Background

On July 5th 2008, whilst on holiday in Florida, I discovered a lump whilst showering. I was scared shitless. I showed my then girlfriend, and between us we  made a joint decision to put it to the back of our minds, enjoy St Pete Beach, and worry about it when we got back to England. The Tuesday after returning to the UK, I went to the doctor’s (which in itself is a miracle – I hate going to the doctor’s). To my relief, he informed me that the lump was a cyst, and not to worry about it. However, this was the scare I needed.

Let me make something clear – I’ve never been thin. I’ve always been a “fatty”.

At school, I played rugby, athletics, and mountain biked, and despite all this I still piled on the pounds in my senior year, and by the time I started technical college I weighed 18 stone. At technical college, I built up a Cannondale mountain bike and began cycling to lose weight. It was bloody hard work to begin with, but after a few months I weighed 14 stone and was cycling anywhere between 10 and 30 miles a day.

4 years later, after graduating from University, I had piled on all the weight I had lost and weighed 18 stone again. Clearly not affected by this, over the next couple of years I continued to eat, drink and be merry, and by 2004 I weighed 21 stone. I was so fat, when I tried to go on one of the rides at the fair, I had to get off because the seat belt didn’t fit.

That year, I joined Weight Watchers, and got myself back down to 18 stone. The great thing about WW is the support network. Everyone wants to know how you did, and tell you what they did in return. In the end, that’s what killed it. Going to the sessions soon became more about socializing than actually losing weight, and eventually I decided to go it alone. The weight came back on, and then some.

When I first decided to do a blog, I weighed 21 stone, 4lbs. A month before this, I weighed just over 22 stone. Twenty two stone.

I currently weigh 16 stone. This is purely from eating healthier food – cutting out the crap. But that’s not enough. I would get out of breath just walking up the stairs! Everyone close to me was and is worried about my health – being overweight increases your risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and a whole host of other stuff I don’t even want to think about.

The weight loss is still important. But now the cycling and racing has become the catalyst for change.