My fat

03 Aug, 2026

Earlier this year, I had my body scanned in a DEXA scanner. This is basically a huge flatbed scanner that you lie down on. For a few minutes, a robot arm moves around you and inspects you from all sides, accompanied by appropriate whirring and beeping noises. At the end of the process, you are handed a PDF with a detailed breakdown of what your body consists of, i.e. fat, and everything else.

In my case, the scan reported that I had lost about 5 kilos of fat, and most importantly, the amount of visceral fat (the bad kind) had been reduced by almost exactly 50%.

This is an excellent result by any standard.

I proceeded to celebrate by eating a large bag of crisps in my car, before even driving off the parking lot. I honestly don't know what I was thinking. I didn't plan to act out a miniature tableau depicting the perverse human instinct for irrational self-destruction, but that's what I did.

In retrospect, treating a single good result as a goal to be achieved, after which my habits could return to normal, was not brilliant.

People who meet me tend to form the impression that I'm intelligent, which is flattering to an extent, but it is a little infuriating that they automatically seem to believe that I am capable of overcoming any problems that I encounter. My whole life has been nothing but a refutation of this notion.¹

My mother clearly had had her own issues in the past, and being the genius child psychologist that she is, had declared all unhealthy food off-limits. "Unhealthy" in this case being equivalent to "tastes good". Unsurprisingly, I started out in life rather underfed and scrawny.

Equally unsurprisingly, as soon as I left home, I quickly ballooned up in size and stayed there for over twenty years. There must have been a day in the late 90's when I was at my ideal weight, but it passed by unnoticed. I was not used to looking in mirrors in any case.

Six years ago I finally lost most of the excess weight. I'm not sure why I succeeded that time, but the circumstances were in my favour. We were all working from home at the time, which meant I could do my dieting without being seen. I was also given some extra motivation by the fact that I had tried to take up running, and hurt my knees and then my back so badly that I literally could not get off the sofa. Acute physical pain is a very effective way of getting the brain's attention.

Other people would not now describe me as overweight, but the cold eye of the scanner certainly does, and although I look decent, I still avoid mirrors and cameras.

I constantly find myself at the edge of success, which is a place I'm very familiar with and one that I am desperate to leave behind me.