In our many years of marriage I have built up a mental list of all the things I handle myself, and all the things I let Greg take a lead on.
By and large, this has been a highly successful arrangement that has prevented no end of petty jealousies, night-time arguments, and slamming doors.
. . . and then I am disgusted to discover that there’s every chance he’s a better writer than I am.
Before the competition started back in March neither of us had ever kept a diary, and neither of us had ever spent so much time writing about our lives. At first the whole process was like pulling teeth, but as the weeks have gone by I think we’ve both discovered that it’s actually rather a lot of fun. It’s made us both better writers as well, given that practice generally does make perfect, if you give it half a chance.
Between us we must have written well over a hundred and fifty thousand words in the last six months, which is quite incredible when you think about it. When we’re not exercising or dieting, we’re hunched over the laptop writing about exercising and dieting.
The Stream FM audience will never get to read a majority of it, of course. Our lengthy essays are generally chopped down into far smaller bite-sized chunks; they probably have to cut half of what we write out just to make it palatable to a family audience, to be honest. We know how much effort we’ve put into the process, though, and how many hours have been spent slaving over a hot keyboard.
Unfortunately, Greg and I now find ourselves in a situation where we’re both pretty good at something, which has inevitably led to comparison and the aforementioned competition.
I want to be better at writing than Greg—and I’m sure he feels the same way.
In fact I know he does, because I’ve caught him re-editing his diary entries on more than one occasion recently. Greg is not one of life’s perfectionists, and tends to pull the stops out only when he’s really invested in a project.
I’m just as bad. Where once I would dash off my entries, I now take my time to go back over them and make sure they’re as witty as possible.
I also read every one of Greg’s entries before he sends them off to Stream FM to be butchered. He does the same with mine. Quite often in the evenings the television is now switched off, and we sit in silence reading each other’s work and sipping on small glasses of wine. It’s a very pleasant way to pass the time.
I read Greg’s most recent entry on Thursday night, about all the exercises he’s tried. When I got to the bit about Wilf seeing his penis I nearly spat my wine out.
‘You never told me that happened!’ I said, making him look up from his iPad.
‘Nope,’ he replied with a broad grin. ‘I wanted to save it so you could read about it.’
‘Oh, so now you’re keeping stuff from me to use as material, are you?’
‘Don’t be so silly. I just thought it would sound better on the page.’
I have to confess it does. Greg is not a good oral storyteller. I’ve never heard him get to the end of a joke without making at least one cock-up along the way.
When I’d finished reading the entry I felt just a little bit jealous of how my husband’s writing has improved.
‘This is really funny, baby,’ I grudgingly admitted to him.
‘Thanks. It was fun to write. Very cathartic, I’d say. I wasted a lot of money on all that crap, so it was good to have a moan about it.’
‘I bet.’
‘You should do the same about all those ridiculous diets you’ve tried. What was that one? The Chapstone diet?’
‘Chatman.’
‘Yeah. That was it. I reckon people would love to hear all about that.’
Bugger.
I hate it when he has a good idea I wish I’d thought of first.
So here we are, then.
I’m going to tell you all about my dieting experiences of the past few months—and I’d better do a good job of it or you’ll think Greg is a better writer than I am. Which would be just awful.
Let’s get one thing straight—most diets are idiotic. Comprehensively idiotic.
There really is only one diet that actually works, but I’ll come on to that later.
For now, let’s concentrate on all those weight loss programmes that sound like miracle cures in the short term, but are actually a complete waste of time in the long run.
I have to whole-heartedly agree with my husband on one thing: most diets—like the exercise equipment he talks about—trade on the idea that they can make you lose weight easily and quickly.
Why bother to put the effort in of eating a balanced, calorie-controlled diet, when you can just follow the simple three-step program you’ve just downloaded off the internet? The one that will see you three stone lighter and ten times more attractive within a fortnight?
Good gravy.
I’ve already talked about the cabbage soup diet, which made me fart like a cow and resulted in absolutely no long-term weight loss.
This is just one of a series of slimming regimes I like to call the ‘object diets,’ the ones that are based around the consumption of a single food type. They all trade on the idea that by restricting yourself to one food you will lose weight in no time at all. This is in direct contradiction of all evidence provided by nutritional science, but never mind: the internet says it works, so it must be true!
In all I tried three of these diets before common sense prevailed.
Yes, three. I am nothing if not a glutton for punishment.
After cabbage soup came the baby food diet.
Why not? Cheryl Cole and Jennifer Aniston swear by it, so why shouldn’t I give it a go?
It’s disgusting, that’s why.
The idea is that you eat about a dozen small portions of baby food throughout the day, thus keeping your metabolism ticking over nicely. Yep, you heard that right . . . a dozen.
How can anyone—other than a millionaire celebrity—possibly hope to find time to fit in a dozen small meals of pureed awfulness a day?
