I was sitting in the Westbury hotel having coffee with an ex at the end of November 2012, when I made a slight joke about my weight. He gave me a look of relief, smiled and said, “Oh, thank goodness we can talk about it. What the hell happened?” What happened indeed? By the end of November I was over 200 lbs, 205 lbs to be exact. And here’s the proof:

Yup. I know.

That’s me, as a size 18, in November of last year. After I reached that dreadful weight one afternoon, I just made a decision. I took up with reddit.com/r/keto, and signed up with www.superbetter.com and www.myfitnesspal.com. I started to eat less, drink more water, eat more high fiber foods.  I also signed up to the UCD gym, which contains this:

Gym? What’s a gym?

This is a 50m pool. And at least three times a week I swim fifteen lengths there in under 30 minutes. That’s 1500 meters, so it is, and that’s how I spend my lunch break. There’s been plenty of moments when I clung to the edge of the pool completely exhausted. But the memory of that reflection in the photo above, and the idea of my son being ashamed of me, kept me going. And this is what I look like now:

Glammed up for the book reading in Kytelers.

I’m now a size 12, and losing all this weight really does do something to how you view yourself. This is the size I was when I was late twenties, early thirties, and seeing that figure in my reflections is almost, not quite, but almost like getting some years back. Certainly better than the alternative.

So that’s last year’s project done. Next up, world domination.