The next 100.

I lost 126 pounds once. Then life, cancer and denial caught up with me. This is the start of the second journey.

There is something excruciatingly painful about gaining weight when you have very publicly lost so much.

For new readers, the short version is this. In 2017 I began a weight loss journey that eventually saw me lose 126 pounds at my lightest. I wrote a book about it. I talked about it. I became, for a while, the bloke who had beaten type 2 diabetes into submission and changed his life.

Reminding my body what a squat it. It’s a pathetic start but I’m so glad to be back.

By 2022, even after Covid had added a few pounds back on, I could still run 5k in under half an hour. I lifted weights. I rode bikes. I walked everywhere. I led an active life. I felt, if not invincible, then at least in reasonable working order.

Then several juggernauts hit me at once.

I had spent three months in Cornwall with my sister and brother-in-law, helping give my stepfather a loving death. An important relationship imploded. I was, for a while, basically homeless. I returned to the House of Lords in Westminster, with all the media scrutiny that comes with it, and it was a shock to the system.

The weight nudged back up. By the spring of 2023, I was still lifting weights three times a week and riding Lime bikes around London most days like a teenager. I thought nothing of walking 5,000 steps to a meeting. Looking back, my alcohol intake had crept up from virtual teetotal to probably around the national average. Nothing like the good old days, by which I mean the bad old days, when it was very much higher than average. But still, it had crept up. I also developed a mild obsession with my friend’s stash of Nutella that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Then, in March 2023, the mother of all juggernauts arrived. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Fuck. Cancer. The Big C. The thing you think happens to other people until it happens to you. My invincibility cloak blinked out.

Diagnosis, treatment and recovery took about six months. I will spare you the details, because some details are best left to consultants and the other people who have had prostate cancer. Prostate cancer makes clever people invent new words. My favourite is “bladmin”. But lifting weights and riding bikes were not on the menu for several months.

Actually, it turns out they were not on the menu for more than three years. A three-year fall. Over a thousand days of drift and denial.

I was busy voting on important things at 1am. I had stopped being homeless and bought a house, which meant the house immediately started needing things doing to it. I had to earn a living. I got distracted by a very high stakes civil litigation with the brave Prince Harry. Even when I got the all-clear from cancer, that renewed subscription to the gym proved elusive.

I was a busy guy. Or so I told myself. Unbeknown to me, a toxic entity had entered my body. To me, it was almost worse than prostate cancer. Denial.

I knew the weight was piling on because my clothes no longer fitted me. I did not know how much I weighed because the denial toxin was flowing through my veins again. Today’s transgression would always be compensated for on another day, at an undefined time, in a future that was somehow both inevitable and never scheduled. Weight, blood pressure and blood glucose were the only things I was strong enough to push upwards.

There were interludes when I thought I was back on track. Mounjaro worked quickly. I lost 20 pounds, but I did not enjoy being glued to the loo seat and I put the weight back on almost immediately after coming off the drug.

Then life hit me on the head with a sledgehammer.

Not only was I obese again, but the cancer came back earlier this year. Is it weird to say this was the wake-up call I needed to choose life again? Perhaps it is. But it is true.

This time, I knew I had to build life around health again. Not bolt it on. Not squeeze it into whatever was left after work, travel, stress, email, politics, family, deadlines and the general admin of being alive. I had to put health at the centre and let everything else arrange itself around it.

If I am fortunate, it is because I am now in a position in life to prioritise time over income generation. At my age, time is the rarest commodity I have. Not money. Not status. Not another meeting in another room with another bad cup of coffee.

Time.

So I have taken a leave of absence from the House of Lords for treatment and recuperation. Initial tests suggest the cancer has gone, though I will not know for certain until more tests in the summer. Despite the uncertainty, I feel good. Chipper, in fact.

Two months ago I gave alcohol a pause. Most days I am in bed before ten and certainly before eleven. I am back on a ketogenic diet, which means plenty of steak, fish, broccoli and cauliflower rice. I have quadrupled my average step count from slug-like to respectable. I walk for 15 minutes after meals. Most importantly, gloriously and with some creaking from the older parts of the machinery, I am lifting weights again.

I will tell you about my exceptional PT in another newsletter, but he is helping me with old people’s things, such as co-ordination, balance and how to stretch your adductor muscles without snapping something necessary for transit. I have also been enrolled into the most competitive steps accountability group since the invention of the Olympic Games. All tricks and strategies are deployed to get daily bronze, silver and gold medals in the group.

It is very early days. Just under a month in to my new programme, I am eight pounds lighter, 5cm tighter around the waist and clearer headed for more of the working day.

There are only another 94 pounds to go. That number would have crushed me once. It doesn’t now. I know it is possible. I have done it before. I know the terrain. I know the traps. I know denial now when it slithers into the room pretending to be reason.

I also know this time cannot just be about losing weight. It has to be about finding stress free environments, staying present for my kids. Keeping my brain active. Staying well enough to write, think, laugh, cook, walk, lift, travel and love.

chest press here we go.

The first time I lost 100 pounds, I thought I was proving something to the world. This time, I think I am proving something to myself.

So here I am again. The second journey.

The next 100.

Confessional over. Thanks for getting this far.

Tom

PS My kids have convinced me that I should get a dog. They say it will get me out of the house early each day. This will give me the edge in the steps accountability group. It’s a little known fact that dog walkers live longer than non-dog walkers and fish owners. More on this in the weeks ahead.