Obituary: Paul Jeffreys

Paul Jeffreys

Paul "Squeeze" Jeffreys was a shining example to New Zealanders trying to turn their health around, the medical director of the New Zealand Nutrition Foundation says.

The man who transformed his size and health in 12 months, losing 64kg, died last week aged 44. His unexpected death came after surgery at Auckland Hospital late last week to remove a benign brain tumour.

"It was a great shock to us all," Professor Cliff Tasman-Jones said of Mr Jeffreys' death. "He was so full of life, and he really kept his weight down."

Jeffreys was in good spirits after the surgery when he spoke to David Walden, a close friend and CEO of Whybin/TBWA. "The next night he had a seizure and slipped into a coma from which he never recovered," Walden said.

Mr Jeffreys came to New Zealand from Britain in 1986. In 15 successful years in the advertising industry, he became a managing director of M&C Saatchi in Auckland.

A courteous, kind, humourous person, he earned a big salary, owned three houses, had a wine collection and drove a sports car. And he gained weight.

At the age of 40, he was diagnosed by a doctor as being "morbidly obese", a phrase indicating the risk of a person becoming seriously ill.

Mr Jeffreys, the funny fat man at every party and known to his friends as Squeeze, realised something had to change. In truth the bright exterior was increasingly a facade.

"The truth is I didn't like myself much, in fact I loathed myself," he once told Hospitality Today.

His solution to his health dilemma was to quit his job and take a year off, moving from the city to Muriwai on Auckland's west coast. There he tackled the considerable challenges of changing his diet and regularly exercising.

It became a project chronicled in an Inside New Zealand television documentary Fat Man Slim, watched by a fascinated audience.

After 12 months he had shed 64kg of his 168kg starting weight. It left him much healthier with a compact figure for a big man of 104kg.

He wrote a popular book about the difficulties and challenges in Diary of a Fat Man - an honest account of his weight loss and the changes in him physically and emotionally published in 2003.

It was followed by Fat Man Cooks, written in conjunction with his wife Caroline.

He once observed that there were two sides to losing weight. The first side was losing it but that was followed by keeping it off. So he needed an eating regime that worked long after the year had finished.

He reckoned he had tried every one of the 101 recipes in the book except tofu, which he couldn't "get the hang of".

He aimed to eat healthily rather than embrace diets which he said came with strong emotions involving denial and what you cannot have.

"You start a diet with all the positive intentions in the world, but you're confronted with the negatives of what you can't do."

Paul Jeffreys' writing led on to newspaper columns, speaking engagements and television appearances.

Walden said that the thinner Mr Jeffreys had become a new man, a humbler man.

"The fact that he'd only had two or three years of that is sad because I think it would have been good for everyone if we could have had him for another 10 or 20 years," he said.

He is survived by his wife Caroline, his father and mother and he was a brother to Pandora, Jacaranda and Tara.