The Fatslayer Chronicles

I walked past a colleague from another department in the corridor last week, and it wasn’t until he called after me (“Hey, are you ignoring me..?”) that I recognised him. He had changed almost beyond recognition through losing a phenomenal amount of weight in a really short space of time.

At first I thought he must be seriously ill - literally dying of cancer or something – because the change was so dramatic. I was at a loss for words – how can you comment on a previously obese person’s weight loss when it might be due to some horrendous underlying illness rather than planned dieting?

Luckily he initiated the conversation. He grinned and patted his stomach and said “What do you think about my new figure?”

“Wow, what a change! What have you been up to?” I said. This was the most neutral thing I could think of to say. I didn’t want to say “You look great” because it would’ve been a lie. Conversely, it seemed rude to tell the truth and say he looked sallow and drawn. So I opted for the conversational equivalent of the colour beige.

He launched into his story, how he’d been on a liquid diet since the end of October last year (2005!) and had already lost 9 stones (130lbs).

Yes, you read that right. 130lbs in 12 weeks. No wonder he looks ill.

He said that he’d gone on holiday to Florida and been mortified when he couldn’t get on all the fairground rides with his kids because the safety bar wouldn’t fit over his stomach. This is a guy who is around 5’6” and who weighed around 25 stones (350lbs).

He said he came home and went onto the liquid diet straight away, and he hasn’t had a bite of solid food since 27^th October. He plans to lose another 4 stones (56lbs) by the end of February and then he’ll be done.

I didn’t really know what to say. I WANTED to say “Man, what you’re doing is DANGEROUS!!” But I didn’t, because I had an inkling that it would fall on deaf ears. He’d think it was sour grapes or jealousy. I did venture to say “Is it safe to lose weight that quickly?” but he ignored my interruption and simply kept on yammering on about how great he felt and what benefits he was seeing. All the time I was thinking, “Wow, talk about royally screwing up your metabolism and fucking yourself up. Doesn’t this guy know anything about safe weight loss and the dangers of crash dieting?”

But obviously he DIDN’T know anything about those things, or he was wilfully ignoring what knowledge he did possess. He wanted fast, fast, fast, results and he was blind to the long term consequences.

After about 15 minutes of singing the praises of his liquid diet, he suddenly cocked his head on one side and gave me an appraising look. My heart sank, because I knew what was coming. “You’ve lost some weight, haven’t you?” he said. “How much, and how long has it taken you?”

I mumbled my reply and he immediately launched into a hard sell of his liquid miracle diet. “You should try it! You could be at goal in 30 days!”

I said I was doing it slow and steady, and wasn’t in any rush to get to goal because I needed to learn the secrets of maintenance, and the longer I took to get to goal the more I’d have learned. He looked at me with incredulity, as if I’d said that Martians were beaming down from motherships on nightly excursions to microwave our brains and steal our DNA whilst we slept.

Then – I couldn’t believe it! - he started to lecture me in a really hectoring manner about how bad it was to be overweight and that I ought to do something about it quickly because time was of the essence and every day I was overweight was a day wasted. He said that conventional diets didn’t work, and that my body needed ‘a liquid cosh’ to jumpstart it into rapid and permanent weight loss.

WTF?

This was a guy who used to sit in the hospital canteen eating TWO fried breakfasts every morning and fried crap for lunch. But now he’s lost all that weight drinking milkshakes he’s suddenly a weight-loss guru.

Give me a fucking break.

I stood there in the corridor whilst he harangued me, wishing I was the kind of person who could harangue back and speak my mind. I wanted so badly to tell him that I thought he was being really foolish and jeopardising his health, but I didn’t want to be rude. How crazy is that? Damn my upbringing and its emphasis on good manners!

To make matters worse, this morning one of my team mates returned to the office after a meeting, and suddenly announced he was starting the same liquid diet. “You’ve been talking to the IT manager!” I said (accusingly). He nodded. “Yeah, talk about a walking advertisement! If he can do it, I’m sure I bloody can too…”

Sigh.

I’ve sat opposite this team mate since 14^th March, eating my healthy lunches, going for lunchtime walks etc., and it’s had no impact on him whatsoever. Periodically he bemoans his size and his type 2 diabetes and the fact that its getting harder and harder for him to run around after his kids (he’s got 4, and because he weighs 22 stones – 310lbs – they run him ragged), but he’s never had the motivation to do anything about it. And patently my example has failed to inspire him. Now after just one corridor conversation with The Incredible Shrinking Man he’s an evangelist for liquid diets and thinks if he drinks shakes for 2 months he’ll be ‘cured’ and will never need to worry about his weight again.

Yeah, right.

I was SO tempted to get on my soap box and try to put him straight, but the sheer magnitude of the task defeated me so I just kept my mouth shut. It’s his prerogative to race off like a hare if he wants to, but as for me, I’m taking a leaf out of the tortoise’s book, and getting to the finish line at my own sedate, boring pace.