesses affecting fat folk in my part of West Sussex.

He seemed to be largely in agreement with the ideas I read over the weekend in Gary Taubes' new book Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It. It certainly seems that the tide has turned on the simplistic low calories / low fat myth. I always suspect that subtle solutions deliver a truer reading than any broad brush approach, and I'm not convinced that weight loss is really down to a tussle between low cals and low carbs, but the critical importance of carbohydrate limitation is certainly establishing itself as part of the orthodox pantheon, much to the annoyance of the many who have done very well for themselves out of misinterpreting the science for so many years, and thereby living well off the fat of the land.

This is my second time in weight loss (and today is a day of minor celebration: I have lost 112lbs, leaving only 112 to go - downhill all the way to target!). The first time I got within a few pounds of where I wanted to be and plateaued, dammit. That was going down restricting only calories.... I did a bit of research and discovered Dr Atkins (and this was around a dozen years ago, before the explosion). I tried to make the thing work, but had one or two difficulties: basically I couldn't understand quite how to translate what I ws reading to what I had to put on my plate. When I went to my available health care professionals (both mainstream and alternative) seeking advice, guidance and support (you know the kind of helpful thing - no online forums in those days, you see), they warned me to run away from that dangerous charlatan as quickly as I could before he killed me with his dangerous quackery. Gee thanks, you guys. The upshot being I never quite reached where I was going, and, after a period of stability, I started that inexorable climb all over again, double dammit.

My consultant chum told me that, in his profession as a whole - not just his specialism - the big bogie man of the moment is diabetes. OK, this shouldn't come as a bombshell to anyone who's likely to happen along and read this. I suspect that all of us who are committed to radical weight loss are very aware that we are reclaiming our health on a number of fronts, and massively mitigating the risk of diabetes will always be right up there near the very top of the tree.

I first really encountered diabetes when I was around 18. I had a girlfriend (later a distinguished professor of mycology) whose father was a master patissier. He'd go off to work around 2 every morning - usually around the time I too would be leving his house... - and produce the most astonishing cakes, and lots of them. Working for a small independent bakery, his boss let him bring home about half a dozen of these wonderful confections every morning. I particularly remember these puff pastry things with a mountain of whipped cream on top with a big juicy apricot perched on the pinnacle. English bakery-bought cakes are generally awful, disappointing at best. Leslie's stuff was magnificent, and by far the best cakes I've ever eaten in England (when I still used to eat cakes, that is). Trouble is, Les was by that time four years into being an injecting diabetic, and he couldn't eat a single one of the damned things. Bloody near broke his heart. He was a small slender guy. I heard it killed him in his 50's.

[An online search just now tells me that the bakery in question, W G Woods of Chase Side, Enfield, survived the intervening 42 years under the same family ownership, but its empty premises are now available to rent, presumably another victim of the economy and another victory for the conglomerates. Shame.]

The other one that really brought things home to me, was the death a few years back of the legendary John Peel. Here's a link to a rare recording of The Perfumed Garden, beaming live from out on the North Sea on the 12th July 1967, hippie radio at its finest, even if the sound quality isn't. I would have been listening to this broadcast at the time. It was unmissable radio. Peel died very suddenly at 65. He should have lasted forever.

So I've long been aware that diabetes was diabolical, and I'm delighted to have escaped falling in its rapacious maw when I was truly fat. My personal risk recedes with every passing, slimming day. Hurrah, but I step carefully.

Just to clarify, type 2 diabetes occurs when the body doesn't either produce or respond to the insulin necessary to process sugars in food, and being fat is a major factor in it it choosing you as its next victim. The more sugar you eat, the more insulin is needed to deal with it (and to put my personal escape into perspective, around 15 years ago, I almost checked out as a result of a really odd and nasty pancreatitis - nil by mouth for nearly six months!!! - so, I'm more than a little glad my pancreas recovered enough to keep churning out the insulin, despite the relentless, endless onslaught of the grub and booze I was constantly, indiscriminately shovelling down my neck).

It appears that the incredibly clever healthcare prognosticators and the insurance actuaries are all expecting cases of diabetes to triple by the middle of this century. Triple! That would mean a third of adults being diabetic in countries like the USA and the UK. Diabetes is already the number seven killer in the US and looks determined to force its way right up the charts, leaving a trail of consequent heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, nerve damage, wet gangrene, and blindness in its wake. Nice, eh? Diabetes healthcare in the US already costs $170billion per year. How much by the time the rate (and the costs) have tripled? And who's going to have to foot the bill, and how?

