Meet the 'grotesquely obese' food writer who's on a mission to shed the pounds by walking 1,450km in 90 days

As you read this I’m at the start of an attempt to walk 1,450 kilometres in 90 days in southern India. My plan is to turn my sedentary lifestyle into something far more active and healthy.

The problem is that for most of my life I’ve been a fatness fanatic, spending more than half my career in journalism focusing on food and drink, especially alcoholic drink. I’ve ended up grotesquely obese – that’s my new category above morbidly obese. My normal exercise is a 20-minute stroll from my house to the ferry pier. Recently I’ve had to stop and rest even during that.

When I realised that I was 57 inches (145 cm) around the waist and in prime heart attack territory, I decided that something needed to be done. Of course, it’s entirely my own fault that I’ve ended up this way and my responsibility to shift the fat. I do want to be very clear about that – I’m responsible for consuming every single morsel and drop that has found its way down my gullet.

In more than a decade at the food writing trough I’ve certainly put away more than my fair share of empty calories.

There was the interview and photo shoot with a chef who cooked us the biggest lobe of foie gras I have ever seen. “If you order foie gras, you want to eat foie gras,” justified the chef. The photographer and I piled into the stunningly prepared dish once the pictures were done. Several months later the photographer had a heart attack – I believe he is still paying for the miraculous stent that keeps him alive – and I thought I really must get round to taking up some exercise. I didn’t.

How can I forget the opening of an Italian restaurant at which I took the chef up on his offer to try a small amount of every single dish on the menu? There were 39 dishes on the menu and a food coma for me. Ironically the next chef who gave me a food coma suffers from narcolepsy himself. This was at another Italian restaurant. I asked for tasting-size portions but the chef brought out full-sized portions of 15 dishes and I was nodding into my plate when he came out to talk to me. In a further irony, the only dish that stood out was the one I didn’t like.