Winning a Losing Battle: From 41 Stone to a New Life

By Gary Kirwan

'Gary Kirwan is inspirational. He talks the talk and walks the walk. You'll be impressed by Gary's determination, discipline and downright doggedness in his attempt to achieve his weight-loss goal.' Ray D'Arcy
In January 2011 Limerick man Gary Kirwan was morbidly obese, so heavy that no domestic scales would take his weight. In desperation, he contacted The Ray D'Arcy Show's 'Fix it Friday' slot looking for a scales that could measure his exact weight and was weighed live on air; the verdict was worse than he ever imagined - 41 stone 3 pounds. He was devastated, but decided that this was the first day of the rest of his life …
This is the story of Gary's dramatic journey from the beginnings of his obesity problem in childhood and the isolation and depression when he was at his heaviest, to taking control and becoming a new person. Today, he's outgoing, happy and loves life; he has even completed marathons and triathlons.
Gary's transformation has gripped the nation, and he's determined to help other overweight people take control and find a whole new happy healthy life. Read Gary's weight-loss diary: his ups and downs, the determination to succeed, and the family and friends who, once he decided to make a change, supported him all the way. Get tips and expert advice from Gary's trainer and nutritionist to and learn how to lose weight and feel great …

• Language: English
• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847175700

Gary Kirwan

In January 2011 Gary Kirwan was morbidly obese, weighing over 41 stone. With the help of Today FM’s Ray Darcy Show, he has so far lost 13 stone, finished the Dublin City Marathon and was able to return to college, currently studying Management and Marketing in Limerick Institute of Technology.

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PROLOGUE

‘IF I DO NOT GIVE UP I CANNOT FAIL’

This quote means an awful lot to me. I found it in relation to a piece I’ve watched on YouTube – many, many times. In fact, I would well believe that I am responsible for at least a thousand viewings of the clip. It’s from the 1992 Olympics, which were held in Barcelona, and features the British runner Derek Redmond. He held the British record for the 400 metre sprint and won gold medals at the World Championships, European Championships as well as the Commonwealth games. So, you can imagine that he was a popular favourite for a medal at the 1992 games.

I can only guess the hours, days, weeks and months of training that went into preparing him for standing at that start line in Barcelona. The crowd was huge, about 65,000 watching the runners stretch their legs and then line up, their faces a study in tense concentration. It is all about winning, or, at the very least, doing the very best you can do, no matter what.

At last, the gun is fired and the runners take off, chasing themselves and their dream of an Olympic medal. Redmond is looking strong and powerful, until, that is, about 150 metres into the race when something goes wrong. Suddenly he is clutching his leg in agony and coming to a shocking standstill as his competitors overtake and leave him behind forevermore, as far as that race is concerned. He falls to the ground, his body utterly gripped by the pain caused by a torn hamstring. And you might think, well, that’s it then. God love him!

But you would be wrong.

Somehow, he finds the brutal strength to stand up … and then, unbelievably, he starts limping forward, his injury forcing him to sort of hop along a track he’d only experienced as a champion sprinter. His face expresses more than a thousand words could – sheer pain, sadness and raw emotion. You can sense the bewilderment of the crowd and the race officials. One guy approaches him, no doubt to help the stricken runner off to the side, but Redmond keeps going. I am sure that everyone is wondering what the hell is going on.

And Redmond just keeps going.

For a couple of breathtaking minutes he is alone in the world, with his pain and his incessant need to keep moving forward. However, this ‘aloneness’ is just temporary. A grey-haired man, in a white tee-shirt, his face full of concern, rushes out to his side. It’s Redmond’s father, who was seated in the crowd and has had to break through tight security in order to get to his son.

His father says what everyone else is probably thinking, ‘You don’t have to do this!’ Redmond’s answer is immediate and solid, ‘Yes … I do.’ Without wasting another second in debating this, his father takes him by the arm and tells him, ‘Well, then we will finish it together’. The two men keep going, at a snail’s pace and, by this stage, the crowd realise what they are looking at … courage and spirit, an Olympic spirit that has nothing to do with winning.

Just before the finish line, Mr Redmond does the right and honourable thing; he releases his son so that he can cross over the line, alone once more. Those sixty-five thousand are now on their feet, roaring their support and admiration. Derek Redmond may not have won a medal that year, but I think you’ll agree that medals, in this case, are hardly the point.

