I'm not obese, I have a normal BMI, am tall and normal. Not athletic, not fat, a middle aged man who sits in a recording studio or is found out on the road recording audio content for various brands and my own shows.
I was morbidly obese.
I shouldn't be here.
That statement is the most important thing I focus on everyday.
Between 2010 and 2018 I was in a weird relationship that resulted in a very unhappy short marriage to my former stalker. Yes. Stalker.
I met someone in 2007 (whom I later married). She was working as a naked cleaner/escort and visiting men's homes advertising on Gumtree her adult services. Her laissez-faire attitude to risk concerned me. She kept turning up at my house unannounced at night. I ditched her very quickly after she had an affair with two local chaps Jamie Ross, who at the time was living with his partner Kelly who sadly died in 2015 (although she had been seeing him in the weeks before Kelly's death too when we were married). Additionally a guitarist Dave Dougherty. Along the way was another chap James Mackness who now lives in Melbourne in Australia.
The latter recently spoke to my barrister in less than glowing terms about my ex. During that time my now ex-wife broke into my home early one morning when I had a guest in my spare room who was equally as spooked as I was, and once into my office arriving without invite. Sending messages to my school friends that they've kept. She didn't even know them, had never met them. Breaking into one of my computer's to take intimate images and send them to my ex partner.
Even more scarily, befriending me over a long period on MSN the social media platform and pretending to be another woman and then only being caught out weeks later when I recognised her using the word "somewhen" and then confronting "her" only for her to then disappear, confessing it later. It was stalking and this would continue post our divorce using our children's Alexa's and involving third parties to stalk me and the children. I recently had to take legal action to make it stop. Cyclical behaviour that causes fear, upset and anxiety.
With hindsight the behaviour has never changed.
Emails I got in 2015, that I have stored safely now show her as obsessed and vengeful. I've even placed them now in front of professionals who share the same perspective. Seeing other men in Wiltshire and the West Midlands while still talking to them about me post coitus in emails. If I'd known this pre marriage I would have run a mile. Using class A narcotics in the form of cocaine, her drug usage I had already had to report to Warren Mann my security lead and controller at the Ministry of Defence when I had asked her to leave my home.
So at least that was, and still is on the record.
She has even admitted, in writing in emails I still have, the effect her regular use of cocaine was having on her daily life causing her physical signs of what the drug was doing to her body.
But she was still driving while taking it and it was still in her system. I have never, and will never, understand anyone who can take a substance they have no idea at all about it's chemical makeup and stick it up their nose ?
And to then drive a car ? What planet do you have to be on to put yourself and other road users at risk ? It's not just stupid, it's illegal.
Risk taking behaviour is entirely foreign to me.
It was wrong, the staking was highly illegal, it was worrying and controlling. It was and is abuse.
As a journalist I very clearly understand the laws on libel and defamation. If these things didn't happen, if they were glorified, exaggerated or made up I wouldn't print them. They did happen, there are witnesses and I would never place anything into an editorial piece if it wasn't based on cold facts with an evidential basis of truth.
In late 2009 I accepted she had changed and invited her to move into a cottage near Malmesbury and soon after we conceived our first child.
I was away for very large chunks of our life pre marriage and also during our time as a married couple, working very hard to support my ex and my family. It was very hard as she had never contributed a penny into our communal bills but took a salary and expenses and a car and never went without by any means. She had more disposable income than I did. Ironic when it was me earning the money. I am very intensely proud of having supported her and her family and also her friends with cash loans to local guitarist Jon Amor and gifts of appliances and help to her friends when they were struggling.
However something was missing and that was affection and intimacy, love and belonging. It wasn't a marriage it was two people in a house, one of whom was so preoccupied reinventing herself so often she didn't see the fact the chap who loved her, and had Asperger's wasn't feeling any love or support.
I thought about leaving in December 2013 and January 2014. I couldn't follow through. I even wrote to her and told her how unhappy I was and how I craved some time with her or some intimacy. It seemingly fell on deaf ears.
