Thursday, June 12, 2008

Sunshine and Diets

Today the sun shone and I started my diet. The two are not really linked in any way except for the fact that they are both long overdue. DD is now nearly 11 and my protestations that I'm 'post-natal' don't really cut the mustard any more so it's time to shift that post-baby spare tyre that's been residing around my waist since 1997.

The internet is awash with different diets all promising a whole host of wonderful results, not to mention the sort of names that just beg you to click on that mouse. I particularly liked www.fatlossforidiots.com and www.bellyfatisugly.com. Mostly they are just links to some sort of herbal remedy found in a remote jungle in Papua New Guinea or the powdered testicles of an rare Amazonian beaver. Either way, if they really worked wouldn't we all be using them? I mean, Duh!!

Instead I opted for Ian Marber, the Food Doctor. I bought his book years ago as I'd heard good reports but I need a good story to keep me interest and, well, to be honest, his just wasn't good enough so I gave up by the end of the third chapter.

The first week is some sort of hellish - invented by a psychotic thin person- detox when you eat old vegetable peelings and rice crackers but hey, I can do it.

Breakfast looked good on paper. Porridge with natural yoghurt and cinnamon. My bowl of brown vomit looked nothing like the lovely photo in his book but I pressed on anyway. Prison food! That's what it was. I love porridge, natural yoghurt and cinnamon but somehow when you put them together you get a bowl of sick that doesn't taste a whole lot better either.

The mid-morning snack is clearly penance for some hideous wrongdoing in a previous life. Clear soup with two slices of pepper and a tablespoon of pumpkin seeds.

The soup is made by boiling up assorted vegetables with some parsley. No problem so far. But then you chuck away the good stuff and you are left with 'clear soup'. Wrong. You are left with the water you boiled your veggies in. 'Add a pinch of cayenne pepper if you want it to have a little kick', said Mr Marber. The only little kick I wantedwas my foot up his backside for daring to call boiled vegetable water 'clear soup'.

By this stage I had a raging headache (no doubt all the badness leeching out of me) and the sort of hunger that made chewing on the bread board an appealing prospect.

Lunch was a triumph! 25g of tuna, 50g of broccoli florets and 4 cherry tomatoes with the juice of half a lemon. 'Start off by making a marinade with the lemon juice' spake Mr Marber ..... and what? You can't make a marinade out of lemon juice on it's own. That's just, well, lemon juice. Don't dress it up as haute cuisine when it's just knackers food, Mr Food Doctor. The only problem was that I'd forgotten to buy broccoli, so lunch was just the tuna and tomatoes. It looked bit lonely sitting on the plate!

Never mind, we've got afternoon snack coming up. More clear soup (Oh God, I've lost the will to live!) with the tasty addition of a crispbread and cottage cheese sprinkled with Garam Marsala. I mistakenly ate a rice cracker (cardboard packaging couldn't have had less taste) and then convinced my self that there was some sort of chemical synergy going on which would be completely ruined if I didn't have the crispbread so in the interest of science I scoffed a one with more cottage cheese. Point of order, Mr Marber, you don't say how much cottage cheese you are allowed to have. I managed to get a whole tub on my rice cake and crispbread!! Tee Hee! I never thought I'd see that day when I'd be looking forward to bingeing on cottage cheese.

By now I was looking longingly at the cats and thinking, can 20 million Koreans really be wrong? Dinner was tomato and rosemary soup with shredded omelette. The only problem there was that in order to shred an omelette it has to have form and substance. Mine have neither. What we ended up was more akin to soup with scrambled egg in it.

"So when do you start eating real food again" enquires DD looking worriedly at her bowl of soup and scrambled egg. (Well if I'm going to suffer, so are they. They are responsible for my extra pounds after all!)

Soon, very soon, please God!

4 comments:

KTB said...

Hi,
I have the same problem! Nine years on and the spare tyre hasn't shifted! I have just started a diet too - slimfast type milkshake for breakfast, fat&sugar free yoghurt mid morning, salad cold meat and some bread for lunch and a decent dinner. I get the daily carbs at lunch, so none in the evening. I'm doing ok so far - only on day three though!
Oh, and if you like sweeties, don't eat too many sugar free ones - they're laxatives as well! Don't ask me how I know that!
Good luck with it.
KTB

Waffle said...

I thought the Barefoot Doctor had been disgraced for various, ahem, misdemeanours with patients, no? Perhaps I dreamt it. If not, should you really trust him with you diet?

Also, are you sure this is necessary VLiF? It sounds cruel and unusual. Can't you get a friendly French doctor to send you to a spa? Or prescribe amphetamines (joke, internet)?

The Accidental Author said...

Hi KTB, good luck with your diet. After the week of hell (which hasn't been to much of a hell as it turns out but for the wrong reasons) mine becomes carbs at lunch but none in the evening, eating little and often. Often I can do, it's little that's the problem! VLiF

The Accidental Author said...

Jaywalker, doesn't the Barefoot Doctor do some sort of Taoist thing? Mine is the Food Doctor, beloved of daytime TV.

The first week is a sort of cleansing of the digestive system thing,which I will write about in the next few days.After that, it's normal food but you eat little and often, mix protein with complex carbs and no carbs in the evening so it's a lot more civilised.

I did the amphetamine thing when I was an airstewardess. We used to buy them over the counter in Thailand. VLiF on speed is not a good mix! VLiF