A grandfather who was warned he would die unless he lost enough weight to make him eligible for life-saving surgery has astonished doctors by losing 11stone in 6 months. Idris Lewis weighed almost 27 stone and in January was told that due to his weight, surgeons could not perform heart surgery, without which they gave him a year to live.
Mr Lewis was so determined to give himself a fighting chance at survival that he embarked on an extreme diet, where he stopped eating solids and lived on fluids entirely. He has subsisted on nothing but mineral water and nutritionally-balanced milkshakes for the past six months in an effort to reach the target weight set by his surgeon in time for the end of July.
He explained that he decided to take such dramatic steps after his doctor made him realise he only had two choices – “diet or die”. He said that learning this was the only incentive he needed to lose the extra weight.
Amazingly, Mr. Lewis said he had not missed solid food, though sometimes he sees an advert for roast chicken or steak and thinks it looks good. He said this was just ‘desire’, not need. Rather depressingly, he told journalists that he got variation in his diet by alternating between mineral and tap water.
He is overjoyed that he has now been told that he can have the operation in October and plans to end the diet in two weeks, when he will slowly start to reintroduce food into his life.
While this story has shown what people can do with determination, it also is fairly scary that it took the prospect of death to convince Mr. Lewis to shed the extra pounds. With 1 in 3 Brits expected to be dangerously overweight by 2012, it seems probably that many of those people will not be able to show the same determination – and their stories will not end so happily.