So, that is what I watched, night after night, when things got really tough. I suppose not many people have stood on a weighing scale and had to read that they were 41 stone. At the beginning of my journey, my own personal race, I had an awful lot to do, in terms of losing stones of weight and the psychological weight that my massiveness involved. There was a time when I wouldn’t leave the house, for fear of people staring at me, pointing at me, calling me names. Things, I’m glad to say, are a lot different now. But it has not been easy.

At the end of this video is the epic tagline that has become my mantra: ‘If I do not give up I cannot fail’. I quite simply decided if I don’t give up I won’t fail. What I most admired about Derek Redmond is not the medals he won, but that he had the heart of a lion.

I’m not an Olympic athlete. When I turn up to take part in sporting events I have a fair idea that I may end up coming in last, or in the bottom few, but it doesn’t bother me. And while I may not win, nobody, including myself, can doubt my trying. As far as I see it, I’m already beating the thousands of others who won’t even take their place at the start line.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

EARLY YEARS

There isn’t a time that I can remember not being big. They say that everything begins at home, so let’s start there. I am the second oldest in a family of four, with one older sister, Orla, and two younger brothers, Darren and Rob, who were all slim to skinny. The youngest did go through a patch of puppy fat, which he rapidly lost on discovering the opposite sex. My dad, a mechanic, and a dead ringer for Emmerdale’s Eric Pollard, is small and of normal build, while my mother, a born teacher and organiser, was always skinny.

For the first fourteen years of my life we lived in a small cul-de-sac, in Richmond Park, Corbally. At that time we were surrounded by green fields and it was a great place to be. There were loads of kids, aged six to sixteen, so there was always something going on, with loads to do. Plenty of football matches were played on our street or else we were up to mischief in the fields. When the building started, with new houses and estates going up, around us, these building sites became a haven for games of hide and seek.

My earliest memory is of the classroom that Mam set up in our house, in Limerick. There she minded us and other kids from the area. That classroom had everything you would expect to see. I loved anything to do with arts and crafts and created wonderful pieces of sculpture from the plasticine, or ‘mála’, that my mother made especially for us.

Later on she set up a ‘Play Scheme’, with her friend, Vera, in St Mary’s girls’ school. It was a summer camp before there were summer camps, run by local parents for the local kids. I don’t remember much about it, other than I loved it. Though I do remember taking part in a fancy dress competition, in 1985, the year that Barry McGuigan won the world title. I went as the Clones Cyclone, even going as far as blacking up my eye with soot from the chimney. My interest in boxing must have begun back then.

Money was always tight although we never wanted for anything. Therefore, a visit to Burgerland, Limerick’s version of McDonalds, was a rarity saved up for birthdays or equally special occasions. We didn’t get takeaways and our only real treat was the glass of fizzy drink and chocolate bar that we had on Saturday nights, in front of the television. I pretty much ate the same as my sister and brothers, our school lunches consisted of a sandwich, Penguin bar and a packet of crisps. However, I will say this; I ate faster than anyone else in the house. My poor mother was always on at me to slow down at meal times, but I never did.

It annoys me when people talk about families that enable children to become obese. My mother did not over-feed me and, yet, it turned out that I got fat while the brother next to me was always as skinny as a rake.

There was an incident that, thankfully, I have no memory of, as I was only five years old. Vera, my mother’s friend, had a teenaged daughter called Niamh who, from time to time, would take us kids swimming. The story goes that one day, on our return, she was very upset and had to be cajoled into explaining that some other children in the pool had been laughing and making crude jokes about me. As I say, I was just a five-year-old having fun and, therefore, was completely oblivious to their sneering.

I suppose my earliest memory about realising that my weight was an issue came two years later. It was 1987 and I was making my First Holy Communion. Mam took me out to buy my suit, bringing me to Noel’s Menswear, in town, where just about everyone I knew went to buy their communion outfits. Unfortunately they didn’t have a suit in my size so we were forced to traipse around a few other shops that catered for communion, confirmations and even men’s shops, before my mother gave up. Naturally I had little or no interest in wearing a suit; my favourite outfit, at that time, was my trusty tracksuit. In the end Mam had to go to a tailor and have a suit specially made for me, in green khaki. I’m only appreciating now, as I write this, that it must have cost a fortune. However, none of this unexpected fuss prevented me from enjoying my special day. There was a tradition in our family that when any of us made our communion or confirmation we went to our neighbours, the Scanlon’s, for lunch. Then, when the Scanlon kids had their day, they came to our house for lunch. We all got on well together, kids and adults, and it was always great fun. A grand total of fourteen of these lunches took place, over the years, between their family and ours, all of which were amazing days out with some great memories.

