It's shaping up as one expensive “Yes” to a challenge.

After 20 weeks, the final weigh-in lunch (yes, lunch!) for contestants in the 20/20 Weight Loss Challenge is on Thursday – and to be honest – it’s about 10 weeks too soon.

It started off well enough.

As regular readers will remember, I had lost almost 10 kilos since the new year and thought I was well placed to enter the challenge with a flying start.

Unfortunately, those mean-spirited organisers didn’t count my starting weight before January. You’d think they were trying to raise money for charity or something!

The first 10 kilos I lost only meant the next 20 kilos were going to be even harder to lose.

That’s my excuse, anyhow.

That and a little thing called the acting-editorship of the paper which probably keeps you further from a gym than most things in life.

Poor excuses really, I hear you say.

If you had made the time, ate less than you expended in energy, the weight would have fallen off.

You’re probably right.

But short of undergoing gastric banding surgery today (any offers out there?) – and being out for the weigh-in lunch on Thursday, I will be saying goodbye to in excess of $1000 - $100 for every kilo I failed to lose.

Colleagues did try to help out.

Our weekend chief of staff Damian Bathersby even offered me a diet program which he reckoned would help me shed about five kilograms a week.

With 10 days to go, I thought I would at least be able to cut a few hundred dollars off the final donation.

The diet involved a lot of soup made with spinach, onion, garlic and tomatoes – which I thought would not be bad through the current cool spell.

It was okay at night – but I found it a little hard to stomach in the morning for breakfast.

I probably would have lasted the week, but then our police reporter Amy Remeikis got in my ear about how it would throw my metabolism out and the weight would all come piling back on.

It was enough to drive me to the nearest fast food drive-through.

In the end, my metabolism was thrown out – by a rush of junk food!

So here I am looking at a very, vulnerable bank balance.

I don’t hold fellow columnist Ashley Robinson responsible for putting me up to the challenge.

I know, I needed it.

And as I explained to Damian as I pitifully tried to defend my failure to stick to his wonderful diet, at least the money goes to a worthy cause.

You can’t complain about donating to a children’s orphanage and separate hospital in India, can you?

At least on Thursday, I won’t be alone in failing to reach the magic 20 kilo mark.

Last time I saw Ashley he certainly wasn’t 20 kilo lighter, while even the good doctor organising the event, Michael Ryan, looks like he still enjoying the odd red wine or three.

We’ve all had our different strategies for weight loss.

Ashley thought by going to India he might get really sick. By all accounts, he came back with more to lose than find.

I hit the gym at Beach House Fitness in Maroochydore regularly in the first 10 weeks – but that program fizzled out when I was thrown into the big chair here.

I’m still walking, eating reasonably well – and determined to keep the 20 kilograms off that I lost in the first half of the year.

But there’s something about winter isn’t there?

The cold mornings make walking that little less enticing while the demand for comfort food like cookies, muffins and the odd hot chocolate increases proportionately.

Well, at least we fatties can take comfort in the figures showing Aussies are now leading the global obesity race.

It’s the skinny people, after all, that are now in the minority.

Personally, I blame the government and food retailers.

Why is it so expensive, for example, to eat healthier while buying a packet of cookies or muffins is so cheap?

Coast nutritionist, Cyndi O’Meara, reckons the government should start taxing heavily all processed and take-away foods and use those taxes to subsidise healthy food such as meat, fish, chicken, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, eggs, grains and dairy.

Think of all the money we would save on health care costs if there was less heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

“Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result,” Cyndi reckons.

“For 30 years low fat, low joule has been pushed by a floundering weight loss industry and for 30 years we have been getting fatter as a nation.

“If this was working then we wouldn’t be the fattest country in the world and we wouldn’t have a diet industry worth billions.”

She reckons it’s time to get back to promoting health by making healthy food more affordable for all Australians.

The idea will never take off Cyndi. Sounds like too much common sense to me.