Perhaps you’re supposed to sneak a few mouthfuls of apple and pear while you’re sitting in rush hour traffic waiting for the lights to turn green? Or maybe you should eat some pureed butternut squash when you nip to the loo? That way what goes in will look exactly the same as what’s coming out.
I tried the baby food diet for a day. My taste buds still haven’t forgiven me.
It doesn’t sound too bad when you read about it. After all, what is pureed baby food other than a really thick smoothie, right?
Oh, hell no.
At least with a smoothie you can convince yourself that you’re just having a nice refreshing drink as the mulched fruit slides down the back of your throat. With baby food there is actual effort involved. You have to pro-actively set your mouth to the task of shifting it down your gullet. If you’re lucky this will involve just a bit of jaw movement and swallowing. If you’re unlucky it will involve—oh, God in heaven—chewing.
If anyone has invented a worse thing to put in your mouth than boiled, pureed parsnip and swede, then I don’t want to know about it.
Over the course of the day my gag reflex was put to the test more than that of a trainee sword swallower. If I wasn’t nearly throwing up banana all over the breakfast bar at home, I was gamely trying to prevent the up-chuck of broccoli and spinach over my keyboard at work.
There’s a reason why babies cry a lot when you’re trying to feed them. It’s because of the horrid concoction you’re trying to force down their throats.
For me personally, being on the baby food diet just served to remind me of my inability to get pregnant. So not only was I force-feeding myself disgusting gunk, I was also being reminded of my failings as a woman. Brilliant. It’s a wonder I lasted until six o’clock that evening.
With a muffled curse I spat the pureed potato and leek into the bin and put the whole sorry d
ay behind me by making a lovely chicken and mayonnaise sandwich.
Don’t worry, I used fat-free mayonnaise and the chicken was free range.
You’d think I’d have had my fill of the ‘object diet’ after that, but then I saw the grapefruit diet.
Grapefruit!
Grapefruits are healthy, right?
How can you bloody go wrong eating a diet that recommends you eat loads of fruit?
Even the science sounds plausible. There is apparently an enzyme in grapefruit that burns fat, meaning you can eat small quantities of tasty unhealthy food, providing you mainly consume grapefruit so that that enzyme gets in your body and takes care of all those nasty fat molecules.
You can eat bacon, for crying out loud. This is the best diet ever, people!
Or so it seemed on paper.
Have you ever noticed how good things always seem on paper?
Diets, package holidays, car insurance policies, fashion tips . . . the list goes on and on.
I often wonder how much better the world would be if none of us had developed the ability to write. Then we’d actually have to see something in action before agreeing to have any part of it. I can’t help but feel this may have made our lives a whole lot easier. You can con me into wearing gold Roman sandals and a sequined poncho in the pages of a fashion magazine, but if I actually see some other poor bitch walking down the road towards me wearing such a hideous combination I’m going to avoid it like the bloody plague.
I started the grapefruit diet quite keenly. I dutifully ate my half grapefruit and drank my grapefruit juice with every meal. Okay, this did get a bit boring after a while, but I was happy to put up with it as it also meant I could eat bacon sandwiches.
This went on for five happy days until my stomach started to emit sharp, shooting pains at regular intervals.
Why?
Well, grapefruit may or may not have a fat-burning enzyme in it, but what I can guarantee you it does have is a high level of citric acid.
I may have been loving every minute of eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, but my stomach lining was not having such a good time with all that acid I was dumping into it.
After a week, the processes going on in my intestines probably resembled the day-to-day activities of a chemical factory—one that will be shut down very soon for its poisonous health and safety record.
I have never suffered so much bloody heartburn in my life. The amount of milk of magnesia I had to consume just to keep the fire at bay was frightening.
Greg may think that the Electromax 2000 is a great way of curing constipation, but it’s nothing compared to swigging a bottle of milk of magnesia, I can assure you. It was a bloody good job we had two toilets in our house during that week.
Needless to say I stopped the grapefruit diet before the allotted ten days was up. I just didn’t think my stomach lining could take it.
That was the last object diet I tried. I may be a glutton for punishment, but even I have my limits.
You simply can’t hope to exist eating predominantly one food source for any length of time.
What’s more, any weight loss you do achieve is likely to be wiped out the minute you return to a normal diet. Our bodies aren’t meant to consume just one thing. We’re omnivores and need a diet that’s got a lot of variety in it. Forcing yourself to stick to one food because some stupid internet website tells you it will shift a stone in two weeks is nothing but an exercise in self-harm and disappointment.
To be honest, object diets are quite easy to dismiss if you just sit back and think about it for a while. They’re just too simplistic to work.
The process of effective weight loss is a complex and time-consuming business. After all, the human body is quite difficult to wrestle under your control at the best of times, so effecting radical change is always going to be a tricky proposition.
By extension of that thought, any diet that sounds quite complicated and scientific should be far more likely to result in long-term weight loss . . . right?
