If you're reading this hoping for the story of a fitness model who suddenly lost half their body weight and discovered their abs, you'll probably be disappointed.

I'm a fairly ordinary 44-year-old bloke with a desk job, a family, a partner and all the usual responsibilities that come with adult life. These days my weekends are far more likely to involve a takeaway, a film, dinner out or spending time with my teenage kids than the sort of nights out I enjoyed in my twenties.

Like a lot of people my age, life gradually changed without me really noticing.

The free time became less free.

The gym sessions became less frequent.

The late nights became more common.

And somehow the weight kept creeping upwards.

The funny thing is, I never really thought of myself as being massively overweight.

From my teenage years onwards I've always done some form of weight training. I was never one of those naturally skinny lads. I've always carried a decent amount of muscle and have generally been built on the broader side compared to most of my friends.

I wasn't ripped. I never had aspirations of stepping on a bodybuilding stage. But I was strong, reasonably fit and carried my weight fairly well.

For years I seemed to hover around the fifteen stone mark.

Sometimes a little above.

Sometimes a little below.

When I was training consistently, the gym often balanced out the less sensible choices elsewhere. The problem was that while the exercise went up and down over the years, the eating rarely followed the same rules.

If anything, it often worked the opposite way around.

When life got busy and the workouts dropped off, the eating and drinking quietly increased.

Looking back now, I can see exactly how it happened.

A handful of crisps while deciding what to have for dinner.

A biscuit with a coffee.

A few snacks while watching television.

Picking at food throughout a Saturday afternoon.

The sort of calories that barely register because no individual choice seems particularly bad.

The trouble is they all add up.

Then there are the things we all blame but which genuinely do contribute: birthdays, holidays, Christmas, weekends away, meals out, celebrations and all the other moments where food becomes part of enjoying life.

For a long time I managed to keep things under control.

Whenever clothes started feeling a bit tighter, I'd pull things back for a while.

I've always had a bit of a stubborn streak when it comes to buying bigger clothes. My thinking was simple: if my trousers were starting to feel uncomfortable, that was my warning sign to sort myself out rather than move up another size.

For years, that approach worked.

Recently, it hasn't.

The last year in particular has felt different.

 

Work has become busier.

The hours have become longer.

The opportunities to exercise have become fewer.

The opportunities to snack have become greater.

If I'm being completely honest, that's when I started losing the battle.

One thing I've learned about myself over the years is that boredom is one of my biggest weaknesses when it comes to food.

I get bored extremely easily.

I can't get to the end of a cereal box without wanting something different.

That's one of the reasons many diets have never worked for me. I don't have the personality for endless containers of chicken, rice and broccoli. The more restricted I feel, the more likely I am to throw caution to the wind and end up eating far worse than I would have done otherwise.

Eventually I found myself in a position where my clothes had been feeling uncomfortable for far longer than I cared to admit.

A recent summer holiday forced the issue.

Some clothes no longer fitted properly.

Photos showed a version of myself I wasn't entirely happy seeing.

And for the first time in quite a while, I decided to stop guessing and actually find out where I stood.

I've never been a fan of weighing myself.

I've always preferred to judge things by how my clothes fit.

But eventually curiosity got the better of me.

I stepped on the scales and had a body composition scan done.

I expected bad news.

I wasn't prepared for how bad.

In my head, I thought I might have drifted somewhere into the mid-sixteen stone range.

Perhaps sixteen and a half stone on a bad day.

The reality was 17 stone 9 pounds.

247 pounds.

I genuinely couldn't remember ever weighing that much in my life.

That was the moment when all the excuses disappeared.

This wasn't a case of losing a few pounds before summer.

This wasn't a stone of Christmas weight hanging around longer than it should.

This was a serious amount of excess weight that had built up gradually over years.

 

The body composition results at least offered one small positive. Everything was high. The body fat was high, but so was the muscle mass. Years of lifting weights hadn't disappeared entirely. Underneath the extra weight there was still a reasonable amount of muscle worth holding on to.

That gave me something to work with.

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Why I Decided to Try Wegovy

Over the last couple of years, I'd become increasingly aware of weight loss injections.

It seemed like every few months there was another news story, another celebrity headline or another person talking about their experience.

To be honest, I was never completely convinced.

Part of that was practical. The thought of injecting myself wasn't particularly appealing, and as demand increased, the costs seemed to climb as well. More than that, I think there was a part of me that felt these sorts of treatments were for people in a worse position than I was.

I told myself I still had things under control.

The reality was that several people I know had already gone down that route and, in many cases, had done remarkably well. They weren't suddenly becoming fitness influencers or running marathons every weekend, but they were losing weight, feeling better and regaining some control over habits they had struggled with for years.

As my own weight continued creeping upwards, I found myself paying closer attention to their experiences.

What started as curiosity slowly became consideration.

Then, when oral Wegovy became available, it felt like the right time to properly explore the option.

I didn't see it as a miracle cure.

I didn't see it as a shortcut.

If anything, I viewed it as another tool that might help me get back on top of the things I already knew I should be doing: eating better, moving more, sleeping properly and taking better care of myself.

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The Road Ahead

In my mind, fifteen stone represents a realistic version of me.

Not super lean.

Not magazine-cover fit.

Just healthy, strong and comfortable in my own skin again.

Ironically, I have been lighter. Many years ago, during a particularly difficult period in my life, I dropped close to fourteen stone. People often assume lighter is always better, but honestly, it didn't suit me.

My target isn't to become the lightest version of myself.

It's to become the healthiest version of myself.

Whilst 15 stone is the destination I've set myself, I'm under no illusion that I'll wake up one morning and suddenly find myself there.

For that reason, I've broken the journey down into smaller milestones that feel more achievable and easier to focus on.

The first target is getting back under the 17 stone mark.

That might not sound particularly exciting to some people, but after seeing 17 stone 9 pounds appear on the scales, crossing back below that line will feel like a significant psychological win.

After that, the goal is to get back into the 16 stone range.

The reality is that I haven't spent much time there recently, and I think seeing a sixteen in front of my weight again will be the point where this all starts to feel real.

The final destination is somewhere around the 15 stone mark.

That may end up being exactly 15 stone, or it may turn out that 15½ stone is where I feel healthiest and strongest. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

For now though, I'm trying not to focus too far ahead.

Seventeen stone first.

Then sixteen.

Then we'll see where the journey takes me.

 

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Why I'm Writing This

This isn't intended to be a success story written with the benefit of hindsight.

I don't know where this journey will end.

I don't know whether I'll reach my target weight, how quickly the weight will come off or what challenges lie ahead.

What I can do is document the process honestly as it happens.

The good days.

The difficult days.

The wins.

The setbacks.

And everything in between.

Partly, that's to keep myself accountable.

Partly, it's because writing things down forces me to stay focused.

But mostly, it's because there might be someone else reading this who is standing exactly where I was a few weeks ago: uncomfortable in their clothes, avoiding the scales, wondering how things got this far and trying to decide what to do next.

If that's you, perhaps this story will help.

Because that's exactly where my own journey begins.

In the next post, I'll share my experience of the first week on oral Wegovy, including the side effects, the changes in appetite, my first attempts at adjusting my eating habits and, most importantly, whether the scales have started moving in the right direction.

After that, I'll provide regular updates as the journey continues, with monthly progress reports and milestone articles along the way.

For now, though, the journey starts here. 💪📉