But, of course, more importantly I also made a small fortune, touring the relatives, in my green custom-made suit, enough to be allowed, at any rate, to blow some of it at my favourite toy shop.

Do kids still go mad about tennis the way we did back then? Once we had our fill of Wimbledon, watching the likes of John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova, all the local kids would fling themselves into the Kit Kat tennis summer camp. Like tennis, the camp would only last two weeks. I was never very good at the game but I still enjoyed myself as much as anyone else.

My primary school was Scoil Íde, and the years I spent there were pleasant enough. I liked my teachers even if I was bored by school work itself. Perhaps thanks to my mother’s play school my one and only favourite subject was art and crafts. At home I could spend hours building elaborate designs with my Lego and Meccano set. Fortunately I always had a great imagination, which I relied on to escape from the boredom of maths, Irish and pretty much everything else in school. People like children to read so that it will stimulate their imagination, but I never had much interest in books myself, even though our house was always full of them because my parents were, and still are, great readers.

When my Dad and his brother, Tommy, were young, they would come home via the local bookshop every Friday, armed with their reading for the weekend. On a few occasions the two men even rang in sick on Monday so that they could finish the book they were reading. Most nights my mother retired to bed with a book in her hands. Maybe it is a little strange that I did not inherit a love for this particular past-time, but there it is, I never had the least bit of interest in reading. I much preferred to look at pictures in the books and make up my own stories about them.

My spelling was always very poor. I could get the first and last letter of a word but the middle bit would be jumbled up, which concerned my mother. When I was about eight years old, she had me checked out and it was discovered I was slightly dyslexic. However, I did not suffer over it. I attended special classes, within the school day, for children with learning difficulties. I loved this class. The teacher was a Mary Kennedy who really understood how to relate to kids who were not into learning that much. It was like she taught us stuff without us even realising it.

Of course I was the big kid all through primary school but it was never an issue. Young kids don’t realise that they might have the power to upset a classmate, and get a kick out of doing it – that comes later. The only thing I truly hated about school back then was the annual sports day. Every year I came last in front of an audience made up of the entire school, including staff, which was embarrassing. As you might imagine, I could not wait for that particular day to finish. Though there was this one time, when I was in fifth or sixth class, and I was standing at the start line for the sprint; naturally I did not fancy my chances one little bit. The teacher blew the whistle and I took off, relatively speaking. Within a matter of seconds I was bewildered by the fact that I could not see any of my fellow sprinters in front of me. I was so used to spending races puffing along while having the time to study the backs of the other competitors. It turned out that the boys were behind me, walking slowly to allow me, I think, a shot at winning something for a change. Unfortunately the teacher spoilt the fun by calling us all back to re-start the race and things went back to normal: I was about twenty metres into the race while the rest were over the finish line and catching their breath.

But then my weight did become an issue, and one that could no longer be ignored by my worried parents. In April 1991 I had to have an operation to remove a testicle from my stomach. I was ten years old. It is a common enough occurrence, or so I’m told, and has nothing to do with weight. The matter has to be rectified before puberty hits or it can affect one’s fertility later on. However, what made my experience distinctive was hearing the surgeon a few weeks later, at my check-up, telling Mam that he had never had to cut through so much fat on a child. He advised her to have something done about it and made a few suggestions. All I cared about was the two toy wrestlers I got for being a good patient.

My mother had always been fairly strict about what I ate, but I think this worried her and it resulted in her bringing me to see a dietician in Limerick Regional Hospital. Now, at this point I would like to interject and again say that I was not eating loads and loads of crap with my parents’ blessing. Yes, I sneaked things from presses in between meals, but there would not have been too exciting a range of ‘bad’ food to help myself to. My mother did her best to make sure I snacked on fruit and healthy stuff like yoghurts. The only day of the week I had chips was on a Thursday when we had our chicken and chips dinner. Darren, my skinny brother, ate really slowly and maybe that helped him to feel full for longer than I did. If I felt bored or lonely, at this age, I did not go and stuff my face. I enjoyed my meals, but I did race through them as if I could win a medal to make up for the poor showing I gave at the school’s sports’ days. My one failing was fizzy drinks. If I had money to spend it usually went on Coke or Fanta, stuff like that.

