At 6:04am this morning, exactly 1 year after I started my diet, I got on the scales in the bathroom for the final time (not really). It seems longer than a year, probably because it has been a year of privation and hunger (not really), of self-revelatory blogging, of desperate pleas for cash, of plateaus and plates, of lowering blood pressure, of improving health, of jogging and of jigging. 

But this is all flannel. Those of you who have been with me for the whole year (hi, Denise!) will be desperate to know what my final weigh-in was (ok, Denise already knows, but I doubt anybody else has read every single post, and my subsidiary aim of creating a massive following for blog has most definitely NOT been achieved - curses! is nobody interested in the struggle of one man with an enormous lump of cheese?)

Before I get to that, here are the secrets of my weight loss...

(1) I used to eat a lot of cheese. I don't now.

(2)  I counted calories for most of the year, but when I got down to my goal weight I counted intermittently but was very aware when I had gone over, because when I go over on calories I REALLY go over on calories.

(3) Weight gain from a couple of days of over-eating can be quickly lost. I never gave up on the diet just because I gained a bit over Christmas, or when I was on holiday, or it was my birthday, or whatever.

(4) Exercise isn't really my thing. Though it might be your thing.

(5) I weighed myself on different days of the week so I was never tied to weighing myself just before the weekend or just after the weekend. Either of these would have led to pre or post weigh-in misery. I'm going to continue, for my own benefit, weighing myself on the 10th, 20th and 30th of every month (and every day, twice a day because I can't help myself) as my official weigh-ins. These will now be private official weigh-ins.

(6) There is no secret but the first rule of Fit Club is we don't talk about Fit Club. Et cetera.

So, here it is, my final jump on the scales...

Which is a total loss over the year of 6 stones and 6 lbs. Here is a graph...

My BMI when I started was 40.1. According to the NHS website, it is now...

Yes, I'm still overweight, and one day I may not be. But food is bloody amazing and I'm afraid that from this moment on, I am going to just try to maintain at my current weight. If I happen to lose more, that  will be fine.

Now I know you have all been waiting for a picture of me in the traditional post diet pose. Here it is...

And, in the tradition of post-diet dancing that was inaugurated by Dr Christian Wobblehead on the amazing Supersize vs Superskinny programme, here is a picture of me dancing...

I said that I would do a song to thank everybody who powered my diet through the medium of guilt if I raised more than £500 including gift aid. I didn't achieve this but I would blooming well like to thank everybody who did sponsor me. The money will do good things within Shelter and the PDSA. If you want to support either of these please go ahead and give them more money. In times of austerity they are amongst many organisations that do great things for the vulnerable members, human and animal, of our society.

I didn't do a song (I did but it was truly terrible and in places a bit creepy) but I have done a dance. Because of where I got the music from, if you enjoy my sexy dancing then why not give some money to Headway, the brain injury charity?

Thank you all and goodnight.

Well, at a lot of stuff has changed over the last year, hasn’t it?

No, I know this didn’t actually happen in the last year but Peter Capaldi had his first full season as the Doctor and he was amazing! The coalition government also regenerated into a harsher, more prickly government who hopefully will, underneath it all, prove to have our best interests at heart (gulp!) It became apparent that FIFA (which stands for the Football Is Football Association and is in direct opposition to Football Is American Football And Soccer Is Rest Of The World Football Association FIAFASIROTWA) is a corrupt institution which I still could not care less about. People stopped doing the Ice Bucket Challenge but probably found some other #fidiotic things to do.

(having heard that #Brexit is a thing these days I’m trying to introduce the new word #fidiot as a term for people who I hear using the word ‘brexit’ outside of this context –

‘I would lend Andy my bike but he always brexit!’)

Paddington Bear got a makeover…

And obviously I’ve changed. Don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict another animated picture of me morphing from fat to thin. In losing my weight I am bucking the trend of how the UK’s fatness levels are going. Look, I made a graph! 

Actually, I say I'm bucking the trend, but those numbers for 2013 (sourced from some rubbish government or WHO survey) show a slight downturn, even though the projections for 2030 are higher. Maybe I'm just surfing the zeitgeist..

