Every year around this time I meet up with an old friend of mine, and last year just before Christmas when we met he had put on a lot more weight as was a touch over 29 stone! This year when we met last week I was really surprised as he looked so fit and had lost a ton of weight, and I really needed to know how he had done it.

We have a lot in common, we both live alone, apart from our pets, and we both love food and we can both cook quite well, and neither of us are that good at diets, so what was his secret. At first all he would say was it had nothing to do with dieting, apart from eating sensibly, plenty of vegetables, light on the red and fatty meats, and plenty of chicken without the skin, the same with turkey, and fish but never fried. Well all of that is just plain common sense when you are grossly over weight, and it didn’t answer my question.

I think I need to give you some history and everything will drop into place. When my friend Steve was young both his parents where performers, his dad a musician and his mum a dancer, so when he was young he was sent to dance class, but after initial protest he found he really enjoyed it, and as he got older he was extremely good at progressive tap, and free style dance.

In the sixties and seventies neither of us where into pop music or disco, but we both loved jazz, and there where some good jazz clubs in and around London, so jazz dance was the order of the day, and Steve would often demonstrate jazz tap on stage, and virtually everyone would be mesmerized. Towards the end of the eighties New Jack Swing hit the scene, and this was really high energy dance, and Steve loved it, and said this is what he had always been waiting for. Considering the fact he was nearly forty he was showing the youngsters some really hot moves, and some fun years followed. Unfortunately in ninety three Steve had a bad car accident and he could hardly walk for a year, and I started getting fat and lazy, and no more dancing.

Last Christmas he went to a party and someone started playing some oldskool swing, and of course this brought back the old memories, and he said he then realized how much he missed dance. A woman friend of his has a dance studio, and since January he has spent five days a week, and at least an hour sometimes two hours, doing tap and swing, He is also teaching tap in some classes to help out, and Waite for it!! he has lost just over eight stone this year, and wants to loose another six, which he hopes to do by the summer.

Steve’s story has certainly given me something to think about, to be able to loose that much weight doing something you enjoy is a real bonus, and without any hard dieting. I have never been as flexible as Steve, or as good a dancer, but it does prove the point that if you stick at something you will succeed in getting to your goal. I hope this might of given you some new ideas how you can approach your own weight loss, it doesn’t always need to be conventional.