All it took was a quick look around and I found it was always the case. There was no getting around it. I was the fattest person in the room.

It took 30 long years of ignoring myself, my health and my well-being to tip the scale over three hundred pounds. As my fifty-second birthday approached, I could barely hoist myself out of a chair. I was eating myself to death, just one super-sized meal away from complete despair.

I knew that somewhere in that mass of fat, I was buried. But to fix something, you have to first identify the problem. Here, fat wasn’t the problem, it was just the result of the problem. So I took a look at my life. Every day was a non-stop blur of client projects, family obligations and daily chores, with not one moment of one day reserved for me. There was no me left in my life. And it had all come about by choice—poor choices made over and over as an excuse to not take care of myself.

I was the fattest person in the room, and then one day, I finally had enough of being my last priority.

Next page: How I lost the weight!