That’s something else that has changed. I’ve worked out how to make graphs in Excel. Who knows, one day that may be a useful skill. Along with making morphing gifs, animated gifs generally, stupid animations generally. It isn’t like I’m wasting my spare time…

Look! I drew a picture of a waste of time bin, full of the ways I waste my time, but not including me drawing a picture of a waste of time bin. Basically I couldn't quite figure out how the analogy or the satire or whatever I was trying to do would work. But there's a Dalek in there and Diablo sticks. Couldn't be bothered to draw an actual Diablo. And I'm really not sure what the man waving his arms is supposed to represent. Me wasting my time? 

On which subject, here is a small clip of my 'Thank You song' 

And although I haven't included a self-revelatory story of my over-eating, I think in one post I've pretty much created a microcosm of the whole of the rest of this blog. 

See you tomorrow for the final weigh-in...

About a year ago Denise and I were on holiday in Worcestershire. We ate muchly and took a photo of me on the verandah of our holiday cottage. You may have seen it before, but here it is...

...and we have just returned, today, from a quick visit to the same sort of area where Denise spent a bit of time handling owls at the International Centre for Birds of Prey. She is probably blogging about it even as we speak! I asked her to take a picture of me in a similar pose...

...because as I mentioned yesterday, I love a morphing image from fat to thin. What could be more fun? Though this one has ended up being slightly psychedelic, on account of I tried to make the trees in the background morph as well! 

There are some things that I haven't been able to achieve in my year of dieting and I think you'll agree that one of those things is talking enough about late 70s and early 80s kids TV.

Now, I know what you are now saying. Just for the record, Doctor Who is NOT kids TV, it is TV for ALL the family and that includes you, Denise! Even if it is only when David Tennant is on screen. Also it spans much more than just the late 70s and early 80s, though those are the most important eras of the show, obviously.

But what can there possibly be to say about Morph? He presented a positive role model for children as he was happy no matter what shape or size he was, and he had friends of all sizes, colours, and art materials...

None of them fat, though. Unless you count those little blobs at the bottom of the screen, because who knows what their correct BMI should be? And I was always suspicious that the guy with the beard was concealing something.

But that really is all I have to say on the subject because what I really came here to talk about today is that, finally, after a year of trying, I have worked out how to do a fat-to-thin morphing image. Which is very exciting for me! 

And just in case you are disappointed by the lack of 'Morph' content in this blog...

I have mentioned before about how, many years ago, I tried to get a hobby to help me lose weight...

I'm pretty sure that playing Tomb Raider counted as a hobby, though there are some who would say it was a colossal waste of time. Especially given, the 'no actual weight loss achieved' end result.

Well recently, as you may have noticed, I have discovered online meme generators. I'm working on developing quick-fire wit. But not yet achieving it. Honestly, that Lara Croft one took me about half an hour of staring into space before I managed to reduce the verbiage to that level.

Also, as you may have noticed (again), I have rediscovered the art of animation. Now I have explored this before as it entertains me no end. And in the last few days I have spent approx 5 billion hours generating approx 0.00002ms of animation. Which is a pretty good work:output ratio I think you will agree. And already Hanna Barbera are hammering at my door...

Ok, maybe not. 

But this all another tool in my plan for continued weight loss or at least weight maintenance. 

But this is all beating around the bush because I know you came here to find out whether I have lost my holiday weight gain. At my last weigh-in I was 14 stone and 2 pounds. At my post-holiday sneaky unofficial weigh-in I was 14 stone and 9 pounds. Today, I am....

...or possibly lurches towards me. 

I revealed, on our return from our hols, that I had put on half a stone in just a few short days. Disaster!

I've been on diets before and there are various things which have broken those diets. One of them is that most years, but not this year, I attend a professional conference for 4 days in early April. At this conference, I stay at a hotel at which I eat a cooked breakfast every day. There are lots of drugs companies in attendance who, throughout the day, offer freebies of food and drinks, none of them healthy. And in the evening there is meeting up with old friends for food and drinks. I always come home heavier than I arrived. 

I didn't go this year, but the holiday fulfilled much of the over-eating in early April criteria for a diet-breaker.

But what is it that breaks the diet?

My current theory is that it seems so easy to put the weight on, and it always seems so difficult to get it off. Attending the conference is a bit like a mini holiday from work and I think I just get the post-holiday blues. You know the thing - you've been away, had a good time, put on weight, and now you've got to go back to work. Who wouldn't feel like just carrying on eating? Because it's going to be hard work to lose that weight again, isn't it? May as well give up.