I ate. Increasingly bigger amounts, in private, on the road, consuming enormous calorific meals. Drinking wine and beer, spirits. On long haul I would enjoy free drinks and free drinks in the lounge pre flight, I would go to conferences and more free drink flowed. I took full advantage. I never said no to a free beer. It was frankly, pathetic behaviour. My kids weren't there and I wasn't a drunk, but everyone drank so why not accept the free cold bottle of Sam Adams that's being thrust in your direction ?
It blotted out the loneliness of being away from the people I loved. I found an email the other night where I had been home three months between trips to the US West Coast and in that three months, 19 months post marriage there had been no intimacy at all in our marriage and I felt utterly lost and totally bereft. I had tried to express how I felt and just been met with rejection. Even though I'd bought cars, paid for a wonderful home and made sure we had total financial security. I was, not wanted.
Because of this I was extremely lonely. Looking back there were enormous chunks of the five year marriage where there was no emotion or intimacy and a lot of subterfuge, especially 2017-18 that I turned a blind eye too. Knew it was going on but threw myself at work.
I was unhappy and instead of drinking or gambling or having affairs, I threw myself at the compound dangers of sugar and fat. They were free, I couldn't see the dangers of what I was doing to myself.
Living on expenses cost effectively, I would always eat three courses where possible on trips with the company, which were almost weekly, but I also had another side I kept secret. One I was ashamed of.
My ex and I were incompatible food wise. I eat everything home made now and know every ingredient that contributes to a meal or dish. She had two small children at home when I was away and had never ever baked until 2013-14 when she briefly ran a blog called The Daily Bake Diary. So meals were gratefully accepted but I grew to dread dishes that I knew would turn up regular as clockwork when I'd finish a long days solid work.
So I would, on a regular basis (I have the receipts) take myself down of an evening to KFC locally and pre meals I would shotgun two KFC mini fillet burgers and a large full fat Cola.
A lot.
This wasn't a one off. I was out of control.
I would also fill up on sugary, sour sweets and confectionery, biscuits or rounds of peanut butter sandwiches. I had no self control at all.
I worked hard and I made sure we had a very good standard of living, ate out a lot and I made sure my ex wife had regular hotel trips away and had a break from being Mum. It was so important she had time out and I worked to make that happen.
So on those occasions on weekends away i could easily pile on 4000 calories in a day plus alcohol. Empty calories that also attracted inflammation and dehydration.
In 2018 I reached my peak of unhappiness. I found an email a week before we split up she had sent to her now partner she was having an affair with three months before we split up, that email has a line it it that tore me into 1000 pieces.
It was cruel, it was shallow and it was utterly bereft of any love for the father of her children.
Sent Easter 2018, I've pasted it below. It starts at the "However...".
It broke my heart, but it also was the biggest wake up call of my life.
I had already considered divorce six months earlier after my ex had admitted seeing other people including kissing a woman from Bristol at Whiterow Garden Centre locally, expecting me to just put up with it. After confiding in my accountant, who couldn't stand my ex-wife, I went to see divorce solicitors in Frome about divorcing my ex. I had copies of the messages she sent me and I had grounds for immediate divorce, I think that was abundantly clear from the shock on the faces of the solicitor I was sat in front of.
This was days after finding out about an affair with a local Labour counsellor around the time of our wedding, her having been to Dubai with her previously, and her meeting two other women 2016-17 including the one mentioned above. She wasn't happy, obviously, if she was needing to seek intimacy outside our marriage. And I wanted out. I couldn't make it work.
I didn't go through with it then, finally pulling the trigger in 2018. And I am now, even though it was horrid for everyone, so glad that I did.
Not Quite The Afterglow - The Radio Show
Between 2017 and 2018 when I was home we were co presenting the radio show "Not Quite The Afterglow" to a respectable 100k+ eager listeners per month, every month (available here online or wherever you get your podcasts). We would go into our studio and record these unscripted shows talking about every single detail of our courtship and marriage.
It spread like wildfire. It became prime Internet real estate.
Ironically in 2023 it now has more listeners every week than it did then, as people discover it and it still charts regularly. Over 6.5m listeners since we launched it in September 2017.
