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!

I lied...

Was it only yesterday I said that I loved my children? How things can change in 24 hours. It all started to go wrong when we had a sudden, very heavy downpour last evening. Earlier in the day DS and DD had been hanging out of the velux window (does that constitute reckless endangerment do you think?) flying some daft 75 cent wind up bird thing which they naturally got stuck in a gutter. After much prodding and poking said bird was removed from the gutter but do you suppose they shut the window?

It was only several hours later, as the rain continued to fall in stair rods, that DS happened to mention to DD that perhaps, possibly, maybe she may have left her window open. I rushed in to find water cascading down the open velux window straight onto her bed and the large pile of ironing that my dearest Mother had spent the last week sorting out, and which, of course, she had been asked to put away.

Now, being as I am a domestic disaster rather than a domestic goddess, the windows were probably last cleaned at the turn of the century, so the water which was now spreading across the bed, the ironing and the floor was a nasty shade of brown. End result, her mattress looks like the last resting place of a serial incontinent. Did I calmy clean up and say "never mind, darling, accidents happen" or did I scream like a banshee with PMT. You guess!

(I'm just having a quick break to restart my heart. My youngest cat just decided to jump onto the desk which is on a galleried landing, overjumped and just about sailed straight over the bannister. I had to grab him by his tail which now looks a good few centimetres longer. Talk about news as it happens eh?)

Back to my blog....

So DD had no option, or rather I had no option, but to let her sleep in my bed with all the midnight whacks in the face, grinding of teeth and speaking in tongues that that will entail - her not me I hasten to add.

When I finally made it to bed after seemingly hours of picking up clothes dropped on the bathroom floor, empty glasses left under the table (where else?), shoes missing their mates and other assorted detritus, I sought (blimey, couldn't remember how to spell that for a minute) the sanctuary of my bedroom where DD was doing a passable imitation of the Vitruvian man, mouth hanging open and snoring gently. Great.

I collected up the jumbled arms and legs and deposited them over to the other side of the bed and hopped in ready to endure another chapter of Carol Drinkwater's 'The Olive Harvest'. I've never come across a writer who can use so many adjectives that it makes my head spin. Still, I press on.

A peaceful 10 minutes pass before DS appears claiming that the storm overhead is stopping him sleeping and can he get into my bed too. (Thank god DH is away!) DS, despite being only 12, is already 5'7 so it's no mean feat to squash us all into the bed, despite it being a superking.

I can hear my mother's doomladen warning ringing in my ears. "You're making a rod for your own back letting the children sleep in your bed" she said when they were but little nippers. But even I thought it was fair to assume that by the time teenagedom was approaching they might have kicked the habit.

So, a very long, very sleepless night, for me at least, followed as I tried my best to hang on to the few square centimetres they had left me, fought for the pillows and prodded assorted snorers and teeth grinders. Eventually at 6am, Basil, my mad kitty decided to come and chew my nose, so that was the end of another rejuvenating night.

Talking of noses, I'm sporting a very sore one today. I tried to peer through a shop window which had one of those security grilles behind it. It created some sort of optical illusion (well that's my story anyway) and I didn't realise the glass was so far forward. I ended up nose-butting the window really hard and now have a slightly swollen, slightly purple nose. Only me...thank god I forgot to spend thousands on a nose job all those years ago.