Katy

Hello. I’m too fat. I don’t look too fat, because I am tall and large-framed and curvy, but I am. I’m hoping to become thinner.

I spent years on diets. Atkins, South Beach, Slimming World, WeightWatchers, Neris and India’s Ridiculously Expensive Pretty Much Atkins Middle Class Diet – you name it, I’ve done it. I got the best results with Weight Watchers, and that together with the Low GI diet taught me some valuable lessons about getting the best out of limited calories – but there came a point when I suddenly realised that I was looking at writing down and counting up every single mouthful of food I ate for the rest of my life, and that every mouthful I ate would be low-fat.

I was slightly appalled. I love food and I love cooking and the thought of living on processed, joyless crap for the rest of my life made me feel slightly demented. I stopped dieting. I went a bit crazy with food for a while. I put quite a lot of weight on again, although not all of it. And then, around Christmas just gone, I began to think seriously about what and how I ate. I realised that whenever I had dieted, I had eaten a lot of food that I didn’t particularly want – low fat, high sugar diet-friendly substitutes for the most part – because I had forbidden myself to eat what I did want. It occurred to me that most diets are about quantity of food, not quality: they either try to teach you to want to eat less than you do, or they announce a Miracle Food like cabbage soup or hard boiled eggs or protein or peanut butter or something that you can eat forever in unlimited quantities without gaining weight. But food shouldn’t be about quantity, it should be about quality. After all, I gained the weight in the first place because I was working too late to cook and living on fat-soaked takeaways, full of empty calories that made me want more and more. And then I lost the weight by thinking of nothing but food and what I could or couldn’t have, eating nothing but low-fat high-sugar processed diet food that always left me feeling slightly cheated and writing every single morsel down so that I could enter it on my tracker later. It suddenly occurred to me that my problem with food might not be how much I ate, but what I was eating, and that perhaps if I paid more attention to the quality of the food that I was eating and stopped obsessing about how much of it I’d eaten, the quantity would take care of itself.

So after Christmas I changed the rules. I still have them – Rome wasn’t built in a day – but they are much easier to keep to:

1. I have three meals a day; I only have fruit, nuts and yogurt as snacks in between.

2. I can have anything I want for those three meals – anything at all: salad or steak and chips, it doesn’t matter – but I cook them myself from scratch.

3. I can eat as much as I like at each meal, as long as I stop eating when I’m full. I’m not talking about some sort of complicated “am I comfortably full or stuffed?” test – I’m trying not to think too hard about it. I stop when I’ve had enough.

4. Most importantly: I use real ingredients. Butter, oil, cream, cheese, free-range organic meat and for the love of little baby Jesus no fucking Frylight, which deserves a whole post to itself.

To be honest, I wasn’t even really sure that this would work. I didn’t even care. I was just so tired of feeling bad about food. It’s just food, for God’s sake, we need it to live and it should be one of life’s pleasures but all my emotions about it were negative: guilty about what I’d had, telling myself not to have something else, spending the whole day developing “strategies to cope” because I was eating out that night. Strategies. For a meal. I ask you. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to wipe the slate clean, concentrate on cooking good food and enjoying it without guilt, and then rethink how to lose weight. But the amazing thing is, I think it’s working already. My clothes are already looser and preliminary soundings from the scales and tape measure are positive.

The Non-Working Monkey and I have a challenge going to lose a stone by March so I need to get my orphanage-sized ass back to the gym pronto. I would like to lose about three stone, although anything will do and I don’t really care how long it takes to lose it altogether. Three stone would still leave me overweight on the BMI scale, but I don’t care because I don’t believe in the BMI, as I will explain in a future post.

Anyway. Coming up from me: delicious recipes; diet book reviews; whingeing; why BMI is useless; how low-carb diets make you crazy; why diets don’t always teach you how to eat properly.

And hopefully I’ll be losing weight literally whilst I’m posting. In fact, I’m assuming that just the fact of contributing to this blog will knock that first stone off, in the same way that subscribing to a gym boosts your metabolism even if you don’t go. FACT.