Fat Chance (26 page)

I’m also never shopping in the IKEA store again.

Say what you want about B&Q, if you do get cornered by some nutter next to the tins of gloss at least you have a clear line of sight to the nearest bloody exit.

GREG’S WEIGHT LOSS DIARY

Wednesday, August 6th

15 stone, 4 pounds (4 stone, 12 pounds lost)

W
ow, less than a month until this is all over.

In a mere twenty-five days we’ll find out if Zoe and I have lost enough weight to win that glorious fifty thousand pounds.

We’ve now shed
nine stone
between us, which was Zoe’s total weight when I met her. How completely and utterly bizarre.

That kind of weight loss is immediately noticeable to anyone who hasn’t seen you for more than a few weeks. I bumped into a guy the other day who’d left the company just before Christmas for a job in Dubai. He actually walked straight past me without registering who I was, despite the fact we’d worked in the same office for four years together. I caught up to him and had to spend the next minute or so convincing him I wasn’t my own thinner twin brother.

Even the people you see on a regular basis can’t help but
comment
when they see you’ve shifted another three or four pounds in one week. I like the look they get on their faces. It’s usually a combination of amazement and amusement, born from the fact that someone they know well is changing right before their eyes.

Inexplicably, eating less makes dining out a more pleasurable experience. Zoe and I used to love going out to dinner in the first few years of our marriage. It was one of the cornerstones of our
relationship
. By the time our fifth anniversary had rolled around we’d pretty much become on first-name terms with most of the local restaurant managers.

Thinking back on it, maybe we became a little
too
familiar with the local restaurants. Our time and money spent in them may well have contributed to our combined weight gain over the years. The Miltons certainly never left a restaurant hungry or unsatisfied back in those days.

Needless to say, those evenings out dwindled to nothing once we had piled on enough pounds. When you realise you are very overweight, eating becomes something you’d rather do in the
privacy
of your own home, where no-one can look at you and make snap judgements.

In recent weeks, however, we’ve rediscovered a love of eating out, even going so far as a bit of alfresco dining when the weather has been good enough. The difference this time is that we choose the healthiest options on the menu and don’t accompany our meals with a bottle or two of red wine. Where once we would eat and eat and eat with little time for conversation, we now both pick at our food and set the world to rights as we do so. I know more about Zoe’s life outside the one we share together than I ever have. The same is true for her.

Where once a meal together was all about the food, it’s now all about sharing some quality time with each other.

It’s not all good, though, this dieting business.

Take clothes, for instance.

When you’re on a long-term weight loss program it can play havoc with your dress sense—and your wallet. You essentially have one of two choices: either stay walking around in the clothes you’ve always had in order to avoid the extra expense, or pay regular visits to the clothes shops and re-buy a new wardrobe every couple of months.

I tried the first option to begin with, being a man used to a certain degree of frugality. It didn’t work out well at all. By the time I’d started cutting new notches in my belt, I was starting to resemble a small boy dressed in his father’s clothes. I’d have to constantly hitch my jeans up, and my vast collection of polo shirts all billowed like sails around my shrinking frame. The final straw came when I was down the pub and someone asked me with a sympathetic voice if I’d contracted some kind of serious disease.

When people are mistaking healthy weight loss for a terminal illness, it’s time to change your wardrobe.

And change it I did, in one swooping attack on Marks &
Spencer
that my bank balance took weeks to recover from.

This was all well and good, but I was
still
losing weight and quickly found myself once again cutting notches in my belt and hitching my jeans up.

I did seriously contemplate buying a pair of those nylon trousers with an elastic waist—but decided against it, as looking like a terminal cancer patient is slightly better than looking like a guy who’s just escaped from the Shady Pines Institute for the Mentally Bereft.

So back to Marks & Spencer I went.

Then I walked straight
through
Marks & Spencer and took a sharp left into Primark.

If I’m going to keep renewing my wardrobe every couple of months I’m going to be buying the cheap stuff, even if it is badly made and makes me itch.

Zoe has got it even worse than me, of course.

We men don’t really hold much stock in the clothes we wear. That would just be a little bit ‘fruity’ and best avoided at all costs. We don’t talk about clothes with other men, and we certainly don’t compare wardrobes.

Women, on the other hand, seem to define their very existence based on their fashion choices, and the fashion choices of the other women around them.

Poor old Zoe is having to constantly update her wardrobe thanks to her weight loss. Sometimes she even buys exactly the same item of clothing three times over in decreasing sizes, in the kind of gross western consumption that people in the third world get justifiably upset about.

I pointed this out to her the other night. The reaction was not pleasant.

‘Don’t guilt trip me, Gregory,’ she snapped. ‘If I go out in clothes that are too big for me I’ll get crucified by the other girls next time I’m out of earshot.’

‘But won’t they just be jealous that you’ve lost all that weight?’ I respond, showing my complete and utter lack of understanding of how the female mind works.

‘No Gregory, that will
not
be what they talk about. Losing four stone is nothing in their eyes when compared to being dressed like a bag lady.’ She puts her hands on her hips. ‘Just accept that for the time being our credit card is going to get pounded, and my usual sensitivity to the plight of those in developing countries is secondary to the need for my arse to look good in chiffon.’

