IT WAS the sight of a wheelchair in his living room that made him take such extreme action. “And this?” he asked his wife.
“It’s for you,” she replied. “Because you’re on your way out.” She was right, Francois de Ridder realised. At that stage he was so heavy his legs could barely support him and he was using crutches to get around. If he surrendered to the wheelchair, it would be the end of him.
“The next step would be amputation of my legs because there wouldn’t be enough circulation of the blood,” says Francois (56), whose weight was creeping towards 240kg. “I thought, ‘What about my family? I don’t want to die’.”
He’d tried diets before
