Show caption ‘I get home from a gig and think, you deserve a treat.’ Composite: Getty Images/Sky/Guardian Design Team<br> Romesh Ranganathan’s midlife crisis Romesh Ranganathan: my diet is at a fork in the road – and I mustn’t use it to eat cake Next week, I promise, I’ll start exercising and eating like a normal human again

Romesh Ranganathan Sat 20 Jul 2019 07.00 BST Share on Facebook

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I have fallen so hard off the weight-loss wagon that I fear if I get back on I might be so heavy that I’ll break it. I was on a good run of spin-biking and eating sensibly, then I had an injury that meant I couldn’t exercise for a day and I have allowed this to throw me completely off course. I’m eating as if preparing for hibernation. The most exercise I have done in the past fortnight is move a box of toys from in front of our freezer. I am in deep trouble.

I have written previously in this column that my weight-loss aspirations are all about health; I was lying. There is so much vanity to this. I do quite a bit of television work with Jamie Redknapp, who makes any outfit look amazing. The other day, after we had been swimming, he was handed a foil blanket to warm up and he made it look so good he could have attended an awards do in it.

The truth is, social media is brutal. Whenever a photo is posted of me alongside my slimmer and more handsome co-stars, people make comments such as, “Oh my God, they look so good, obviously not Romesh, bless him! ;-)” Or, “Gosh, I’m getting all hot and flustered, had to look at Romesh to calm down.” Now, I’m not entitled enough to think I should be getting comments about being attractive, but it does exert a bit of pressure to shift some timber.

Weirdly, I can’t figure out if that pressure is what threw me off course. I lost a bit of weight before starting to film the current series of A League Of Their Own and had been told by a number of friends that I was looking good. Having seen myself next to people who are in genuinely good shape, I now realise that what these friends were saying was, “You looked really shit before.”

The truth is, I deserve to be overweight. I am so greedy. I promise myself I’m not going to eat crap, but then I get home from a gig and think, “You deserve a treat,” and eat like a man who thinks his treat should be type 2 diabetes. I wake up with the intentions of an Olympic athlete, then inhale three sandwiches before I’ve even registered them.

I’m facing the slump – the commonest, yet most underreported part of trying to get healthy and fit. There are loads of stories written about the start, and the finish, the bit when you have achieved all your goals; but there’s nothing about the bit in the middle when you lose momentum and sit in your pants eating Ben & Jerry’s, watching Netflix, while occasionally catching your reflection and shuddering – which drives you to eat more ice-cream.

I imagine that’s what happens, anyway. It could go either way. I’m at a fork in the road, and I mustn’t use that fork to eat cake.

So, I begin again. Next week, I’ll start exercising again and eating like a normal human. I’m going to stick with it, I promise, and in years to come I’ll write a column with the tagline: “People keep telling me how ripped I am and it’s starting to get annoying.”