Two weeks ago I joined Paul McKenna’s private army.

Seriously, I’m vaguely concerned. I’ve been listening to this CD every night and there’s a point at which I always fall asleep. Not properly asleep, because I wake up when he tells me to wake up, but lookintomyeyesnotaroundtheeyesintothemintotheeyesyou’reunder sleep. I’m not being funny, but the man could be telling me to do anything and I’d have no idea. It is entirely possible that one day I and five million other McKennettes will suddenly all look up from our desks at the same time, rise to our feet and stagger out with our arms in front of us to do … what? I DO NOT KNOW.

It’s quite possible that I’ll be a bit thinner by the time that day comes around though. I’ve been doing this for two weeks and I’ve lost 9lb, which I consider to be pretty respectable. On the one hand, it is not quite as much as I lost on Weight Watchers or Atkins (1 stone each, y’all). But on the other hand, I haven’t been dieting. I’ve been eating very well. Better than I ever have, I think. I would say that the main differences between the way I eat now and the way I ate two weeks ago are as follows:

1. I eat quite slowly and stop to see if I’m still hungry. Paul McK says that fullness is felt just below the solar plexus. This is going to sound ridiculous but I had never really thought about that before. So when I eat, I eat very slowly, and I keep half an eye out for the feeling of fullness just there. When I start to feel full, I stop eating.

2. The order in which I eat has changed. I have always been a person who eats in groups – that is, I’ll eat all of the steak, then all of the salad, then all of the fries, and then my plate will be clear. Now that I know it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to eat everything I’ve got, I tend to have a bit of everything. I actually found myself thinking the other day that I’d better stop eating the chicken and have some of the salad before I got too full.

That’s right, bitches: Katy Newton gets too full for salad.

3. I don’t really crave sweets or chocolate. It doesn’t really occur to me to eat them. We have some posh chocolates at the moment, left over from Christmas, so we have a couple of those in the evening before we go to bed, but we’re talking 2 chocolates each. I’ve often said that I don’t naturally have a sweet tooth, and that turns out to be true. I just don’t think about my brother’s bars of chocolate, even though I reach past them to get coffee every day. I have started every day of my life since going onto solids with a cup of coffee and biscuits, but now I have coffee and toast and by the time I’ve finished I don’t really want any biscuits. I have discovered a thing for full-fat yogurt, but a tub of that eaten slowly is pretty much a meal in itself.

4. I’m much more inclined to eat salad and veg-based meals, with lots of fruit in between. This makes sense because I remember him talking about choosing fresh ingredients on the CD.

5. Food no longer talks to me. When people offer me biscuits in meetings I say no without thinking about it, and I’m not really that bothered about the biscuits, even if they’re sitting in front of me. Normally they would chatter to me in their little biscuity voices and I would either eat nineteen of them or stare vacantly at them with my mouth open, mumbling “Nnn-hnnn” when someone spoke to me and occasionally dabbing my mouth with a hanky.

6. I have downloaded some podcasts to help me get into running. I haven’t actually done any running as yet. But that’s considerably more proactive than I usually am. I’m thinking of doing my first run tomorrow. And they say that exercise is 50% mental. So I feel a lot healthier already.

So that’s how it’s going so far. I am currently approving of Paul McKenna, although I would not dance with a broom to please him.