The Diet Guy

Desiderata

I first read desiderata when I got to goal weight and a friend of mine gave me a framed print.

I now have a bigger framed print in my office at home and also have given copies to my family and close friends.

I also intend to have part of it tattooed on my back when I next go back to Florida.

It reads

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

For me it is an amazingly accurate piece of text and one which I live my life by.

Cause Or Effect?

I get a lot of people ask me what was the turning point when I decided to be slim, what was the "trigger" or the reasons etc. I have studied this a lot as it fascinates me why I waited until I was 32 years old to really do something about my weight. Why did I wait until I was peeing blood and struggled to walk up the stairs to actually reduce down my weight.

 

But then I realised it was the day I took responsibility! What I call  cause and effect, and up to that point I was living my life in effect.

 

For example I blamed being overweight on the following reasons.

When I Get Slim I Will Be Happy

When I was big I always believed that if I could just lose some weight and get slim then I would be happy. I used to stand in the bedroom crying thinking why can't I be strong enough to just stick to a diet for a few months and then everything will be perfect.

I had a great life, great job, family, cars, money and therefore all I needed to do was shed the fat suit and then I could jump over mountains and live happily ever after.

I used to daydream about being slim and how amazing it would be, I never thought if my only problem was that I was overweight and would be super happy otherwise then WHY did I get big in the first place?

Going In Search Of What?

When I got to goal weight I had loads of loose skin. The majority of it was round my tummy, although I did have a lot of loose skin around my arms and legs, but by far the most skin I had was this apron of skin around my middle.

Now I would tell everyone that it was a great battle scar and that I had obviously done really well if I had loose skin but I hated it.

I used to stand in the shower pulling and stretching the skin and used to be paranoid that it was hanging over the top of my jeans and people could see it.

Counting The Days Down To My Next Diet

When I was big and not dieting I was always planning when to start my next diet.

I would tell everyone that I planned to start it on a certain date and the result I was going to get.

I would plan it exactly and make sure that the night before I started my diet that I would eat as much as I could to make sure I was happy and full before the prison sentence started.

I used to plan to start my diets about a month in the future or at least the back end of the following week just to give myself enough time to eat inbetween.

Quantity Or Quality?

I was lucky enough to go out last night to a very nice new restaurant. The menu was absolutely top notch with some great steaks and scallops. It was generally what I would call a 'posh' meal.

It was a work related meal and I was with a couple of guys who I hadn't seen for a few years, since I was big. They were chatting about weight, size etc. and one of them said 'Do you still like food?' and then said 'Or is the key to treat food as fuel and not like it any more?'

I sat there and my immediate thought was I actually enjoy food now loads more than I did when I was big. When I was big it was all about quantity, it was about ordering the biggest dish, or eating the most food, or eating between meals, or eating from other people's plates, finishing off deserts, sharing puddings but then eating 80% of them and generally getting the food into my system. I didn't ever have it in my mouth long enough to actually appreciate its taste, that wasn't the goal. The goal was to be happy and that didn't require you to actually taste anything.

BAS (Boney Arse Syndrome)

I was having a fantastic chat last night with someone who has just reduced her weight by6 stone (84 pounds). She was telling me all the good stuff she was now doing and was trying to convince me to get out my trainers again and do the Great North Run with her later this year.

But then she really made me laugh, she was talking about how now it hurts for her to have a bath, as when she sits in the bath her bum aches after a while as she is sitting on bone.

It reminded me immediately of  a couple of things from when I reduced my weight, I remember one morning asking advice from someone as I could feel something in my side, and yes it was my ribs! I hadn't felt them for many years and it freaked me out as they felt like a lump.

Weight Loss Surgery

I had a couple of E-Mails from people over the weekend asking if I really don't diet anymore and whether I had secretly had a gastric band or bypass and hence the reason I am still slim.

I didn't take offence at all at the questions but it does go to show how alien it is that you can just do a diet once and then maintain by not dieting. It's so alien that people even question whether you are actually telling the truth or not.

Well I have had two operations since reaching goal, one of them was a tummy tuck as I had loads of loose skin round my tummy, the second operation was a smaller tummy tuck as the first result was not very good so I had it a year later to tidy it all up.

These Clothes Come Up Small

 

I was in London on Friday and went shopping for a new coat. I knew the one I wanted and went to the shop and tried it on. When I tried on my normal size it was really tight, the nice young lady came over to tell me 'not to panic', that this brand deliberately make their clothes small and not to get upset.

I assured her I was fine and wasn't upset and just tried the size up from my normal size which fitted fine.

When I went to to the till and was still chatting to her she said that loads of people won't buy the size up as it depresses them too much and therefore she thinks the brand are missing out on loads of sales by making their sizes smaller than normal!

It fascinated me! To be honest I don't care whether it says small/medium/large or huge on the label, it is whether I like it and whether it fits me properly.

It got me thinking back to when I was big and the fact I used to have to choose my clothes by size and not by style. I was stuck with whatever they had in my size and therefore now I just choose clothes based on what I like and then I check that they have my size in stock.

But I don't get hung up on clothes sizes now like I did. In fact, I don't get hung up on my size full stop like I did! I am a healthy weight and if one T-Shirt I try on is too small then I won't buy it anymore than if I try a T-Shirt on and it is too big! 

So turning this to you? Do you live on your clothes size? Do you control your weight by not moving out of a clothes size you are currently in?