Looking back now I can see how the diet programme at the hospital could not have helped me at all. I suppose not a lot was known back then about child obesity, or whatever you like to call it. The dietician, a lady, was nice but she never asked me about myself or my personal eating habits. Instead we came away with a ton of booklets, about diet and so forth, that were aimed at the masses. There was no interest in particular cases, like that of a ten-year-old boy who somehow was the heaviest in his slim family. She never thought to ask me if I was unhappy, or why I was always hungry. Meanwhile, the diet, in my opinion, was just plain wrong, in that it advocated lots of carbohydrates. So I ate lots of potato, bread, pasta and rice, thinking it was going to help me lose weight. I had to cut out sugar, but sure there was little or no weight loss thanks to the amount of carbs I was eating every day.

Maybe with a bit more knowledge and curiosity, the dietician might have discovered something that I only found out in the last eighteen months – grains do not suit my body. But that is probably unfair of me. She was following the rules set out in those brochures and would not have considered, like my mother and me, to question them.

I was to spend the next five years trying to lose weight on this diet, with frequent visits to the dietician. Since I never actually lost much weight it was frustrating for all involved – as well as being demoralising for me, in fact I put up weight gradually over this period.

CHAPTER TWO

SCHOOL DAYS

Istarted secondary school in 1992, in CBS Sexton Street, Limerick. I was in the class group that did the more hands-on subjects like woodwork, art and technical drawing. After my Inter Cert I had the option to go into a more academic stream, but I was adamant I wanted to do these subjects. The class had around forty boys or young men in First Year; by the Leaving Cert only fifteen of us remained. It was a bit of an eye-opener as there were some real characters in the class! On starting in Sexton Street, once again I was the fat kid but, this time, there were a few others too, it was a big school. The furniture was against me from the very beginning. Except for Second Year we had the old-style wooden desks, where the bench and desk are connected, and, ordinarily, there is room for two. I remember feeling sorry for Keith Prendergast, he shared my desk with me in First Year and it must have been a bit of a squeeze for him, but, to be fair to him, he never said anything.

First and Second Year went by without too much trouble. I was slagged over my size but it was just boys being boys, in that everyone, at one stage, got a ribbing over something. In First Year I took up hurling with a passion that was unequalled by the other, far superior players. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I was quite probably the worst hurler that every represented the school, but I genuinely loved the game – not least because matches meant half days from the classroom.

The ninety-minute PE (Physical Education) class was a very long one for me. As far as I remember, we seemed to do the ‘bleep test’ – a fitness test where we had to run between two points at ever decreasing time intervals – very frequently in First Year. I was always the first to be knocked out in anything that involved speed, so I usually spent the best part of that hour sitting on the bench with Allan Franklin, a skinny kid who hated PE as much as I did, but I think it was for very different reasons, he just didn’t like it and I was crap at it. We would watch the others, in silence, feeling that time was crawling to a standstill.

I was still an avid day-dreamer, mentally removing myself from boring classes and running entire films in my head based on whatever cartoons I was watching at the time. It was all too easy for me to completely switch off and spend forty minutes as a super hero or sports star, while one teacher or another droned on, and on, about algebra or Irish grammar. Naturally, in these dreams, since I was both the director and producer I played the starring role, and was always super fit, strong and very, very fast. I certainly was not the chubby kid squeezed into a desk that barely contained me and poor Keith.

And the thing about it is that I did not worry about being chubby, fat, or how I looked, since I had always been that way as far as I could remember. It was part of who I was. It was me. I am sure that it is fair to say that when I looked in the mirror, there were days when I might have hated the flabby person staring back at me, but then there were the days that I merely needed to check my reflection, to see if my hair was okay or my face was clean, before I left the house, and I would not have noticed my bigness, any more than I might have noticed my eyebrows. Other kids might fret about their acne or their height, or – especially boys – if feel they are too small, or look much younger than their friends, but they forget about it too, and get on with their day. We are allowed to forget about ourselves, up to a point, the point being when something happens outside of us, when we are suddenly shocked into viewing ourselves through another person’s eyes. The shock depends, I suppose, on who that person is.

