By Mike Hind MBE19 September 2026

Dibsy: 20 stone in 358 days, and every meal came out of our kitchen

In October 2018 a 27-year-old lad from Middlesbrough called Darren McClintock, known to everyone as Dibsy, was nearly 40 stone, eating around 11,000 calories a day, and had been told by doctors that if he did not lose weight it would kill him. Twelve months later he had lost 20 stone. Every one of those days he ate food cooked in our kitchen. This is the story people still ask me about, told properly for the first time on our own website.

The poster

Most people remember the posters before they remember anything else. I printed a photo of Dibsy with the words "Save Dibsy. Obesity is killing him. Do not serve this man" and took them round every takeaway he used in Middlesbrough. It was a blunt thing to do and it was meant to be. He could not walk past a takeaway without going in, so I made sure that when he went in, they would not serve him. Within days the story was in the national papers and on TV, and I had a lot of people telling me I was cruel. Dibsy never once said that. He knew I was the first person who had taken his life seriously.

Where he started

Dibsy could not sleep in a bed. He could not do the things most people do without thinking. He was at the point where an operation he needed could not go ahead until he lost weight, and the only way to lose it was to change what went into his mouth every single day. I take on one person a year for free, out of hundreds who ask, and that year it was him.

What he ate

This is the part nobody in the papers wrote about, because it was not the dramatic bit. For a full year, Dibsy did not cook a meal and did not buy one. Every breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack came out of the Macro Based Diet kitchen, weighed, labelled and counted, and delivered to him the same way it is delivered to our customers now. No shakes, no diet pills, no gimmicks. Real food, the right amount of protein to hold on to muscle while the fat came off, portions that were exactly what the label said, and nothing left to willpower at seven o'clock at night.

That matters because 20 stone in a year is not a story about a diet. It is a story about consistency. He went from around 11,000 calories a day to a set daily target and he hit it every day for 358 days, because the food was already made and there was nothing else in the house. The meals we send out today are built on exactly the same idea: the deciding is done in our kitchen, so all you have to do is eat.

What he did

Alongside the food he trained with me, up to three times a day when his body could take it, at Mas Body Gym. Seven stone went in the first ten weeks. By the January he had lost more than eight stone and was sitting on the This Morning sofa with Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby. By February he had lost ten stone, enough for the operation to go ahead. In the summer Channel 5 broadcast a documentary about him, Eating Ourselves to Death. In September he ran the Great North Run. In October, with a week to spare on the year we had set ourselves, he passed 20 stone lost. Along the way he climbed Roseberry Topping, then Ben Nevis, passed his driving test and won a charity boxing match.

Where the story went

ITV News, This Morning, Channel 5, every national paper through the news agencies, Teesside Live every step of the way, and as far as Fox News in America. For a while Dibsy was one of the best-known faces in the country, and the phrase "do not serve this man" followed me around for years. I would do it again tomorrow.

What it proved

I had been coaching for a long time before Dibsy and I already knew that food is where people win or lose. What that year proved, in front of the whole country, was that if the food is right and it is there every day, the results follow, even for someone starting from the hardest place imaginable. It is the reason Macro Based Diet exists in the form it does now: a kitchen in Middlesbrough cooking meals with the calories and macros already worked out, delivered to your door, so the hard part is done before you open the fridge.

Dibsy is still a mate, still training, and still the first name I think of when someone tells me they cannot do it. If he could, you can, and you do not have to do it on your own. Build your meal prep, or read about our weight loss meal plans.