Weight off his shoulders
ALISON ROBERTS
AT HIS largest, Tom Armour had a neck measurement of 23 inches, the same size as Victoria Beckham's waist. His own waist measured 60in, and his thighs rippled as he walked. This was a very, very fat man.
For 13 years, Armour - who hails from Johnstone, near Glasgow, and is a banker - weighed between 26 and 30 stone. "I was about the same weight as the darts player Andy Fordham, but I'm not as tall as him, so, in fact, I was, well, wider."
Today, Armour is just 7lb from his target weight of 13st 7lb (through concerted dieting and exercise, he has lost more than that amount - 13st 10lb - in less than 18 months). Dressed in beige trousers and a checked shirt, he looks almost slim.
He hands me six pictures of himself as a fat man: family snaps in which he poses awkwardly with his wife, Marie, and his two daughters, Lorna, 14, and Katie, 17, his vast bulk squeezed into, and dominating, the frame.
"I struggled to find these," he says. "I used to avoid having my picture taken at all costs, just as I'd avoid looking in a mirror. The other day we were watching a family video from a couple of years ago, and for a full five minutes or so, I completely failed to recognise myself." I ask him what he feels as he looks at himself in those pictures. He seems sad, on the verge of tears. "Guilt, primarily."
Obesity, particularly in men, is a serious and ever-increasing problem in the UK. While celebrity culture promotes extreme thinness as the desirable norm - even in men: see Orlando Bloom's protruding ribs and sharp-as-knives cheekbones in Pirates of the Caribbean - a staggering 61 per cent of men (and 57 per cent of women) are officially overweight.
According to government figures, 17 per cent of men are clinically obese; between 1980 and 2002, the numbers of obese men quadrupled. It is estimated, meanwhile, that each year obesity is directly responsible for some 4,000 cases of cancer (an extreme surplus of body fat raises the risk of bowel cancer, for example, by roughly 60 per cent).
Armour, 45, was relatively lucky. His Scottish family has a history of heart problems and diabetes, yet during his days of excess he developed neither.
Instead he suffered a host of more nebulous, but just as chronic, problems: exceptionally low self-esteem, anger, guilt, self-loathing. He was bullied at work, physically assaulted by strangers and often insulted in the street or on public transport.
"I think my wife stayed with me out of habit," he admits. "For all that time, I wasn't really a husband to her." (She agrees: "I felt like a single parent for years. He was too embarrassed to come to family weddings or parties. He'd even fabricate arguments just before we were due to go, so that I'd set out on my own. When I was with him, I used to see pity in the eyes of people looking at me on the street. You can love someone, but it's hard to lust after a 28-stone man.")
"There are many misconceptions about being fat," continues Armour. "One of them is that fat people are jolly, cheery types. I suppose that's what I was like at work, the show I'd put on. But actually being fat makes you miserable - certainly I was miserable - and my family bore the brunt of it."
Taking the train to the City of London, where he now works, from his home in Essex, Armour was often the subject of vicious comments from strangers. "Of course, I couldn't fit in the single seats, only the double ones. When it got busy, people would sneer at me, 'Oh, if the fat so-and-so got up, two or three people could sit down.' It happened all the time, and there's nothing you can say to it. I'd bury my head deeper in my paper, and try to ignore it. Deep down, I suppose I felt, yes, they were right."
Armour's story of weight gain is not uncommon. He used to be a fit, rugby-playing twentysomething, but quickly fell into very bad habits. Extremely long hours at work - Armour handles property deals worth up to £200 million for the Royal Bank of Scotland - meant his eating patterns became unhealthily erratic. For years he ate badly, often and on the run: sausage rolls and scones for breakfast, chocolate and burgers during the day, all on top of regular meals. Two or three times a week, he binge-drank, sometimes as much as 15 pints in a night. In just two years, he put on 14 stone.
But how did such a high-powered man like Armour allow himself to get so massive? Part of the explanation lies in simple over-eating with a lack of exercise. As a rugby player, he could get away with the consumption of large quantities of poor food, but, as an older man who took no exercise at all (and ate the same amount), the pounds began to add up. Yet, he also, undeniably, lost control of his body and was never quite able to face the reality of his size. His weight fed a spiral of unhappiness.