What I was told was that healthcare professionals and their directing bean-counters are petrified of this tsunami of potential cost that's rushing toward them, since all these nasty conditions brought about by diabetes, and of course the diabetes itself, are extremely expensive to treat and manage (and do note the emphasis is entirely on cost: you'll look hard to find evident concern for patient suffering - you know what it's like when you stop being a person and instead become a 'case'). Their largely misdirected attempts to wean us all off our hard-won over-fed sedentary life-styles having by and large failed, they've realised that if they can't persuade us to sort out our weight issues by traditional routes, then they are going to have to come up with something radical, effective, and cost-effective.

And they have.

Going online and searching out the costs of having a gastric band inserted, it looks as if you'll be spending around £5000 on laparospic surgery, though I imagine that a flight to Warsaw, Budapest or Bombay might reduce that to, say, £3k if you're lucky.

It seems that it might only be a matter of a very little time before, for instance, the National Health Service in the UK as well as the leading private insurers such as BUPA will be routinely offering gastric bands to their overweight customers because, although they can be circumvented, on the whole the things work and do what it says on the tin insofar as weight loss is concerned. They have taken the decision that the costs of providing gastric bands ad lib is likely to slash their overall spend by substantially mitigating the diabetes flood-tide and the nigh-on unfathomable costs associated with it.

Well, I don't know how you feel about this but I'm a little ambivalent. Actually, no, I'm downright miffed. I've been hard at this diet since July, not done too badly, racked up some substantial costs in uninsured fees to LighterLife at £70+ a week (don't begrudge it), generally behaved myself and controlled my eating, cut out the booze entirely. Put in a bit of effort.

Meanwhile all these fat and feckless ne'erdowells and hobbledehoys who haven't taken a moment's responsibility for managing their own circumstances and shifting their own lard, they are going to be entitled to waddle along to their quack and get themselves signed up for surgery either on the NHS or through their insurer, but in either event being funded by me, through my NHS contributions or my health insurance premiums.

I don't mind, and that. I wouldn't wish the diabetes on anyone, if you know what I mean. It's just that, I'm not mean or petty but what are they going to do for those of us who've already taken the initiative and got ourselves sorted out ahead of the herd? I think we, you know, deserve a refund, or something, in recognition of our valiant efforts. I mean, don't you think, it would only be fair. On the one hand, we're each of us saving them a whole pile of money and paperwork, and on the other, we're helping them fund other people's health care: isn't that good of us?

[Parenthetically, in all the recent toxic debate in the States about 'socialist medicine', people seem to have overlooked one thing: in both an insurance-funded and an NHS-funded medical system, the same rule applies - mutuality. The money gets pooled, and spent in response to perceived need. The only really individualistic private medicine occurs when you turn up with a fistful of dollars - hard cash - and say, 'cut my leg off, Doc.' Private insurance and state-run insurance are basically the same thing, and the individual has to be prepared to tussle with a parsimonious bureaucracy in order to get out of whichever system that which they believe to be their right. Or am I completely wrong-headed on this one, too?]

Private insurance or NHS, somehow, I just don't see either the mandarins or the bean-counters hurrying themselves to hand down the largesse like an inebriated Oofy Prosser on a spree, so perhaps we'd best console ourselves by noting that, as a result of our brilliant foresight and persistence, we have managed to avoid the scourge of diabetes as well as the indignity of laparoscopic surgery.

Of course, much of the advice in favour of the gastric band is coming from people who will themselves benefit by making, selling, inserting and managing the things (and correcting them when they go wrong). The healthcare industry and professionals. I'm not cynical. Honest.

Might there not be an even cheaper alternative? Stop pedalling the government-approved overly simplistic 'low calorie, five-a-day, high fibre, high carb myth'. Stop bolstering the sugar-laden processed food industry. Sack all this badly-trained generation of incompetent and ineffective nutritionists*. Devise and initiate a high intensity programme of teaching people the truth about their dietary requirements? Back that up with appropriate legislative mechanisms. Or does that sound either too much like hard work, or too opposed to engrained vested interests? And isn't it on a par with the treatment we've rightly been handing out to the toxic tobacco industry for years?

