Mayor Rob Ford returned Monday to the radio station where he announced Sunday that he had quit his diet. His message to NewsTalk 1010 listeners this time: I haven’t quit my diet.

In the latest odd twist in his ever-more-tumultuous “Cut the Waist Challenge,” Ford said Monday he didn’t mean he was abandoning the challenge when he said Sunday that he had stopped dieting and doesn’t care about his scheduled weigh-ins.

No weigh-in was held Monday morning, Councillor Doug Ford told reporters he would now be weighing in by himself, and Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday pronounced the challenge a mistake.

But the mayor then took to the airwaves to say he would weigh in once more, at the end of the challenge on June 18, and had simply been frustrated on Sunday by Doug Ford’s jokes about him.

“He just kept buggin’ me and buggin’ me and buggin’ me,” he told John Tory.

“I know I can do it. It’s just mind over matter,” he said. “It’s just frustrating. Everyone just keeps harping and harping and harping. I said, ‘Enough’s enough.’ I said, ‘I haven’t quit one thing in my life, I’m not gonna quit.’ Obviously I have to get down, and I will. Somehow, some way, I will figure this out.”

His Sunday comments were prompted by Doug Ford’s threat to drag him to the weigh-in planned for Monday. He responded: “I don’t care about the weigh-in. I’m not even dieting anymore. It’s gone! It’s water under the bridge. So I gotta — we gotta refocus.”

The mayor created the weigh-ins as a media event. On Monday, he blamed the media presence at them for his decision to stop holding them regularly.

“The media just has a frenzy. I think it benefits the media. They just sit there and wait for you Monday like piranhas. They just wait. I said, ‘Enough’s enough. This is becoming a circus,’ ” he said.

The campaign has provided a glimpse into the brothers’ close but competitive and complicated relationship. Though Doug Ford is fiercely defensive of Rob Ford, he has repeatedly mocked him for cancelling weigh-ins, visiting fast-food outlets, and failing to match his own weight loss success.

Before Rob Ford’s reversal, Doug Ford said he accepted blame for leading his brother into trouble by proposing the challenge. But he did not sound fully sympathetic.

“He knows he has to lose weight. He wants to do it on his own time frame. I take the responsibility of putting him in this position. But at the end of the day, you’ve gotta lose weight,” he said.

Holyday said Rob Ford needs a better plan. Ford agreed. He said he has not been following a regular diet or exercise regimen to date.

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