Clothes are an important thing for a lot of dieters, including me when I got to goal, but ultimately it is whether you believe you look good in clothes that is the key and that is nothing to do with a size label.

Learning To Use Food To Numb The World

 

I learnt early in life to use food for the emotional benefit it gave me. I can first remember overeating when I was around ten years old, I can remember going through a tough time both at home and at school and coming in from school on a winter's evening and looking for some comfort. I was in the house by myself and it was dark, cold and gloomy.

I can picture it now some twenty five years later as if I was back there in the kitchen of our lovely big house! I can remember having a bowl of crunchy nut corn flakes, it was a big bowl of them and on the top I put single cream and milk with more of it being cream than milk.

As I ate the corn flakes they numbed the world, everything for those split seconds fell quiet as I focussed on how nice they tasted and the treat I was having. 

After a few minutes, I had finished the corn flakes but still had a mix of milk and cream left so I refilled the bowl with more cornflakes to mop up the milk, I then of course ran out of milk so put more cream on the top, from memory I had around four of five refills before I felt full and satisfied. For maybe ten minutes of eating I had felt great, I had forgotten all my problems, and I was too young to care about he consequences or even to understand the consequences of eating that amount of calories. 

I was already chunky at this age anyway and already had an identity of being big as I was the biggest of my school friends but at that age it wasn't an issue as it was just big Mike ! People used to say I had puppy fat and that I would burn it off when I hit puberty but the reality was I was learning by the day to use food as a duvet and the seeds were being set for my later years.

The behaviour I learnt then I went on to use for the next twenty years, if I had a bad day or needed comfort then just for a split second it was there while I was eating it, sure afterwards I would feel guilty and self-loathing and the older I got the more I disliked myself for overeating and yes sure ten seconds after the last mouthful I would feel guilty as hell but in the moment, the moment it hit my taste buds it was such a drug to me to help me through my life. I was in control, I could choose to eat as much as I liked, sure I might get bigger and bigger but I could have what I wanted when I wanted and I wanted big portions and often, the bigger I got the more I then needed to satisfy the need.

As I am much more self-aware now than I was then I can see that food was never the problem, it was my relationship with food that was the problem, and back in 1984 on an innocent afternoon I learnt something that took me twenty years to choose to stop doing.

I can't unlearn overeating now, and I certainly don't want to forget my past as it is still me but maybe back then if I had learnt not to use food as a blanket then I wonder how my life would have panned out? The silver lining of all of this of course is now I get to help other people which I couldn't have done so empathetically had I not have been so big but it's a journey I would never recommend to a friend...

20 Benson's Please

I used to be a heavy smoker in my teens and 20's, I would smoke between 20 and 40 a day until I was 25 and then decided to just stop. I tried for years and years to stop with patches, plastic pipe's, chewing gum and willpower but all I could ever do was cut down to around 10 a day and then gradually go back up again.

When I was cutting down I used to see cigarettes everywhere, I would smell them, I would see adverts for them, I would see people lighting them and be obsessed with what I couldn't have.

But then one day in the car back in 1999 I decided to stop, I flicked the butt out of the window and thought 'I'm done...'

And I have never smoked since, I didn't need willpower, or gum, or anything, I felt lousy for a few days as the physical addiction went cold turkey but after that I forgot about the fact I used to smoke.

Until a few months ago !

I was on a course with a good friend who asked me to go and buy her 20 cigarette's in the lunch hour as I was going to the supermarket for a sandwich.

I walked in and got my lunch and then went to the cigarette counter and looked at cigarettes! It hit me like a brick that I was now such a non-smoker that I hadn't for years even bothered to look at the counter, I noticed that suddenly cigarettes were nearly six pounds a pack (they were about three when I stopped), and that they now had big labels on them with pictures. I noticed that there were new brands I had never seen or heard of before.

As I walked back to the course I thought this over and came to realise that someone who really is over something doesn't even notice anymore that it is a problem.

And I am that same now about food, when I was big I was a pudding person! I loved my desserts and especially profiteroles and sticky puddings. When I used to diet I was always obsessed with not being allowed them and had to try and avoid the aisles in the supermarket.

But now I don't ! I don't crave them anymore and don't even notice them when I am shopping, if I go out for a meal I may well have some but now I can take or leave it without feeling like I am being hard done-by or in a prison.

I was out with a friend last week who stopped smoking for New Years and was telling me constantly how he was now a non-smoker and hadn't smoked for 18 days. Now that is fantastic and well done to him but it will be when he forgets about cigarettes to the point he never talks about them anymore that he truly will be a non-smoker.

Welcome To My Blog...

Hello there!

I'm Mike Scott and this is my home on the internet where I like to share some of my own thoughts and experiences. I spent 20 years being a professional dieter and got bigger every year but back in 2005/6 I reduced my weight for the last time and stopped dieting forever.

   
 

I reduced my weight by 11 and a half stone (161 pounds) in 20 weeks.

It was when I dealt with WHY I ate and not WHAT I ate that the success really started to flow.

I know if I managed to do it, then everyone can do it! I hope this blog helps others help themselves.

To your amazing success

Mike ;-)

P.S. I actively push back against advertising on the site to keep it clean and without prejudice, but it does cost me a lot of money to run the blog and the newsletter. If you can then any donation towards the monthly costs would be appreciated. The donate button is in the top right hand corner. Thanks