I take stock.

I started posting on here as something of a diet veteran. I hadn’t done anything too stupid - no cabbage soup diets, no food combining - but I had lost a couple of stone on low-carb diets, which I promptly put back on plus more, and considerably more on Weight Watchers, of which I promptly put back on 75% - making me a diet triumph, because 90% of dieters put the whole lot back on within a year plus ten per cent, or something. But by the time Anna and NWM and Wendy and I were putting this blog together, I had decided: no more counting, no more cutting out food groups. I was going to eat what I wanted, cook all of my food myself and exercise more.

I didn’t manage the exercising - I hadn’t organised myself properly, about which I will post another time. But I did manage to eat intuitively between Christmas 2007 and February 2008. There were no forbidden foods. The rules were simple: I ate whatever I wanted for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and ate until I was satisfied. I confined myself to fruit, vegetables or nuts in between meals. And I cooked everything I ate myself (apart from chicken beyti kebabs from the local Turkish, which are my absolute favouritest most favourite food ever). So if I wanted fried fish and chips that was fine - as long as I sliced the potatoes and fried the fish myself. The rationale was that if I wanted it badly enough I’d make it, and if I didn’t want it badly enough to take the time to make it, then I was probably more looking for convenience than fishy chippy happiness and should be rethinking my choice.

There is actually a name for this approach. It’s called Health At Every Size (HAES). HAES is about focussing on improving health and quality of life by eating delicious healthy food and taking joy in physical activity, leaving your body to find its natural set point in terms of weight rather than aiming for a particular number on the scales. Weight loss might be a natural side effect of HAES but it is not the aim. It worked for me in the month or so that I did it. I can honestly say that I have never felt better. My skin was clear, my hair shone, I slept well, and - and this is the really big thing - I did not think about food. I made decisions about what to eat, but they were simple: I thought about what I felt like and I made it for myself. I did not obsess about food. I did not worry about it at all. Nor did I eat everything in sight, as some might expect a newly released dieter to do. Once I gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted, I found that the urge to eat like a horse just disappeared.

Take that Sunday evening urge for a pizza. If I’m dieting, eating takeaway pizza is OFF TRACK. Weight Watchers will tell you that if you handle your points properly you can make allowances for a takeaway pizza, but people I am telling you from experience: it takes a lot of work to get yourself enough points for even a slice or two of takeaway pizza. You have to exercise to gain Bonus Points and you have to cut points back from other days, and when you’re already on the equivalent of 1500 calories a day that is no easy thing to do. Pizza is NAUGHTY. You tell yourself it’s ok because you will get BACK ON TRACK the next day. But because Weight Watchers is a lifestyle, not a diet - or so they tell us - you don’t know when you’ll be able to have a pizza again, do you? And so you scoff it down, all of it, whether you want it or not, and then you go to bed overstuffed, full of pizza and self-loathing.

But if I’m eating intuitively? I think to myself, “What do I want?” and if the answer is pizza, I make it (ideally) or I order it if I’m feeling lazy, because it’s just another food. I eat it at a leisurely pace; I stop between bites to talk with whoever I’m eating with; I savour every mouthful, and I stop when I’m full. Chances are there’s at least half the pizza left; it goes in the fridge so that someone (maybe me, maybe someone else) can have it for lunch or supper the next day. It’s no big deal. It’s just supper.

So. Despite the fact that I felt good about myself and my eating, I wasn’t seeing much in terms of weight loss. That could be because I hadn’t given HAES long enough or got the exercise thing going, or just because for better or for worse this is me, here and now. But my newly found confidence in my eating habits made me more optimistic about dieting, bizarrely. I still had good memories of Weight Watchers. I decided that I was going to count again on 9th February. I had this idea that I could count points AND eat intuitively. I posted about it here. And I’ve been counting points for two weeks.

I’m not going to say that WW didn’t have results this time too. It did. I lost 4lb last week and I was very pleased about it. But - I was also miserable. Miserable as fuck. I’m sorry, but I just was. I can’t eat sensibly and count. They don’t work together. Perhaps part of this is the hours that I work, which are not regular. Some days I can eat breakfast at 7am, lunch at 1pm and supper at 7pm, and that’s good. But other days I might grab breakfast at 5am, and lunch at 3pm, and not eat supper until 9 or 10pm. When you’re eating over 15 very stressful, high-energy hours, the points approach doesn’t cut it. I might want a big lunch, but then I have to think: hang on, when am I going to eat supper? And what am I going to want for supper?