[* Query: given that UK hospital nutritionists talk to their customers in terms of aiming to lose a good and steady (mighty!) 1/2lb a week, what damned good is that if, like me, you were 224lb overweight? That's a little under 9 years to dump the load. That would keep a chap motivated! And that, of course, is assuming that 1/2lb a week actually worked: one recent study showed a GP-directed average loss of 6lbs! IN A YEAR!!! Which would have taken me 19 years to lose what I've already lost in 5 months. Nearly 38 years in total to get to my target weight. I'd be 98 by then. Only I wouldn't be, because I'd have died - in my early sixties; basically any day now. Give me strength! That's why I use the word incompetent. Sack them.]

While you digest that lot, and contemplate how other people decide to spend your money in both the public and private health care sectors, there are worse things to do in this world than enjoy the lamentably late Kenneth Williams and the still extant Lance Percival in the not entirely irrelevant bank robbery sketch from the West End revue One Over The Eight, written by the equally lamentably late former Greatest Living Englishman, Lord Gnome himself, Peter Cook (aetat 21!!!). 1961. Unmissable.

Missing you already till the next time (and looking forward to reading your comments in the interim),

Your old rugged pal,

Fred

Letter To A 15-year Old Fat Kid Called Victor

I went online this morning to the Low-Carber Forum and found a message posted by a 15-year old boy called Victor. He wrote:

Hey guys, my name is Victor Martinez. I'm 15 going on 16 in February, and my mother told me about this site. She is the one who introduced me to this diet. I have never really heard about 'low-carb diet.' I really want to lose weight because I hate being the 'Fat Kid.' I hate hate HATE looking at myself in the mirror and seeing my wide stomach, my fat thighs, and my double chin, my man boobs. It's a new year, and i really want to change my body image. I'm not asking for a miracle, I just want to look and feel healthy. I am going to try my very best, and put a lot of effort into my diet. But i dont really want to look at it as a diet, but as change of life. I have to do this for me, because I dont want to risk getting a heart attack, diabetes, or anything worse. I know it's time for me to actually feel good about myself. I want to look in the mirror and smile. I want that perfect body that I am always fantasing about.

What follows is my reply to him.


Keep the vision of slim, healthy Victor in the front of your mind. This weight loss is something you are doing for you, and you are doing it for a superb bunch of reasons - to reclaim your health and future, and to stop being the Fat Kid in school.

Get yourself an eating plan sorted, working from an Atkins recipe book - there are plenty around in thrift stores - and make sure your mum buys into the project, understands what your diet requires, and doesn't accidentally sabotage you from time to time. When the pair of you fully understand how this works, she'll be delighted: as well as seeing you turn into the bloke you want to be, she will save so much money at the supermarket!

Do you know this saying: FAILING TO PLAN IS PLANNING TO FAIL. Planning your eating (and your exercise) is essential to success. Oh, yeah, and sticking to that plan - that's pretty damn' important, too!

You've got to approach this thing in a disciplined manner and make yourself stay on track. It's almost like planning a military exercise - you don't leave things to chance. And like in a military exercise, there's a life at risk: yours, and you already know that you're doing this thing for you. Don't allow yourself to be be deflected!

Look for regular weight loss, but (like you said) don't expect miracles. It's taken you 16yrs to put on that extra fat. Let it take as long as it takes for it to be gone. Be patient and be consistent, don't force it.

That means, for instance, that you shouldn't look at my speedy weight loss figures, or some of the others you'll see around here on this forum, as something you should expect to do yourself; 108lbs in 5 months is not usual! Some of us on this forum do very radical dieting which involves us living on special powdered shakes and soups and NOTHING ELSE for month after month. It's usually done under medical supervision, and is no fun whatsoever. You do, however, lose a lot of weight very quickly - I was talking last night to a bloke who's dropped 142lbs since June last year! You wouldn't want to do it that way, believe me!

But you can easily expect to lose that weight of yours by the end of the year, following a good, sensible, effective eating plan. Just make sure you understand how your diet works, and stick within its rules. When in boubt, ask questions: that's what the forum is for!

And why stop at 200lbs? None of us needs to be 200! What is the weight you really want, in your dreams, to be? Why settle for second best? You can get to exactly where you really want to be. You just have to decide where that is, and go for it!

Now the hard bit (because nothing comes easy in this life). How and why did you get to be the Fat Kid in the first place. Why did you fall into patterns of eating where you were using food to improve your mood? And what do you need to do to break out of that mould? Because you have to turn that bit off in order to really secure your fit and healthy future.

