Media's biggest loser

Australian television personality and radio host Ian "Dicko" Dickson has dropped 16kg in six months through weight-loss programme Jenny Craig.

Congratulations, I say, not quite sure if it's the appropriate response: Miss Manners never did cover what to say to a celeb-who's-dropped-weight-as-the-face-of-a-weight-loss-programme-and-is-now-spruiking-that-plan, at least as far as I am aware.

"On not being a huge fat bastard anymore?" Dickson says cheerfully, "Thanks."

At 104kg before he lost weight, Dickson was not exactly super-fat, but he was carrying too much weight, enough to affect his health. His doctor told him if he carried on in the same weight bracket he could expect to live between five and 10 years less.

The first entry in the blog he kept about the experience mentions how he wanted to lose weight so he could play footy and golf again, but also to "tie my shoelaces without getting out of breath".

When tying your shoes becomes a cardio workout, you might think you would automatically lay off the crisp sandwiches (his big vice). But Dickson claims he had no idea how to go about losing the pounds or even how what he ate affected his weight.

In the Western world, where most women seem to have picked up a basic nutrition qualification almost by osmosis, he says men still just don't know where to begin.

Yes, Dickson, who worked in the appearance-aware record industry for 20 years, knew weight affected how people saw you. Indeed, as a judge on Australian Idol he found himself in considerable hot water in 2003, after he told contestant Paulini Curuenavuli: "You should choose more appropriate clothes or shed some pounds."

And he was aware he himself was overweight - he says he used to be too self-conscious to go to the beach because he knew people were looking at his man-boobs and his beer gut and thinking, "there is a bloke who has let himself go".

"But I just didn't know what to do about it," he says.

"I ate the wrong things at the wrong time. I'd skip breakfast and fill up around lunchtime on sweets and chips. I'd think nothing of having butter and mayonnaise in a ham and cheese sandwich. And then I'd have chips with it.

"I had absolutely no discipline. I had a complete lack of awareness of energy out versus energy in. And I don't think I'm alone in this. I think there's a fair few blokes just like me."

Until, last September, when Jenny Craig approached him to become the face of its Jen4men plan (one pities the poor PR person having to make the initial approach here to suitably overweight celebrities).

"But I wasn't offended," he says.

"In fact, I'm pleased they contacted me. I saw it as an opportunity. And at 46 it felt like it could be my last opportunity to do something about my weight."

It's not even hard to lose weight, Dickson says. Once he had "knowledge and the right tools", it pretty much fell off, a steady kilo a week.

While he was losing weight he followed the Jenny Craig programme, which supplies dieters with three meals and one snack a day. He says the food is fine and "perfectly edible". But once he was at his goal weight, he had to learn to choose his own meals.

Now he always eats breakfast - a bowl of muesli or grainy bread plus fruit and yoghurt. Lunch is a sandwich with no butter or mayo and in the evening he has a piece of meat or fish and salad. He gave up drinking altogether 15 months ago (he's spoken frequently about his battle with alcohol addiction).

"I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything at all now," he says.

"I get as excited about a crispy salad as I ever did about bacon and eggs."

Dickson is by no means the first celeb to endorse a weight-loss plan; indeed he's most probably been given the gig because of the success of the Jenny Craig campaign centred around a fellow Australian, comedian Magda Szubanski, who lost 26kg through the programme last year. And there's no doubting celebrity weight-loss ambassadors work for these companies; the Szubanski campaign saw enquiries to Jenny Craig rise by 50 per cent.

But do the likes of Dickson and Szubanski - and before them Sarah "Fergie" Ferguson (a Weight Watchers ambassador for 11 years) and Kirstie Alley (who used to be a Jenny Craig ambassador, although given she regained the weight when her contract lapsed, she's possibly up for grabs to be the face of your weight-loss programme at the moment) - really give us tubbies at home a realistic view of weight loss?

In Australia, a spokeswoman for the Dietitians Association pointed out celebrities were motivated in ways that did not apply to other people. They are paid to follow the weight-loss programme and they do so knowing their results will be made public.

Dickson freely admits he was paid by Jenny Craig to follow the plan, plus he had a personal weight-loss consultant (although that's standard for that company) and a personal trainer. He knew his results would be publicly disclosed, in fact he was contractually obliged to meet certain weight-loss goals.

"But everything I have done is available to other people," Dickson says.

"I was surprised, when I looked into it, to see it's not even that expensive. I was overweight for 15 years and then I decided I was going to do something about it.

"Whether I was paid or not isn't relevant. I don't think that made it any easier or harder for me. I think there's just a hundred reasons not to improve your life and none of them are any good.

"The only thing that makes me feel stupid is that I didn't do it sooner."