A fortnight ago in this space I faced up to the fact that, at 200lb, or 14 stone 4, I was overweight. “My name is Bob,” I wrote, “and I am a lardarse.” Or words to that effect.

Undertaking to lose 20lb, fully 10 per cent of my bodyweight, by the time of my cousin George’s wedding in Seville (which was then four weeks away), I announced, cue a big blast on the bugle, A Spring Diet! I then settled down for a large slice of cake.

Actually, for a few days, I did fan the dying embers of self-denial laboriously into life, losing a creditable five pounds. Or so the scales said, although I find my mobile phone to be just as useful a measure of weight loss. Mobile phone? Indeed. At 200lb, its outline in the hip pocket of my jeans is so tightly defined as to make me appear in a state of permanent sexual arousal. A curiously phone-shaped state of sexual arousal. For those several days of abstinence, the contours of the priapic Nokia had begun to blur.

And then my son’s 11th birthday came along and with it crisps, cocktail sausages, cheese straws, your full range of delicious party tat. All was lost. Or rather, all was restored. For the Birthday Treat, Sam and I went fishing, and although fishing isn’t usually thought of as a fattening activity, it is when you both get bored within three minutes and spend the next four hours eating bacon sandwiches and Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Tap it, unwrap it, stuff it in your face. We fired some maggots at each other with a catapult as well.

On the Big Day itself: bowling. Now, ten-pin bowling is no more calorie-intensive than failing to catch fish, and worse, it tends to go hand in hand with the excessive consumption of junk food. I had pizza, beer and ice-cream, the same combination Robert De Niro ate to gain 60lb to play the older, bloated version of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull.

Incidentally, as for the bowling itself, we booked two lanes, which then split on gender lines. Over there, even though they were competing with each other, my wife, daughter, Nadia, Caiomhe and Rionach were all sisterly hugs, high fives, shouts of encouragement, sighs of bad luck. Over here, a tense silence gradually enveloped the male contest, Sam, Miles, Max, Isam and me, a silence broken only by my muttered mantra of miss, miss, miss whenever the six-year-old Isam took a turn. Unfortunately, he still won.

The long and the short of my so-called diet was that after a week I was back where I started, weighing in at the big 200, thinking the whole sorry business best forgotten. But that was not to be.

Because the column in question had caught the attention of the sixth floor, and the sixth floor is where the big cheeses on the News International, er, cheeseboard, are located here at Wapping. I say “big”, I mean “large beyond comprehension”. If I am a few crumbs of own-brand cheddar hidden under a grape, the sixth floor is chock full of shiny truckles of Fortnum & Mason Stilton, premier cru, five star, blue riband, whatever appellation you use to denote a heavy hitter in the world of cheese/global media management.

In 16 years, I have been up to the sixth floor twice, both times as a result of pressing the wrong button in the lift. The first time (as a younger, braver man) I had a nose around until a glacial secretary asked if I’d come to move the filing cabinet. The second time I simply stared at the ceiling until the lift doors closed again. When I think of the sixth floor, I think of a vast, sepulchral silence and very thick carpets. Be that as it may, Paul Hayes, the Managing Director of Times Newspapers Ltd, admired my resolve, and to stiffen it, he has offered a deal: £100 to a charity of my choice* for every pound I shed, that £100 to become £250 per pound if I hit the target weight by the target date. Thus (Paul made the calculation rather more quickly than I did, explaining, perhaps, our divergent career trajectories), a potential five grand was up for grabs if I lost 20lb by April 27.

Furthermore, Paul suggested (but, going back to the cheeseboard analogy, the verb to suggest assumes here a euphemistic quality) I haul my indecently large bulk into the 21st century and write about the experience for the Times Health Club on Times Online. Paul then wished me good luck, warned me that the use of suppositories would constitute cheating, and was gone.

And that, reader, is where you find me today. The whole rigmarole starts again, only for real this time, with more at stake than whether I look a bit porky at my cousin’s nuptials. (Mercifully, George’s wedding now being a risible two weeks in the future, the deadline has been extended, to May 10.) For the next four weeks, by logging on to http://robertc.timeshealth.co.uk, you can follow my nail-biting progress towards the magic 180.

I am quietly confident.

robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk

*I’ve gone for Chance UK, which provides adult mentors for 5 to 11-year-olds with behavioural difficulties