I'm trying to lose weight since, to be blunt, I'm obese.

I'm not doing it as a response to the whole hate and abuse campaign started by the newspapers and politicians about the “obesity epidemic”, I had my intention to lose weight well established before that latest populist witch-hunt kicked off.

Losing weight takes years… there is no quick fix. If you don't accept that, and deal with it no matter how frustrating your slow progress or occasional reverses and lack of progress might be, you'll never lose weight.

These are my thoughts and reflections on the issue.

For everyone that's never tried to lose weight, it's unbelievably hard. The facetious instruction to just “eat less” sounds so much simpler and easier than it really is. Losing weight is about a change of lifestyle, a change of ingrained and long established habits, about constantly tracking and watching what you do to make sure that you don't slip back into old habits.

If you've ever had to break a habit, e.g. chewing fingernails, saying certain words all the time, or even things like smoking then you know how hard changing a habit can be, how much effort you need to put into constantly monitoring yourself to make sure you don't relapse. Eventually though you can monitor less and need less effort, you'll have changed your habit. They say changing a habit takes 10 times more effort than creating one; from personal experience, I'd say that sounds about right.

You could “exercise more” to lose weight, except that being overweight means that exercise, which isn't fun for many people in the first place, is that much less fun. Imagine jogging, walking, or cycling with dozens of bags of sugar strapped to you. You tire quicker, your legs, feet and muscles quickly start to ache then burn.

You are also more likely to have an accident or seriously injure yourself. Imagine slipping and straining your ankle; now imagine the same thing but carrying a couple of bags of cement on your back; the chance of serious injury goes up considerably.

It's all down to human nature, or more correctly, simply nature. Humans are unique in the animal kingdom in that we have been changing our environment to an enormous extent and an ever increasing extent. Beavers build dams, birds build nests, rabbits build warrens, but we, we build cities.

Evolution takes a very long time, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years to bring about big changes (walking upright, losing our hair, our tails) yet humans have brought about massive changes in mere hundreds of years.

Our bodies are adapted to the environment he had to live in, but that environment has now changed beyond recognition, and not enough time has passed for evolution to keep up.

A hundred thousand years ago, the blink of an eye in evolutionary time, humans were nomadic hunter/gatherers. The men went out hunting every day to find and kill food, the women gathered berries and plants in the fields in case the men didn't succeed; which would normally be the case. Humans lived in perpetual semi-starvation, barely surviving on the gathered fruits and plants until an animal was killed and would provide a massive surge in energy, protein and minerals, only to starve again until the next successful hunt.

A simple daily shopping trip to the supermarket brings back home more calories than our ancestors might see in a week.

Meat, cheese, sugars are luxury foods our ancestors hardly ever had. They provide energy and nutrition for us in form we are optimised to exploit. Our body has evolved to recognise these ideal foods, it's why they taste so good; it's our body's way of telling us we should eat it. Since this food was so rare in the past there was nothing wrong with our bodies going “eat as much as you can” because we'd not likely see that much food again for days or weeks. In our plentiful society though, we see that food everyday. Maybe in a few hundred thousands of years we will have evolved so that our body is less enthusiastic about such foods (or genetically engineered ourselves to achieve the same result) and we no longer crave sweets and fats.

Trouble believing that? Have you ever wondered why salt sometimes tastes great, but at other times tastes foul? If you've been sweating a lot, and have a salt deficiency, it will taste good. If you've eaten too much salt, then it will taste foul. It's simply your body telling you what it needs and then protecting you from the harm of overdosing from too much. Our ancestors though never had a need for this mechanism where fats and sugars are concerned, they were never in sufficiently plentiful supply, so we don't have it.

What makes things worse when trying to lose weight is if, like me, your weight is linked to emotional issues. You eat to protect yourself, to provide a barrier or shield of fat that keeps the hurt out. As long as you need the comfort, the protection, of that shield you'll never get rid of it, no matter how hard you try; your subconscious will defeat you every time. When someone or something upsets you, you'll reach for the chocolate, the ice-cream or the pizza and all your hard work will disappear. The worst thing is that this is all self-reinforcing.

The fatter you are the more you hate yourself and what you are, the more upset and hurt you become; I worry about how I look and that people won't like me because I'm fat, easily confirmed when complete strangers call me names in the street, which has happened a number of times.

The more some idiots in the news and politics say it's all just down to lack of self control and vilify me and others like me, accuse us of sabotaging the NHS for others, of taking up all the seats on the train or bus the more you reach for the comfort foods and put on weight.

What makes it easy is that the those comfort foods taste so much better than say lettuce or carrots.

If you suffer from issues like this, you need to get those fixed or losing weight will always elude you and that failure will actually feed your self loathing, making things worse.

As facetious and superficial as the phrases “just eat less” or “do more exercise” are, they are in principle correct. Weight and losing it is all about energy in vs energy out. If you're fat it's because the ratio of energy in to energy out is skewed towards intake, and not balanced as it should be.

Almost all diets out there are just cons, or flawed, based on pet theories or simple nonsense. Atkins, strawberry, blood-group etc. all are, in my opinion, nonsense. While many will let you lose weight successfully, they don't promote a change in lifestyle and habits, and many of them are possibly harmful because you are doing things to your body you really shouldn't be doing and that will damage you in the end as surely as being obese will.

The most effective and best diet is a calorie counting one. Count how many calories you take in, and balance that with the amount of calories you use, whether used by simply beating your heart, breathing and pumping blood, or by running marathons.

Weight Watchers is, when it comes down to it, a calorie counting diet. Calories and fat (calories in a different form) are converted to “points” and it's those points that you track. The amount of points you should have a day is calculated from your weight (heavier, i.e. fat, people burn more calories a day) and how much you move a day (do you work sitting down, or standing up for example) and then you just make sure that you eat all those points your allocated.

Weight has to be lost slowly, no more than 1-2 kg a week at the most, or your body will start to think there's a famine and will re-arrange its metabolism to deal with it, essentially entering an energy conservation state that will try to save and store as much energy (fat) as possible; not something you want if you are losing weight. Too fast weight loss can also cause a myriad of other health issues.

It's therefore important that you do actually eat all the points (calories) you are allocated. If you lose weight too quickly you simply suffer health issues and the dreaded “diet bounce” and put weight back on again soon enough.

There are times when things will stand still, when weight doesn't drop, or when it actually goes up, and those bad times need to be managed, not by berating yourself, but by accepting that this is inevitable and that next week will be better.

The most important thing is to not berate yourself and to simply accept that it happened, promise not to have it happen again, and move on. Try to figure out why it happened, was it avoidable, was it caused by something unexpected, is there an underlying problem that needs to be solved or addressed? Maybe you had a job interview, or someone upset you, or you were simply bored and reached for the snacks? Whatever it is, be constructive about it, be analytical and reasonable, don't just tell yourself off, if you do you're just perpetuating the cycle of eat/hurt/eat.

Also, remember that your body needs to adjust to your new weight. It's a well recognised phenomenon that while you are keeping closely to your diet you can plateaux, your weight seemingly unchanged for a number of weeks. It is very important at times like this to keep going with the diet and not be disheartened. Your body is adjusting to your new weight and the new conditions and the diet is continuing to work. If after a couple of weeks your weight doesn't start dropping again, you should re-evaluate your calorie (or point) allocation and ensure that it's correctly calculated for your new weight; as you lose weight, your daily calorie requirement also goes down.

If you've actually managed to read to here, thanks for sticking with me :)

Best of luck with your your own weight loss, if that's your intention, or hopefully I've helped you understand a bit more what it's like to try and lose weight.