• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

I Was so Fat, I Feared I'D Die on My Own Operating Table

Posted on: Tuesday, 14 June 2005, 18:00 CDT

IT IS 9.15am in Harley Street. After a 5.45am breakfast of muesli, banana, yoghurt and juice, a 6am ward round at the London Clinic and almost two hours in the operating theatre, consultant anaesthetist Dr Peter Amoroso bounds down the street to his townhouse.

Over a cup of tea, his manicured hands turn the pages of a photo album to reveal an image of a blubber-whale of a man with five chins, fat, pink cheeks and a voluminous belly.

It's hard to reconcile the behemoth of the photographs with the well-proportioned man sitting before me. He now weighs a mere 12st 7lb - whereas once he threatened to break the scales at 19st 4lb.

Even the police have had a problem matching the old Dr Amoroso with the new.

A few months ago, a police chief called to renew the shotgun certificate he needs for clay pigeon shooting. "I showed him my old certificate which bears my photograph and he said, 'Who's this?'" Dr Amoroso, 45, laughs.

"I told him it was me. He didn't believe it."

Dr Amoroso's parents came to London from Milan the year he was born. His mother cooked good Mediterranean food, lots of pasta, rice, olive oil and salad. "A very healthy diet, but at school I would raid the tuck shop with my friends and spend all my money on Mars bars and crisps.

I was a little chubby but very fit and active, playing in the school football, cricket and athletic teams at Woodhouse College in Finchley," he remembers.

But his weight started to balloon when he went to King's College Hospital medical school, and continued to do so when, as a junior hospital doctor, he migrated to the hospital canteen for every meal. "They served chips with everything and very little fresh fruit or veg," he says.

"I got out of the habit of eating breakfast and kidded myself I was saving calories. Then, I snacked on anything that came my way.

"I would go on ward rounds where all the patients offered me chocolates.

Thirty patients a morning equalled 30 chocolates and I never said no," he admits.

"I would help myself to biscuits wherever I saw them, treat myself to crisps and nuts, and if I stopped for petrol, I would buy a couple of chocolate bars and inhale them on the way back to the car. Sometimes I'd pop into McDonald's on my way home for a couple of quick burgers, large chips and a big, sugary milk shake.

"I used to snore like a battleship and wake myself up because I was so overweight.

Colleagues laughed at me because I waited for the lift to go up a single flight of stairs at the hospital."

As an anaesthetist, Dr Amoroso admits his biggest fear was that he himself would need an anaesthetic. "I would have been at terrible risk because of breathing problems as a result of my size, apart from giving any surgeon who needed to work on me a hard job, cutting through the layers of fat to reach my organs. But I was a salt/ sugar/ fat addict, just as other people are addicted to tobacco or drugs."

Dr Amoroso agrees that obesity is the curse of the 21st century. From experience, he knows that fat people are often shunned and ignored. "Once I decided to treat myself to a black Armani suit. I took myself to Selfridges where a very suave, sophisticated chap took one look at me and said, 'That would be a 50in chest, sir.' I told him that actually it was 52in." When the salesman told him the largest ready- made Armani suits were 44in chest, Amoroso was devastated.

"I was at the top of my profession, working with some of the most eminent surgeons in the land, advising patients to lose weight but didn't do it myself." His patients included - as they still do - leading politicians, authors, actors, High Court judges and pop stars.

"People tried to tell me I was overweight but when you are fat, you don't hear them. I divorced and then I was comfort eating. My oldest schoolfriend once said to me, 'You must be bloody good at your job to be working with top consultant surgeons looking the way you do.' Now I realise what an insult that was."

SO, WHAT changed?

The breakthrough came from an unlikely source - not a nutritionist but a theatre orderly called Frank at St Bart's hospital, where Dr Amoroso was working.

"Frank is a real star," Dr Amoroso says. "He'd been at Bart's 25 years. We got into the habit of consuming huge fried breakfasts together every day.

Then Frank was told he was on the verge of becoming diabetic and must lose weight. He stopped eating the fried breakfasts and taking sugar in his tea and told me he was walking every day. He lost three stone in under a year.

"I, however, was still piling it on. One day I looked at him and thought, 'He's the porter. I'm the consultant. And he's showing me what to do. It wasn't rocket science. He'd changed his lifestyle.

But to me diet was and is a fourletter word."

That summer, he went to Tuscany on holiday and bought a pair of trainers to go jogging.

"Perspiration poured. My face went puce after 50 metres. It was comical," he says.

Back home, he abandoned fried breakfasts, stopped snacking on salty, fatty and sugary food and gave up bread completely. Today, if he snacks at all, it's on blueberries, "full of cancer-preventing antioxidants". He's cut down on portions and never eats after 6pm if he can help it. "If my mother piled my plate high with pasta, I used to scoff the lot," he says. "Now I make her take half away and then only eat half what is left." Lunch is usually a large salad with fish or chicken and fresh fruit.

Exercise is a major feature.

"After Tuscany, I came home determined," he says. "At first, I used to drive the car for 30 seconds to get across the road to the running track in the outer circle at Regent's Park. I'd run 100 metres, get back into the car and drive home."

The day he first managed to run one whole 400-metre lap before collapsing into the car was memorable.

As he got fitter, he walked to the track. "Finally I was able to run to the track, and go four laps before running home - a total of one-anda-half miles," he says. "I was elated.

The weight was falling off.

"I'd discovered it wasn't just sensible eating. It was exercising for long enough that was the key.

Exercising builds muscle for the first 40 minutes. Only after that do you start burning fat. Now, I try to work out for two hours a day. If I haven't time in the morning, I will fit it in later.

DR AMOROSO now has a 32in waist and a 40in chest. "One day I stood on the scales and realised I'd shed seven stone. I went back to Selfridges and bought my Armani suit. The same salesman served me. He looked at me quizzically and said, 'Don't I know you from somewhere?'" Then, just eight months after he changed his lifestyle, he decided to run the London Marathon for the Prostate Research Campaign UK charity. He completed the course in five hours 10 minutes and is planning to do the run again.

He and his colleague Professor Roger Kirby and Kirby's wife, Jane, are opening the Prostate Centre at 32 Wimpole Street next month. It is also offering men colon and vascular checks, with nutritionists on hand to offer obese patients lifestyle-changing advice.

"Superfluous weight is the cause of so many physical problems. We don't want to cure men of prostate cancer, only to have them die of vascular disease a year later," he says.

And if his celebrity patients are in any doubt about the validity of his advice, they need look no further than the good doctor himself.

Source: Evening Standard; London (UK)

More News in this Category