My point was reached in Third Year. I was fifteen years old.

By this stage I was wearing heavy jumpers all the time, to hide my man-boobs. Out of sight, out of mind, and jumpers, I quickly discovered, formed the perfect barrier between me, the general public and my sagging chest, which was extremely embarrassing. They had always been there, but once I hit puberty they just grew and grew and I was extremely self-conscious about them. No matter how hot it got, or what month it was, nothing could make me take off my jumper. The school uniform involved a jumper, bearing the school’s crest. Now, this should have been glad tidings for me except for the fact that school jumpers might well be the most unforgiving of all jumpers in the jumper-world. Anyone who ever had to wear one, and was not built like a bean-pole, will know exactly what I mean. I know they are made from wool, so why is it that they cling to a body like a leotard, or a wet swim suit?

Brother Power was the principal and he was a typical one in that we were mostly terrified of him, for good reason, but he also had a decent side. It was my mother who approached him, she wrote to him about my problem regarding the school jumper. The brother carried a bit of weight himself, and I think this is why he immediately allowed me to wear a substitute navy jumper of my own, the only solution available to me. When I think about it now I really appreciate his kindness, as it could well have gone the other way, where I might have been forced to do without and go about in the white flimsy school shirt, which would have left nothing to the imagination. The problem was solved and I took to wearing a navy fleece that stretched over me nicely, with my principal’s blessing. It allowed me to hide my embarrassment; for a young man of around fourteen it was a huge embarrassment to have man-boobs bigger than most girls of the same age.

One afternoon my class was waiting for our usual teacher to arrive, I can’t remember which one, when the door opened and a man we did not know strode purposefully to the desk, shouting at us to be quiet. Maybe our teacher was sick, I don’t know, but this guy was ready for trouble. Our class did have a lot of messers in it, and he was taking no hostages. It’s strange, but I remember this as if it had just happened ten minutes ago; you know how there is always one scene from your childhood that stays with you forever and ever? Well, this is mine. He was very tanned, wore grey slacks, white shirt and glasses, had a real ‘prim and proper’ look about him – and he was as skinny as a rake.

He fired insults left, right and centre, obviously needing to establish from the very beginning that he was the boss and we were just a bunch of no-good hoodlums: ‘You sit down!’, ‘Shut up you!’, ‘You, there, take off that jumper!’ That last one was flung at me, where I was sitting, at the back of the room. I jumped, ‘Sir?’ All eyes turned to me as he repeated himself, in a voice dripping with contempt, ‘I said, take off that jumper. It’s not school uniform’. I am sure I must have been blushing furiously as I tried to explain that I was allowed to wear what I was wearing, ‘Brother Power says it’s all right’. As far as I was concerned, and any other of my fellow pupils, they were the magic words, just like the words ‘Open Sesame’ opened up the cave in the story of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’: Brother Power says it’s all right. End of story. Only it wasn’t. I don’t think I can quite describe the horror I experienced on hearing him reply, ‘You are in my classroom. Here, we play by my rules!’ It was utterly bewildering. This was not his classroom; none of us had ever seen him before and even if it was his classroom – which it wasn’t – Brother Power was the one in charge of all of us, not him. Panic set in, along with a bitter surge of helplessness. He was the teacher while I was just an unruly pupil who had absolutely no chance of evading his direct order. It was horrible, that slow dawning that, at this point, I had no option but to remove my fleece, my barrier, my safety net. I hated myself for giving in but, really, what else could I do? I was taught at home to be well-behaved and so was in no way prepared to stand my ground against a teacher.

He sat down at the desk and reached for his newspaper while I slowly took the bottom of my fleece in my two hands and miserably began to lift it towards my head. I cannot remember if I was aware that the rest of the class were watching me do this – however, it soon became abundantly clear that they were watching when, somehow, I managed to pull my shirt up, along with the fleece, thereby exposing my belly, by far the biggest in the room, for all to see. Everyone started to laugh at me, including the teacher. The sound of his chuckle and the laughter of the