"We had one staff outing to a go-karting track," says Armour. "For days, I told my boss I didn't want to go, but he went on and on at me to join in. He told me they would find a big-enough racing suit and go-kart, so eventually I caved in and agreed to come along. It sounds funny now, but at the time it was all utterly humiliating. Of course, we got there and I ripped the suit as I was putting it on. Total silence in the changing room. There was no go-kart big enough, so I spent the entire evening standing alone waiting for my colleagues to finish their fun.
"At work, when I met people for the first time, I was often a fat guy first and a person second. I've sat around the table at meetings with people who really made little effort to disguise their disgust at my weight."
Though, like millions of women, he began four or five diets every year, he rarely stuck to them for long. "You have to live with yourself, so you construct this image in your head where you look and feel OK. It's just self-delusion really."
Psychologists say it often takes a shock of some kind to shatter this false self-image, and it was only when Armour learned what his younger daughter really thought of him that he decided to take action.
"I hadn't really realised, but Lorna always asked her mother to collect her from her friends' houses. One evening, Marie had had a couple of glasses of wine, so I offered to do the picking up. I got to this particular house and I knocked on the door for Lorna - who came out, got in the car and burst into tears. I remember what she said so well. 'Why did you come? Now my friends know what you look like.'
"I guess after that I suddenly understood what my daughters thought of me. I had nowhere to hide and I felt terribly exposed."
Armour joined a club called Slimming World (he has just become its Man of the Year), whose membership lists tell their own story. At any one time, a quarter of a million people are members, of whom 240,000 are women.
The club is rather like Alcoholics Anonymous: members, even those who have reached their target weight, are encouraged to return week after week to trade stories of managing to beat temptation. Its diet plan follows the rules of basic healthy eating - low fat, high fibre, lots of fruit and vegetables.
Yet the discipline, and potential embarrassment, provided by these weekly clubs satirised in Kay Mellor's TV drama Fat Friends - were "vital" to Armour's eventual success.
And he reels off the benefits of his changed life: "I went in the pool on holiday this year. I can walk up escalators. I'm looking forward to a wedding. I can wear clothes from the high street.
"Clients I haven't met for ages don't recognise me, and are then utterly bewildered and shocked to realise who I am - which I love. It is a new lease of life."
Just occasionally, however, Armour dreams that he is fat again. "I wake up in a cold sweat and roll to the side of the bed - which I couldn't do before - and realise that, no, I'm not fat. The great thing is not being noticed - being just like everyone else."
ROAD BACK TO FITNESS
BREAKFAST: two or three slices of toast and butter. On the way to work: a bacon sandwich, or fruit scone with butter and jam.
• MID-MORNING: one chocolate bar (KitKat or Twix).
• LUNCH: canteen meal - burger and chips or curry and rice.
• AFTERNOON: two chocolate bars (KitKat or Twix).
• ON THE WAY HOME: a sausage roll or cake. ("I never got on the train without something to eat.")
• DINNER: extra-large portions of something meaty, such as chilli con carne or spaghetti bolognese. Ice-cream or pudding.
• EVENING SNACKS: more toast, a couple of chocolate bars in front of the TV.
• GOING OUT: 15 pints of lager two or three times a week, followed by a Burger King meal or a curry.
• BREAKFAST: Bran Flakes with skimmed milk.
• MID-MORNING: two apples.
• LUNCH: from the work canteen - salad or vegetable soup (no roll), yoghurt and fruit.
• AFTERNOON: two helpings of fruit: apples, bananas or grapes.
• ON THE WAY HOME: more fruit. ("I still can't get on a train without a snack.")
• DINNER: grilled chicken with home-made tomato sauce and lots of vegetables, or spaghetti bolognese made with Quorn. No pudding.
• EVENING SNACKS: yet more fruit.
• GOING OUT: a couple of glasses of white wine once or twice a month. "I still go out often, but nowadays I just don't drink every week."
ARMOUR was extremely fit as a young man: he played rugby for local clubs, loved to hill-climb in Scotland, and thought nothing of running 60 miles a week. From his late twenties until his early forties, as he forged his career and started a family, he took little or no exercise. He took a bus the short distance from home to the station in the morning, and became so unfit he couldn't even run for it. He was permanently exhausted.
JUST three stone into his weight-loss programme, Armour joined a gym. "You feel pretty self-conscious in the gym when you weigh 25 stone, let me tell you," he says. Today he goes to the gym with his daughters two or three times a week, for 50 minutes to an hour. He walks to the station every morning, and climbs the stairs to the eighth floor at work rather than take the lift.
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