Losing it[1]

This email was concocted by my assistant (whose name I have concealed for now). I suppose it might have been partly responsible for me starting to lose weight. Just found it again while sorting out some folders….

From: name removed to protect the guilty
Sent: 09 October 2003 15:22
To: Les Bessant
Subject: Diet Plan - Follow instructions in full (do not open if you’re going to grass on me)

Diagnostic

1 - You look like this.

See below unaltered photo

Cure instructions

1 - Do everything name removed to protect the guilty asks you to do.

Outcome

You will look like the below altered picture (artist impression)
You can not only see the difference but you will also feel the difference.

name removed to protect the guilty reserves the right to say you may have bigger bones than the photo.

Have a nice day!

The losing weight thing, that is…

Well, it was all becasue of this thing:

I stood on it one day back in November 2003 and didn’t much like what it told me. According to the scale, I had reached the slightly[1] alarming weight of 16 stone, 11 pounds[2], or 235 pounds if you prefer, or around 106.5kg. Heavy. Now I knew I’d been getting a wee bit[4] heavier, and that my waistline had been getting slightly[5] larger, but this was rather more than I had expected. Somehow, I’d managed to ignore the rather larger waist size I’d had to go for when I bought a suit a couple of months earlier.[6]

Well, it must have been the right phase of the moon, or my brain was in the right mode, or something, because I actually decided to start doing something about it.

And I did.

And I’m still doing it.[8]

Further entries will describe what I’ve been doing, and the results….

[1] Understatement[3]
[2] Note to non-Brits: a “stone” is 14 pounds. I think we use them so our total weight sounds less scary
[3] I do that a lot
[4] More understatement
[5] I’ll stop pointing out the understatements now
[6] I think that’s what they call “denial”[7]
[7] Jokes about Egyptian rivers on an email to someone else, please
[8] Over three months later. Quite unusual for me….