I have been overweight for about the past ten years and have attempted to shed the extra pounds many, many times. I have followed regimens, such as the Atkins diet, or tried simply not to eat much. I’ve upped my exercise by pounding a treadmill or by playing racket sports. But whateverI’ve done, I’ve failed to lose much weight and, more importantly, failed to keep it off.

So when I was asked to road-test The Times Health Club, I thought if it can help me, it can help anyone, so why not? What was there to lose? Apart from a bit of weight, of course.

I replaced my bathroom scales about the same time and discovered, to my great dismay, that my old – and evidently broken – scales had been underweighing me. In a flash, I went from 12st 9lb (78kg) to 13st 9lb (87kg). The results of my life of overeating and not exercising hit home.

But the new site gave me extra motivation, and so it was down to business, although how much weight to lose, and how to do it, were something of a mystery to me. The BMI calculator on the Health Club, however, helped me to work out what my weight range should be. I then set a target of 12st 5lb, ideal for a man of my height (I’m 5ft 9in or 1.75m tall). For some reason, I had been under the misguided impression that I should weigh about 11st. It is amazing how demotivating ignorance can be.

Of course, setting myself a target was great, but then I’d always done this. Next, I had to work out how I was going to achieve it. One thing I have always found difficult is that most exercise regimens or diets seem to involve significant change. A consuming full-time job and young family, not to mention a great love of good food, has made it all too easy to give up on anything too ambitious.

What I discovered with The Times Health Club was that the exercise and calorie intake tracking tools, with the advice provided, enabled me to make small changes to my daily routine. I could also nominate someone to support me, so I duly added my wife as a motivator so that she could keep tabs on me.

This is how it worked: I decided to eat breakfast each day (something I’ve not done for years), get off the train one stop earlier to get a brisk walk into work, have one main meal a day and make sure that the smaller meal was around the 300-calorie mark. This was a set of small changes that I felt I could stick to.

But would it work?

After a week of eating breakfast, lowering my calorie intake at lunchtime and walking 30 minutes more each morning, I approached my oh-too-accurate bathroom scales. Imagine my amazement to discover that I had lost weight with what seemed like minimal disruption. A small glow of success filled my bones.

I continued to follow my seemingly successful health plan and, again, at the end of week two, I had lost more weight. So it continued for the next couple of months. With each lost pound came a growing feeling of achievement which, to be quite honest, I found addictive.

The Health Club tools were great for recording the amount of calories I had consumed or what exercise I had done – this helped me to understand where I was going wrong or right – and to track my progress. Initially, I used them daily to make a note of my exercise and calorie intake, and then weekly to record my weight. The added incentive of reporting my progress to my wife, my nominated motivator, was also a fantastic driver.

I also set myself the challenge of dropping a waist size. Although these are connected, the latter feels much more tangible than reading numbers on scales and is a more visual measure. I decided to lose 2in and have used the tracking tools to monitor the loss, another incentive to push me towards my goal.

So what have I achieved? In the past three months I have lost 12lb. My jeans need a belt to hold them up rather than holding my stomach in, and my hands are thinner, with the unwelcome side-effect of my wedding ring becoming loose. In fact, I appear to have lost it and now have some explaining to do to my wife.

What next? Although I’ve made progress, I am still a bit short of my target weight. But I feel a lot better about myself and confident that I can continue towards my goal and, more importantly, to keep myself there.

CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE TIMES HEALTH CLUB

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