It’s the season of dry January, recovery and resolutions. Not that I have made one. The resolutions often involve bleak pledges to deny yourself something, or do more of something else -less alcohol, no more cigarettes, increased daily steps and more hours in the gym. I have failed to make a resolution –but if I did, it would be less moaning and more joy. More embracing the day and less wishing I was somewhere else, leading a completely different life. One that involved sunny winters. I would hope to continue not smoking and abstaining from bread which I have been doing fairly successfully for the last 18 months.
The bread had to go. And it has done. Having said that I have just eaten a tiny slither of malt brown bread at lunch with a friend in the exquisite restaurant 6 Portland Road off Holland Park Avenue in London. A little gem (albeit chilly the day we went) that offers a reasonable fixed price menu for lunch and early evening or an absurd 5.00pm dinner with half price food through the app First Table. But I diverse, I was writing about bread and diet. After having children in 2001 and 2004 my weight ballooned. My face was no longer angular. People said I looked soft, and I am still not sure if that is a compliment? I wore baggy jumpers and shirts billowing over my waistline. When I lay on the floor and raised my hips and legs for a yoga pose, my stomach plopped over my leggings. My knees and hips began to ache. I remember going to a summer party and a man I had once kissed in an alcohol induced haze didn’t recognise me.
For a number of years I was on one fad diet or another. Back then there were no fat loss jabs that are the thing now – if you can afford it privately or if you are seriously obese, and even then you may have to wait years on the NHS. The first fad diet I went on was the cabbage diet, cabbage soup at every meal. The smell permeating around the house was sickening. The taste of the soup like some kind of mean Dickensian gruel. It worked. I lost the weight but a few weeks after finishing put it all back on. The most extreme diet I have ever heard of is the Cotton Ball Diet. The trick is to survive on cotton wool dipped in juice to make you feel full. It sounds like fiction, perhaps it is, some April Fool that someone put out there all those years ago. All these diets work in the short term, but the downfall is that they can ruin your natural metabolism. The body will get used to the extremely low caloric intake and eventually the speed of the metabolism slows down.
About ten years ago or so the latest fad diet was the low carb Dukan Diet . I was on it for 12 months and survived on expensive slithers of steak, packets of prawns and crab sticks. I became a shadow of my former self. I remember wearing a silk blouse tucked into something for a party, and feeling light and sexy. However, after a year I gave up completely, mostly out of boredom, bad breath and constipation. Also, at heart, I don’t eat red meat.
I tried the 5/2 Fast diet (about six years ago) made famous by Dr Michael Mosley. The diet involves cutting calories to 500-600 on two days a week, while eating what you like on the other five. It was popularised by Mosley, the television doctor who died in June 2024, aged 67, after going for a walk on the Greek island of Symi. It’s very hard to function normally on 500 calories a day on the two fasting days. I survived on miso soup and diet coke, which seems unbelievable now. How did I do that? We know there are benefits to fasting, and particularly as we get older but 500 calories twice a week long term, is insufferable and sad. A friend on the same diet told me she was so ravenous, “she could eat her children.” I understood.
You could tell me that thinking about my weight and dieting is in bad taste considering what is going on in the world today, when so many are suffering, and have very little to eat. When fires are raging and bombs are falling, and people are being brutally killed in war. I agree. It is bit tasteless, but there are so many of us out there in a parallel world trying to lose weight, or maintain an ideal weight. So I am about to tell you how I lost a stone. And without a jab
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I went away for a month in August 2023. The house was near Granada in Spain. The first two weeks the heat was searingly hot until 9pm, at which point it would cool down a few degrees. It was far too hot to eat much, and so we lunched on pulses and Gazpacho and had fish and salad for dinner. The salad above was from a local restaurant. There were no scales, but as the weeks went on, it was obviously that my body was smaller, but It was still a shock to arrive home and find that I had lost nearly a stone. Of course this was good news, and so I maintain the weight (although I now weigh a little more) by not eating bread. It’s a simple as that. And weighing myself most days, and by doing Pilates at least twice a week along with a daily dog walk. Also being watchful about what I eat and when I eat. Trying not to eat mindlessly. That’s it really. PS You can see from the photo above that I was still smoking in Spain.
always love reading your writing xxx