Introduction

12 Jul 2011

I have been fighting obesity for 22 years now. Back in 1977 I was 27 years of age, and took my first overseas job in the Middle East, the first of several. I worked in a number of conservative Muslim countries, and due to the lack of social amenities available in those places the companies I worked for provided a large range of sporting activities to keep their staff entertained.

The working hours were typically 7am till 2pm, 6 days a week. So it was not unusual to go straight from work to the beach for scuba diving, water skiing, etc, and at around 6pm when it started to get cooler to head for the golfcourse, or to the squash courts. I didn't notice my calorie intake start to climb to match the extra calories my body was burning. Soon I had gone from a regular 2000 calorie a day guy, weighing 80Kg, to a 5000 calorie a day, without putting on any extra weight. All that changed in 1988.

In 1988 I went to work in Beijing, China. There was none of the sporting facilities I was used to, and my work also changed from a very active style to more of a desk job. However, my eating habits continued as usual. Soon I noticed that my weight was ballooning. I tried to cut back, but habits are difficult to change. One problem was that my stomach had increased in size to about 60% more than normal during my time in the Middle East, so it was always complaining that I was hungry, and it was very difficult to actually approach feeling full. I started one of many diets.

Eventually I tried every diet in the book, and all the various diet pills that were hailed as the magic bullet when they came out. I had great short-term will-power, in that I was always able to stick to the diet until I achieved my target weight, the big problem was keeping the weight off. I kept slipping back into old eating habits, my stomach was always yelling "not full!", "hungry!". Each diet/remission cycle always left me a couple of kilos heavier than before I started dieting, this was a vicious circle that gradually saw my weight rise steadily.

This is how I looked at the end of my last big diet when I lost 30Kg (66lb), bringing me down to still very overweight 95Kg (209lb).

Me at 95Kg, on holiday in Olympus, 2007

I put it all back on of course, getting back to a new peak at 125.5Kg (275lb).

I had come to the conclusion that my biggest problem was the size of my stomach (and a lack of post-diet will power to ignore my stomach's signals). I discussed this at length with my GP and he agreed that the time had come to consider weight-loss surgery.