But no! If there's one thing I've learnt in this year of dieting, let it be this. Short term weight gain can be lost almost as quickly as it was put on.

Or at least, that's what I'm hoping tomorrow will bring...

A friend of mine sent me a helpful link to an article recently. This article...

Now, it is bad enough that on one of my shoulders, all the time is this little character...

...without 'scientists' and 'friends' trying to convince me that cheese will help me lose weight. Or, as it turns out, 'journalists'.

Did I need to put journalists in quotes then? Probably not, they actually are journalists, probably.

Anyway, if you look a little deeper at this 'research', it turns out to have been paid for by the Danish Dairy Board, so that may not be entirely unbiased.

And all it actually shows is that in 15 men who ate one of three equally calorific diets with similar fat contents (high in milk, high in cheese, or a control diet) the ones who had the dairy products had higher levels of the gut bacteria by-product, butyrate. Which in an unrelated study has been associated, in some circumstances, with lowering the risk of developing obesity.

So, for those of you who like an equation with your science stories, because mainly that is what science does...

Oh man, I love cheese…

People still look at me slightly askance when, in response to their “How did you lose weight?” question, I say, “I just stopped eating cheese.”
I have to follow it up with, “I really love cheese. No, really, really love cheese. No, not like that. But honestly I love eating cheese.”
If I’m unlucky I then get into a conversation about the different types of cheese, the many varieties, the stinkiness, the blueness. I have to quash this line of conversation very blooming quickly. I do not like all cheese. I’m not a maniac. I like Cheddar cheese, I like the Double Gloucester, the Red Leicester, the Lancashire crumbly cheese. I like me a bit of Edam. As soon  as any weirdness starts going on with the cheese, you know, streaks of colour, foot smells, I become not a cheese lover. I am not an aficionado of cheese, I am not a connoisseur of cheese. I love your basic cheese. 

This stuff.

And in the mythology of me, it is probably true that I could eat the whole of that lump of cheese in a single sitting. 

And yet when I come to write my best-selling tome of diet advice, possibly entitled ‘I lost weight and so can you!’ (just send me cash now if you want to pre-order this) I feel it won’t be much use to say on every page, ‘Stop eating cheese!’ I believe there may be more to it than that. 

Apart from anything else, I haven’t entirely stopped eating cheese, but I have stopped eating cheese when I’m making a cup of tea, or when I’m toasting some bread, or when I’m staring out of the kitchen window, or when I’m watching Doctor Who late at night.

My best advice at the moment, if you are somebody almost exactly like me, is take a long hard look at yourself and think about the food that you guzzle more than anything else, you know, the one with loads of calories in it. And just eat less of it. Imagine, every time you go to eat some, that somebody is watching you and shaking their head sadly, also possibly tutting. Or you could just imagine a flood of cholesterol swooshing through your arteries and plaques of, not to put too fine a point on it, crapulent gloop (okay, I did apply a slightly finer point than necessary because I didn’t want to offend) adhering to the walls of your blood vessels. Or you could just imagine yourself having a heart attack and being no longer alive to eat cheese in moderation. I have attempted all of these methods of food control, but if they don’t work you could try these instead…

1. Employ an army of mice. This almost never ends well and only works for cheese, or if you are mad keen on eating grain, but requires the secondary employment of an army of cats and so if you are a mad cat person you will at the very least be happy.
2. Acquire an extreme dairy intolerance, the kind which means you can’t even go into the countryside for fear of meeting a cow. Unfortunately this may limit your exercise opportunities and it is not easy to acquire food intolerances, despite what everybody seems to think. Yes, I am saying that your lactose intolerance is probably all in your mind.

3. Groundhog Day your way into Seattle on January 18, 2015 when the city authorities banned cheese ahead of an important sporting fixture. I feel it is as sensible to suggest you could Groundhog Day yourself as it is to ban cheese, so there.

4. Make every day a cheese-rolling day. You are only allowed to eat cheese if you have first chased it down a hill and injured yourself. Combine exercise and cheese-eating with prolonged periods of recuperation.

And this sort of advice is why my book, ‘I am an idiot and you are too’, is going to make a fortune.