That was the last word on the subject.

Since then I have resolutely refused to go anywhere near a shopping precinct with my wife, for fear of having to spend a good six hours sitting outside changing rooms while she tries on everything in sight.

I can’t escape the hell of female clothes shopping completely, though. Zoe has taken to ordering stuff online, so I’m forever
having
to take delivery of a package from one website or another. So much so that I’m now on first-name terms with our postman.

‘Has she gone mental?’ asks Wilfred the garrulous old postie as he hands over the latest purchase. ‘This is the fifth parcel of the week.’

‘Quite possibly,’ I reply and take ownership of the brown
cardboard
box.

He gives me a look of profound sympathy. ‘Joan was the same with shoes. I had to threaten her with divorce before she
bankrupted
us both.’

‘And how did that work out for you?’

Wilfred looks more glum than Birmingham. ‘I got the dog in the settlement. The house went to her and the shoes.’

I didn’t quite know what to say to that, so I took the
conversation
back in the direction of business and told him that if any more
parcels
come and we’re not in, he should just come through the side gate and leave them in the shed. He seemed a little disconsolate that I didn’t want to discuss his marital break-up in more detail.

There’s no doubt about it: losing weight is an expensive
business
.

You may think that all that money lost on new clothes would be clawed back by the cash we’re not spending on food, but you would be completely wrong in that assumption.

Yes, we no longer treat ourselves to at least two takeaways a week and have cut down on unhealthy meals and snacks in general. The problem is we have to eat
something
, and healthy food is always more expensive than the cheap, sugary stuff. Mung bean salad and a fresh fruit compote may be a one-way ticket to a smaller waistline, but they also costs four times as much as the family-sized lasagne and chips lurking a few aisles away in the frozen food section.

I always knew that a harsh weight loss program would mean a lot of physical effort, but I wasn’t prepared for how much of a financial outlay it is, too. I now have a better appreciation of why so many people on limited incomes and benefits are big roly-poly people. It’s hard to maintain a thirty-two-inch waist when the salads are three quid and the burgers are thirty pence.

I haven’t even started on how expensive the actual diet food is. All those milkshakes, smoothies, healthy snack bars, and dried fruit snacks cost a bloody fortune.

How on earth can we ever expect our society to get thinner when no-one is making any effort to make the healthy food cheaper than the toxic, fatty stuff that’s creating a nation of tubby fuckers with too many fillings?

The expense sadly doesn’t end there, either. If eating healthy is a strain on your wallet, then exercising can quite easily break it completely.

Gym fees are quite frankly idiotic.

If the government wants Britain to lose weight it should make all those fitness companies charge less for the privilege of using their shiny, complicated equipment.

Let’s face it, exercise can be something of a ball ache, especially if you’ve just spent eight hours at work, sitting at a desk feeling your vertebrae fuse together. The last thing most of us need is to then go to a hall full of sweaty people and add our own perspiration to
the
mix.

People need to be incentivised to get off their arses and go to the gym. Charging them fifty pounds a month on a one-year
contract
is not the best way to accomplish this, as far as I am concerned.

If the gym contract stated that you could stop paying if you didn’t hit your target weight within six months then I’d be more likely to sign up—but I think the chances of that happening are roughly equivalent to me winning Miss World in a mankini.

I’ll apologise for the hideous mental image that may conjure up, and move on.

Since March, when this whole escapade began, I’ve tried many different kinds of exercise in my pursuit of a healthier lifestyle and fifty thousand pictures of the Queen.

My week with Alice Pithering still keeps me up at night, but it did give me some insight into what it’s like to have a personal trainer. Enough insight, in fact, to make me one hundred percent sure that I
never
want a personal trainer ever again.

Aside from this I’ve also tried a plethora of exercise
contraptions
that purport to help you shift weight at a vast rate of knots. Most of them also promise to make exercise ‘fun’ and easier to fit into your hectic social life.

All of them are expensive.

None of them work.

Take the following few paragraphs as both warning and consumer advice, so you don’t end up making the same mistakes I did.

Like everyone who embarks on a weight loss program I went for the easy options first. This is just human nature. If we can avoid hard work, we damn well will. An entire industry has been built around this inherent laziness, one that I have contributed a great deal of money towards in the last six months.

If there is a piece of exercise equipment specifically designed for the lazy, it’s the electro muscle stimulator. Not half as dirty as it sounds, these odd little contraptions are designed to send small electric charges through your body, making your muscles twitch—which apparently encourages weight loss.

How utterly brilliant! You can just attach a few pads to your body, turn on the machine, and lose umpteen calories while you’re sitting in your armchair watching ‘Downton Abbey.’ By the time the episode has ended (usually with tea being served in the
drawing
room) you’ve dropped several pounds, all without any effort
whatsoever
!

Needless to say I was sceptical. But I was also grossly overweight and lazy, so I forked out two hundred quid and ordered the
Electromax
2000 from Amazon with fingers crossed.

Let’s just repeat that: I spent two hundred quid on a machine that basically electrocutes me every few seconds, in order to avoid any
actual
exercise.