It's also very valuable as a digital asset. It's value is currently in 2023 about £350-400k along with the associated metadata and six years of logs and the raw data.
I turned down selling the syndication and licensing of it last year to a long established American broadcaster. My reason was it would have meant having to write an almost six figure cheque to my ex wife. Which I was simply never ever going to do after what has happened since we split.
My kids think it's ironic I didn't sell it as they were there when the offer came in last July. To them it was a lot of Lego. My eldest saw the emails from the US rolling in but I think he realises that to reward what has happened since with a life changing sum of money would be false reward.
To me it would have been taking money to celebrate a very unhappy marriage and also giving money to someone I don't ever want to see or speak to ever again. Ever. It also was short of the figure I knew it was actually worth but if you can turn down $200k and not burst into tears that's a healthy place to be.
It was the story of someone I thought I knew. Someone I vaguely knew for a short period of time who had previously researched me, stalked me, broken into my home, taken and sent intimate images to people I cared about and who has threatened, in writing, to blackmail me, my family and to cause me to live behind CCTV since 2019.
Logged and caught by Wordfence (later admitting it in court) using my corporate web server to send me threats and to threaten to make public stuff that is wholly private without thought for our children.
But as the podcast developed a life of its own and rapidly accelerated to a point where we garnered attention across the globe.It fast became really really popular and grew every single week. It was outranking several UK and US shows and eating a lot of bandwidth. We even recorded a live show (Episode 15) from Time Square in NYC talking to US couples.
That episode alone has had over 400k listeners. There are BBC podcasts which can't get those figures.
The podcast though it sounded real, in hindsight was a sham. It was me genuinely trying my best, but it was a plaster in a gaping wound of a marriage that was heading for the skids. In public.
Friends listening back now tell me all the controlling narcissistic signs and phrases are captured there in perpetuity in a digital infinity. I can't say I've gone back in time. I don't tend to want to listen to any of the 450 plus shows I've broadcast over the last 12 years or so.
However I am sure this still grinds. My ex knows people still listen to the show avidly so she has to create a false narrative. It's hard to do when there is fifteen plus hours of you talking on air captured in the ether and syndicated in people's ears.
You can't get more public than 6.5m people listening in, hanging on your every word of fifteen hours of you two talking.
I know it grinds, the most famous thing she's ever done, that she's known for all over the world is the story of her having affairs and being kicked out of a marriage, and it's syndicated by every major outlet online. Singapore Air even have it as one of their 40 curated podcasts you can listen to in flight.
And the losing the chance of life changing sums of money from licencing recently. I can't imagine how angry and incensed she is. But it's the internet, once you put it out there, it's out there. You can't take it back. It's not like it can be deleted. And I know for a fact her partner is furious it's still ever popular. It's Thursday lunchtime, since Monday 00.01, 23.7k people have listened in.
That's not bad for the story of a failed marriage.
I did try to make it work
I'd tried a make or break holiday to the US as an extended family which was ruined an hour after arrival when my ex caused a woman to fall over after rudely pushing her. The woman exploding in a fit of righteous anger at her at Newark Airport Station. She wouldn't apologize and stood there with a face like stone, zero emotions. I was angry and embarrassed at her behaviour. Again. Both our children are still mortified about it even now.
It didn't stop me trying my best to make it work for the children.
So post split I needed to turn a negative into a positive.
When I left my ex the divorce diet kicked in.
Now I'm 11 stone 13lb lighter than April 2018. I would be dead by now had I not stopped. I was lonely, I had no support at home in a hard job, and I was compensating with food. I was one rib roast dinner away from cardiac arrest at any time.
I couldn't have done it without support. I am a sugar addict and I know that and I embrace that and learnt to stop.
No alcohol, no sweets or snacking and sensible eating.
My blood pressure is much lower, I am no longer pre diabetic, I don't get kidney stones, I wear 36" jeans and I sleep better.
I have more energy to be Dad at 50 and I have a relationship with food that's getting better.
It does work
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