My Personal Journey

The Penny Drops

“I would never leave you but last night I realised I was dating the fattest person at the party!”. That was what my wife said to me the morning after Sarah’s birthday party.  I knew I was overweight but I never knew I was the fattest.

“My wife said you are heart attack on legs”. That’s what one of my tradesmen said to me when we were discussing a job. What did she know?

“We are going to have to start you on cholesterol lowering tablets”. That’s what my doctor told me after they did a blood test on me because I was already on high blood pressure tablets.

I think that was when the penny dropped.  I connected the dots.  I’m heading for an early death. Or even worse get a stroke, be left in a vegetative state and have a miserable life.

The high blood pressure tablets had horrible side effects. They made you cough, made it difficult to breathe bust most importantly it was affecting my sleep.  Some days I was a walking zombie.  The last thing I wanted to do was take even more tablets.

I already knew that to reduce your blood pressure you had to lose weight.  Doing a quick check on google lowering your weight lowers your cholesterol as well.  That’s a double wammy in my books!

So it was glaringly obvious I had to lose weight.  My motivation clearly being the avoidance of getting a stroke, becoming mentally and physically disabled and not being able to look after my wife.  This was a very powerful motivator for me. 

But how was I going to  lose weight? Many years ago I had done atkins, weight watchers and low fat diets.  They never worked long term.    So I did just what came naturally to me…..

Necessity Is The Mother of Invention

I am a successful businessman.  I am not a doctor or a nutritionist or anything else to do with health or food.  I was a businessman with a problem.  If I am not here to run the business then the business will fail.  So I approached this problem of me being overweight as a business problem. Which it clearly is. 

Any successful business person will tackle problems head on.  They rank the problems faced in their business, decide which ones require the most of your time and delegate the other problems to capable members of staff.

So you can guess where this problem of me being overweight ranked…..FIRST.  This business relies on me being conscious and able.  If I am not around the business will fade to nothing and my wife will be destitute.  My wife is not business minded nor do I have anyone who I could fully trust to run it for me upon my incapacitation or death.

Now successful businessmen do not delegate the most important problems to someone else.  It falls to them.  Yes there are plenty of outside consultants who claim to be able to solve your problems but when it comes to it it’s the top bod using plain old negotiation, common sense and compromise that wins the day.

So I tasked myself with the problem of working out how to lose weight.