Yes, I’ve always been a porker. I think I was eight and a half pounds at birth, or something ridiculous that gave my mother quite a shock.

Apart from a brief growth spurt during my teens, when the increase in vertical size overtook the horizontal one for a few memorable years, I’ve always been the sort of chap who has trouble buying clothes off the peg.

That’s why I was exceptionally chuffed when I got on the scales last week and saw my weight had hit 95kg. That’s still a lot, and I’ve got a long way to go to reach my ideal weight, but it’s a significant milestone. At my heaviest in 2019, I was a shade under 125kg, so I’ve lost 30kg!

Thirty kilos is a lot of extra weight to have been carrying around. That’s 66 pounds! To put it into some sort of perspective, an eight-year-old child can weigh 30kg. It’s the same weight as six bowling balls or half a dozen fully grown house cats. It’s about thirty bags of sugar or three lots of cabin baggage on Ryanair. It’s no wonder I feel a bit lighter on my feet!

So I thought I’d put pen to paper by way of celebration and jot down a few notes about losing weight.

First of all, it’s a personal journey. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution for dropping the pounds and keeping them off. Eat less and move around more, they say. If that were all there was to it, we’d all be doing it. But there is more to it. We all have our own personal set of schedules, incentives and motivations. The trick seems to be to work out what that set is and find a way of working with it.

I’ve nothing against diets. All of them work to a degree, yet none of them is necessarily a long-term solution. When I lived in England, my wife at the time was a fad-diet fanatic, which kind of meant I was a fad-diet fanatic too, though without quite so much ra-ra enthusiasm. We did the Cambridge Diet, the Atkins diet, the pineapple ring diet. You name it, we did it!

Of all of them, Atkins seemed to have the most dramatic effect on my waistline. Diets involving some sort of carbohydrate restriction seem to be the right direction for me, but back then I couldn’t stick to Atkins for more than a few months at a time. I love bacon as much as the next carnivore, but there comes a time when not having it inside a sarnie kicks off a craving for bread that’s impossible to resist!

Another culinary experiment from that time sticks in my mind. It stemmed from a book called Eat Right 4 Your Type, which was based on the seemingly tenuous premise that people with blood type O were hunter-gatherers, while those with type A had evolved in the first agricultural societies and were therefore better suited to a plant-based diet.

I don’t know the science, but I do know that I find the meat content of carbohydrate-restricted diets agrees with me, whereas the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been after a meal was when I tried falafel for the first time. This was probably more than ten years ago, but I still recall the pain as though it were yesterday. It was as though I’d eaten a bag of cement that had set in my stomach. Never again!

So maybe there is something to this eat-for-your-type business. I once had a cat that was allergic to milk, and I worked with a woman from Barbados who was allergic to Lilt (the totally tropical taste, if you remember the adverts), so you never know what your ‘type’ permits.

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert in this weight-loss malarkey, but I’d like to suggest a few things that have helped me.

Measure. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. Choose a schedule and stick to it. Maybe Saturday morning, when you’ve got more time, but make sure you weigh yourself on the same day every week. Your fluid levels can change considerably during the day. Probably the best thing is to weigh yourself after your first pee when you get up in the morning. That way, your fluid levels should be relatively consistent. Start a graph in a spreadsheet if you don’t already have one. A graph is an essential tool for eyeballing your progress, or the lack of it.

Observe. Since I started plotting my weight several years ago, I’ve been able to spot trends that I was only dimly aware of before. My weight loss varies with the seasons. It starts to make sense when you think about it. My theory is that the body wants to generate more heat in winter than it does in summer, so my appetite for the wrong kind of food kicks in around December and lasts for a few months, until it gets warm again. Being aware of this trend enables me to build defences against it. (What gets measured gets managed.)

Replace. Sometimes I’ll look back at my shopping baskets and ask myself, “Did I really need that?” For example, if my appetite has led me to buy a lot of bacon, I might decide to swap it for something less fatty or lower in calories. So I’ll make a shopping rule for myself: “Tuna is the new bacon.” From then on, whenever I fancy a meal with bacon in it, I’ll have tuna instead. It’s surprising how far this replacement technique can get you. Try replacing regular bread with flatbread, or chicken with white fish. You don’t have to do it forever, just long enough to break the cycle when your weight has plateaued.

Experiment. The only way to find out what works for you is to try different things and see what happens. Try carbohydrate restriction, low fat, fasting or whatever takes your fancy, and watch the numbers on that graph. I make a note next to each weigh-in recording anything I’ve done differently. “Ate cake twice. Must do better!” This really helps when you’re looking back over what worked and what didn’t.

And finally, the best thing I ever did was stop drinking alcohol.

You don’t need it!!