I DIDN'T WANT TO DIE

He knew he had to do something drastic to lose weight so Francois stopped eating almost eight months ago

- JACO HOUGH-COETZEE

IT WAS the sight of a wheelchair in his living room that made him take such extreme action. "And this?" he asked his wife.

"It's for you," she replied.

"Because you're on your way out." She was right, Francois de Ridder realised. At that stage he was so heavy his legs could barely support him and he was using crutches to get around. If he surrendered to the wheelchair, it would be the end of him.

"The next step would be amputation of my legs because there wouldn't be enough circulation of the blood," says Francois (56), whose weight was creeping towards 240kg. "I thought, 'What about my family? I don't want to die".

He'd tried diets before - plenty of them - and had been seeing dieticians since he was a teenager, but nothing worked for long.

In 2014 he decided he wanted to do the Cape Town Cycle Tour and shed 40kg in preparation, yet the weight soon found its way back.

The sight of the wheelchair made him realise he needed to do something drastic.

Francois started researching fasting and tried intermittent fasting - where you fast for a period of the day, for example 16 hours, and eat only within an eight-hour window. Seven months later his weight had dropped to 215kg.

Then Francois, a computer analyst from Centurion, decided to take things to the next level. He decided he'd stop eating until he reached his goal weight of 100kg.

The last time he ate was 8 August last year and his "last supper", as he calls it, was a large pizza and a chocolate bar washed down with a Stoney Ginger Beer.

"The first week the hunger pangs were nearly unbearable," he says. "But I will not turn back because I have an incredibly strong will."

Francois now weighs 111kg, but he isn't on a mission to persuade others to follow his example.