Yeah.
Riiiiiight.
Let’s start with the Chatman Diet.
Or should I say, let’s start with the Professor Montague Chatman Approach to Effective Nutrition and Metabolic Health.
Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
Montague Chatman sounds like the kind of serious, bearded intellectual who has spent decades in a laboratory somewhere, coming up with new and interesting ways to help you lose enough weight to fit into that black party dress you saw in H&M last week.
What’s more, his Approach to Effective Nutrition and Metabolic Health is contained within three hundred pages of hardback book—full of diagrams, pie charts, complicated formulas, and big long words like ‘glucagon,’ ‘epinephrine,’ and ‘oxidization.’
The book has been a bestseller in thirty countries, further adding weight to its credence as a weight loss method.
. . . So thinks Zoe Milton anyway, as she purchases a copy of the book from WH Smith with the voucher her mum sent on her birthday.
What a magnificent-looking book it is, too!
It’s got a bright red cover, with bright white and green writing. The excitement of all that potential weight loss fairly leaps out at you when you’re just holding the damn thing. ‘The multi-million bestseller!’ it informs you in a splash across the top of the book’s jacket. ‘The scientifically proven way to a slimmer waistline!’ another equally bold strapline screams at you from the bottom.
When you crack the book open you find that the actual content is written in a large, easy-to-read font . . . so they’ve even taken steps to prevent you suffering eye strain. This must be the reason for such big letters. It can’t possibly be because they’re having to stretch a small amount of spurious and badly researched information across enough pages to fill a whole book. Oh no.
I sit down in the living room early one dull Sunday afternoon with a glass of fruit juice (mango, not grapefruit) and begin to read this marvellous book.
Ten minutes later I’m more confused than a Tory politician in Lidl.
The tactic of Montague and his cronies is to baffle you with enough long words and pseudo-science that you just end up believing everything they say, so as not to come across as a thickie.
What I did manage to glean from the first fifty pages or so was that the Chatman diet is about controlling the amount of carbohydrates, fats, and acids that go into your body, which will in turn affect your metabolic rate—speeding it up to such an extent that cream cakes don’t stand a chance against the cleansing fire burning from within every molecule of your body.
By following Chatman’s method you avoid what he likes to call ‘metabolic anti-stasis.’ This sounds extremely nasty.
The book then goes on to discuss the best way to accomplish this. Again, a lot of long words are thrown around with gay abandon.
I thought a jam doughnut was just a jam doughnut, but it turns out that it is in fact a ‘negative metabolic inducer’ which can lead to a ‘higher density of lifoproteinates.’
Now I don’t know about you, but having a higher density of lifoproteinates sounds like a bad thing to me. I don’t have a fucking clue what a lifoproteinate is, but I’m damn sure I want to keep my density of them low.
It’s frankly amazing how many foods are bad for your metabolic rate according to Professor Chatman. Human evolution would seem to dictate that there are at least some food substances out there that are good for you—otherwise the human race would have died out millennia ago as soon as it took a bite out of the first banana it came across. But old Montague seems to completely disagree. According to him, the human body is not meant to eat all the food that’s just lying around. That way lies madness—and an unhealthy amount of back fat.
Carbohydrates might as well be the work of the devil as far as he is concerned, and the way he rips into foods heavy
with lactose gives me the impression that at some point in his youth he must have been molested by a milkman.
Monty (after two hundred pages I feel like we’re on first-name terms) then starts to talk at length about amino acids. He has decided, in his infinite wisdom, that my metabolic rate is dependent on the level of amino acids I use. Why? Because of the enantiomers and stereoisomers, silly!
You know what enantiomers and stereoisomers are, don’t you?
They’re just by-products of the isoelectric process!
Still a bit confused?
You’re not the only one.
I have the distinct feeling that any passing biochemists would look at Monty’s theories and claw their own eyes out with the stupidity of the whole thing—but I’m no expert, am I?
Who am I to judge the veracity of Monty’s claims? After all, his book has sold millions of copies, and there can’t be that many people who would just blindly follow a load of hack scientific blather in their desperation to lose a few pounds, can there?
By page two hundred and fifty I have entered a state of near catalepsy. I’ve been bombarded with so much information I’m finding it hard to uncross my eyes. According to Monty, I am a methanogenic and carbonic life form low in selenocysteine and hydroxyproline.
But then . . . salvation!
Friendly, helpful Professor Montague Chatman is now ready to explain all of this nonsense in simple, easy-to-understand sentences that feature words of no more than three syllables.
It turns out that Chatman and his colleagues have done all the painstaking research so we don’t have to! We don’t need to know which foods are negative inducers or isoelectric inhibitors! Woo hoo! Just when I thought I’d have to take the entire biology section of the library with me every time I go to bloody Tesco, the good Professor has come along to save me all that time and inconvenience.
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