I have not weighed under 100kg since I was sixteen years old. This week I am 92. Twenty-six kilos gone since last September, and I still do a double take in shop windows.
I am not going to insult anyone by pretending this was willpower and salad. It was not. I had pharmacological help, the kind that is reshaping how this is done for a lot of people right now. I went and sorted it out myself, off my own reading and a fair bit of talking to people who had been there before me.
Here is the only sensible thing I have to say about that. This is not advice. I am not a doctor, and I am not telling you to do what I did. What was the right call for me, eyes open and on my own head, is not a template for anyone else. If any of this is on your mind, the conversation to have is with a medical professional, not with a bloke in a Hawaiian shirt on LinkedIn.
What I will talk about is what it changed, because that is the part nobody warns you about. My blood pressure had been creeping up for a while. Not alarming, but heading the wrong way, and a daily walking habit that should have held it steady simply was not enough. That has turned around. So has my sleep. So has my ability to get through a long day on a show floor without flagging by three in the afternoon. At my age, in this trade, that is not vanity. That is being able to do the job for another ten years.
The wine has survived, before anyone worries. A glass or two most evenings, entirely unrepentant. John Baulch got 22,000 hits last week for a post about having a drink, so clearly there is a market for the honest version of a man’s habits, and I have never been short of honesty or shame.
What strikes me most is how much sharper everything feels with the weight off. You make better decisions when you are not tired all the time. You see the room more clearly. The same instinct that tells me to walk away from a bad line is a lot quicker to fire when I have slept and my body is not fighting me.
Twenty years in and I am, against all expectation, in better shape heading into the back half of my career than I was at the start of it. I will take that. Still the same shirt, though. Some things are load-bearing.