One thing you'll spot if you read many of the journals on the forum, is that many people are going through this weight loss thing for the second, third, fourth time - and I don't see why you should have to. Once is enough!

For my part, about twelve years ago, my weight had crept up to 313lbs. I'd never done a day of dieting in my life, but all of that food, wine and beer had done its insidious work over the years, and it wasn't going to go away. So I set to work and over the space of about 18 months, I got myself down to 173 (which is the weight I'm aiming at again, right now - for the second and final time, I might add!), and I managed to stay there for about three years, plus or minus a few pounds, until the minus dropped out of sight and every week it was plus, plus, plus.... I'd lost control of my food addiction, completely lost sight of all the good and sensible rules and plans that had got me where I wanted to be, and my weight started its long gradual climb upwards, with me arrogantly ignoring what my friends and family were telling me ('you're getting fat, again!'), until I was nearly 400lbs, when I finally woke up and decided that I had to regain control.

Perhaps that last bit isn't quite right; try this instead: when I finally woke up and discovered the power and determination within me to face those demons down.

That’s completely true, and I’ve written a lot about this on my blog (try the piece from last month called Of Demons – tells you too much about being a 400lb man. No fun.) I’m still not saying it correctly, however, but I will this time: when I finally woke up and realised that I was very likely to die soon. You don’t see many 400lb 60-year olds. They’re dead already.

You, Victor, are ahead of this game: you've already decided you don’t want early death preceded by diabetes and heart problems, and lord knows what other horrors. Instead, you want to seize your life and run with the unique and precious joy of it. Well done, you! I have to tell you, when I was 15 (when I was 50 too, come to think of it) I didn’t think like that, man, I JUST KNEW I was immortal. Bulletproof, bombproof, radiation-proof 24-carat immortal. So I didn’t need to worry about my health, what I ate, what I drank. All that bad stuff was for other people, it sure as hell didn’t apply to me.

Victor, I salute you for being more grown-up, knowing better and wanting out.

The thing is, it’s not just about eating less, or eating differently, though both of those are important. It’s also about understanding and overcoming the self-destructive impulses that always make us reach for food as our first line of defence; it's about understanding how we fell into this hole in the first place. Why me, and not that skinny guy over there? And, it's about understanding all this 'why' and 'how', then going on to change the behaviours which trigger all this dumb set of reactions in the first place. That's how you get on top of the weight loss game and play it to win.

And it’s only by winning that confrontation that you’ll know you’ve got this fat thing beaten. However strong and determined you are, you might not be able to do it on your own. You might well need (or at least benefit from) a spot of counselling, therapy, or support, to help you win this battle because these issues go deep into the roots of being Victor, the unique combination of factors, elements, experiences and expectations that make you you. Don’t be afraid to go asking for help. There is absolutely zero shame in asking for it. Instead it’s all a measure of the man you’re becoming, if you can say to someone, ‘look, I'm dieting because I want to change this, and I want to change it for good. What can you do to help make this change stick?’

Because this thing is going to be hard work, and it’s going to ask a lot of you. That’s why the first words I wrote here were ‘keep the vision of slim, healthy Victor in the front of your mind.’

Another key secret to making your diet work is going to be this: you don’t go filling your face because you’re feeling great about yourself. You do it to try and make yourself feel better. Because your self-esteem isn’t too good. Being the Fat Kid is a daily kick in your self-esteem. Well, you start finding the good bits about Victor, the Victor who’s decided he’s doing this diet, the Victor that goes running by the canals, and make sure you concentrate a big bit of love in his direction, because you will succeed with your diet in direct proportion to the extent that you dump your negative images of Victor and start loving him, every day, a little bit more.

Here's a mantra for you to say to yourself a hundred times a day: 'love me, hate my fat.' The powerful part that makes the difference is the first bit, the loving yourself bit. Like the adverts say 'because you're worth it.'

Did you see the TV show Jamie’s Food Revolution? You know, you’re setting out on your own revolutionary road right now, it'll be rock from time to time, but keep on and it'll take you where you want to go, not just in relation to your weight but right across your life. What you've started is that important, and while I don’t know you, I feel inspired that at 15 you’ve got the cojones to come on this forum and declare to the world that you don’t want to be the Fat Kid any more.

You’ll be fine!