And what about snacks? Nuts and dried fruit, which are healthy by anyone’s standards and a great source of energy in the middle of a tough day, have relatively high Weight Watchers points values, so if I eat a handful of those I have to deduct more food from my lunch and my supper. You can’t just choose what you want, even if it’s healthy; you constantly have to try and second-guess what you might want to eat later, because you can bet that if you leave yourself with no points for later you’ll be starving.

Over the last fortnight of counting, I’ve been constantly doing maths in my head. I stood at the Shapers shelf in Boots for twenty minutes at lunchtime on Thursday holding a diet chicken wrap in one hand and a diet honey and mustard chicken pasta salad in the other. Have you any idea how disgusting packaged diet food tastes after six weeks of home cooking? I couldn’t decide between them, not because I was spoilt for choice, but because I knew that:

(a) the only reason they were low calorie was because they had nothing of nutritional value in them;

(b) whichever one I chose would taste disgustingly synthetic;

(c) I would be starving again by 4pm.

On Friday I was desperate for a handful of cashew nuts and/or a banana and/or some dried apricots mid-afternoon. Instead of having them, I agonised internally for fifteen minutes. I scolded myself for having two biscuits with my coffee in the morning. I angsted silently about whether I should go ahead and have the apricots even though it would leave me with virtually nothing for supper. In the end I told myself, sternly, that I had chosen to have two biscuits with my coffee. Now I would have to take the consequences of that decision. There would be no apricots. I would have to Wait Like An Adult. And so, at 9pm when I was finally able to have some supper, I picked up a pizza because I was so hungry that I’d lost the ability to make any sort of rational choice. And because having the pizza meant going OFF TRACK I ate all of it, quickly, without enjoying it. I had to, you see, because Weight Watchers is for life, and that meant that the next day I would have to be ON TRACK and who could tell when I’d see a pizza again?

When I compared what I had been eating when I wasn’t counting to what I was eating when I did count, I was rather surprised to see that I had actually been eating less food, of better quality, when I wasn’t counting. When I was counting, I tended to eat a mixture of packaged diet food and serious takeaway.

So. I’m listening to my body and what it is telling me - loud and clear - is that counting is not the answer for me anymore. I’m glad I tried it, but it doesn’t work for me now. It’s only been a fortnight, but enough is enough. I can’t do this long term. Hell - I can’t do this for another week. I am indebted to Weight Watchers from the first time round, because it taught me some good habits that I haven’t lost: eating lots of vegetables was the main one. But I’ve gone from eating good, healthy, nutritious home-cooked food to a mixture of low-quality processed diet rubbish and high-fat takeaways. And I am tired, and cranky, and constantly obsessing about what I have eaten, what I am eating and what I’m going to eat.

I’m not saying it isn’t the answer for anyone - the other Porketeers are going great guns. Wendy and NWM are counting and kicking ass. Anna is the queen of gym and home cooking. I know plenty of other people who have got their weight off and kept it off. Hurrah homegirls! And perhaps the truth is not so much that I can’t diet, as that I won’t diet. But I’m looking at this realistically. I know that if I keep trying to do this I’m only going to end up swinging wildly between forcing down diet food and eating my own weight in deep-fried takeaway lard. Sooner or later I will be fatter than I am now, and I think we can all agree that however fat you are you are still healthier if you can comfortably maintain your current weight than if you put another five stone on whilst you’re trying to take it off.

I’m going to go back to my original plan, and I’m going to do more exercise. I’ll try to approach every meal with a view to making it healthy without making it inedibly tasteless and fat-free. I’ll eat slowly and stop when I’m full. I won’t be shovelling cake into my face or mainlining chocolate, because I rarely want to do either of those things if I’m not fetishising them by cutting them out altogether - but if I listen to my body and my body says “CAKE” or “CHOCOLATE” then a piece of cake or a bar of chocolate is what it shall get - and I don’t mean a crappy diet-cake or a Shapers chocolate chip cereal bar, either.

I hope that this will lead to some weight loss, because I would still be happier at least a couple of stone lighter than I am now. That’s not about numbers on the scale; it’s about my sense of where I feel physically comfortable. But if I don’t get there, I don’t get there. What I think I’ve worked out is that I can live with that. I know that this will make me healthier even if it doesn’t make me thinner. I also know that I look better and like myself more when I am eating sensibly and exercising than when I am pigging out OR when I am driving myself nuts with diet food. We shall see.