Your new old pal,

Fred

Back In The Jug Agane

What do you mean, you've never heard of Molesworth? Chiz, chiz. Where on earth did you go to skool? Clearly not St Custard's. New year, head down and hard at it, as any fule kno. Back in the jug agane, all right, skool dog slinking around stealing sossages and all, but not on my frail and delicate, wraith-like behalf.

Tuesday, so it's Fat Club tonight: truth will be told. As things turn out, I'll not be too despondent. The scales will show a pound down from the last weigh-in, way back in 2010, maybe even two, and given what we've all been through lately, that's OK.

A mean, unworthy, caddish and downright rotten thing to say, given the overall circs of what she's had to put up with from My Royal Highness over the years, but the really difficult bit has been matching what I want to do on the eating front with my wife's seasonal expectations.

Usually, or more accurately, in the period since this process of mine started, we each go our own direction with regard to food. Some of the time, I'll cook for her. Occasionally I'll eat some of what I've cooked, more often I'll not. But over the Christmas break - and maybe I'm making much more of this than necessary - I felt an occasional pressure to join in with eating which just isn't there in our typical daily round.

I don't think I'm writing in bad faith, but this year I really would have settled for a Christmas dinner of a roll-mop herring sitting on a mound of sauerkraut with a couple of cornichons on the side. Lovely. Instead, and as I've proudly written before, I cooked the best Christmas dinner I ever achieved. And then I went and ate it. Plenty of it, at least. From that point on I wasn't exactly lost, but I was rather bumping along between the tracks rather than running smoothly on top of them. Not exactly out of control, but too damned complaisant for my own liking.

However I've since had the heavy mob in from the superego department, and they've given me a suitably hard time and I believe I've sorted it. In a sense, it's good to know I can't just shrug it off and excuse myself for just one of those no-harm-done-really things. I'm just grateful that now, at least, I'm back doing what I should be, and I'm 100% confident of seeing progress. Certainly by this time next week I'll have passed that elusive mid-point on my personal progress. Yippee, there will only be another 108lbs to lose... Only!

So, I've been asking myself what I need to get through what I'm starting to refer to as Phase 2. I'm back hitting hard on the VLC route after a couple of months' comparative soft-pedalling.

I suppose, particularly I need to gauge whether my expectations of me have changed now I know that I can indeed do this thing making my own eating decisions instead of relying slave-like those determined for me and handed down by the very bright (and slender) people at LighterLife. For instance, how am I going to feel in a couple of weeks time contemplating yet another aspartame-fuelled shake, or one more day of nasty-flavoured soups, because whatever LL gives its customers, it ain't a fine dining experience. If anything it's too damn' near punishment. 'You're a degenerate food addict so now you must subsist on this muck. Serves you bloody well right. You might never eat anything wholesome again....'

Having swum in the waters of an LL support group for a number of months now, I could tell myself that, for some of their customers, these magic powders are a step up from what they've been eating up to now. But that would be mean and unworthy of me. Twice in one blog. I suspect it's the contemplation of a future of powders brings out the bile in me. Even if so, it comes quite naturally and painlessly.

At this point, looking ahead down the road, it would be easy to cut and run. However, if I take a moment and clear my vision, I can start to see a bit further down the road to the point where there will be no powders because their work will be done, I'll have hit the magic 173, and the job will be educating myself to comfortably maintain. No question, but the key to this, and the only way I will ever get to that point is to find value in myself, to generate a little bit of entirely healthy, well-balanced and proportionate self-love. There is a very wise woman living up in Canada called Glenda whom I encounter on the Low Carber Forum, and she wrote to me yesterday as follows (and I suggest you transcribe these words and pin them up somewhere prominent, because I doubt you'll read anything more pertinent to the situation of the reforming food addict anywhere this year):

It's well nigh impossible to do something as difficult as change your whole way of life and mindset just to improve the life of someone you don't even much like! Loving yourself, in my book, has to be the very first step in any successful self-improvement.

Sounds more than good to me, and I can keep this thing steady on the rails, realising that the healthy me I'm moving towards isn't just my body. More and more I'm coming to realise the whole thing starts and finishes with my mind. Last month I wrote a blog called Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow. Translated into unsentimental English, this can only mean 'learn to love yourself, and you will be free to heal yourself.'

Every day, that is sounding a more attractive, more imperative prospect.

Of course, not every attempt at communication succeeds first time. But you've got to keep trying till you get it right, as The Two Ronnies demonstrated in 1976.

Till the next time, increasingly optimistically, whatever the odds,

Your old pal,

Fred