So you think you might be fat.

But how do you know?

This is not a stupid question. I can only talk about the women I know, but it seems to me that nothing makes women, as a group, more miserable than WEIGHT - regardless of whether they’re 7 stone or 17 stone. They all think they’re fat. Even if they have been told by a doctor that they aren’t fat, even if they are comfortably within what is said to be the “healthy range” for their height, they all seem to think that they could do with losing half a stone.

But why? How do you know you’re fat? Because you don’t like what you see in the mirror? Because your clothes are getting tight? Because your boyfriend’s started making pointed comments about going to the gym? Did your mother ask if you needed that second slice of cake? Did your father take you aside and ask if you wanted to end up like your mother? Did you suddenly realise that the reason 1994 was the happiest year of your life was that you’d managed to get down to 10 stone? Did you divide your weight in pounds by your height in inches squared and realise that the chart says you’re overweight? Is your waist-hip ratio too high? Or perhaps you’ve just been to your doctor hoping for antibiotics for your cough and came out with an appointment with the surgery nutritionist instead?

Make this. Really Really Amazingly Tasty Grilled Chicken. Really. Make it.

You know what I really hate? I hate those stupid fad diets where some lollypop-headed wizened strip of beef jerky masquerading as a health professional tries to persuade you that you can learn to eat nothing but lean meat poached in water and steamed vegetables forever. I hate that. I HATE it. Eating well should be about eating well in every sense. If you’re dieting, it’s really important that you eat healthy, satisfying, tasty food that fills you up and doesn’t leave you feeling like, well, a strip of beef jerky living on adzuki beans and lean meat poached in water.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot to be said for lean meat and veggies. I don’t believe in cutting out carbs altogether because it is stupid and bad for you, but for some reason I’ve fallen into the habit of eating carbs at breakfast and lunch and keeping my suppers relatively carb-free. Or rather, potato or bread or rice. Starchy carbs, I suppose. Except veggies are carbs and don’t they have starch in them? WHATEVER LOOK I AM NOT A FOOD SCIENTIST OKAY.

Anyway, that works for me. But honestly. You do not have to spend the rest of your life eating chicken poached in water. You are allowed to eat meat that tastes good and it’s really easy. So let us tiptoe behind the “read more” tag, Dear Reader, and I shall whisper the recipe in your ear.

I decide to start counting again.

Many many years ago I passed the entrance exam to a Rather Good Public School and got a place there. I got permanently excluded three years later, so don’t be getting too excited. And I was really miserable there anyway. No no, stay with me, there’s a point to this. It was a bit of a coup for my junior school, which was a middling state school, and naturally as soon as I passed my head swelled to fourteen times its normal size and I wandered about looking smug and generally acting like an unbearable twat.

But then my mother, who is Very Wise, took me aside and said: “Don’t be thinking that you can stop working now. You might have been top of the class at junior school, but now you’re going to a school where everyone was top of the class at junior school.”

“This,” she concluded, “is where you have to really start working.”

Lunch: the dieter’s nemesis

Lunch is tricky if you work away from home. It’s a difficult meal anyway, to be honest - I never really know what to have or how much to have. Where I work, there are more soup bars, sushi bars, noodle bars, sandwich places and sit-down cafes than you can shake a stick at, but the portions are huge and excess fat lurks everywhere. NEVER, for example, let the girl behind the cafe counter put butter on your baked potato for you, unless you want to spend your lunch hour wading knee-deep in said butter to find your potato.

(Does anyone else find the thought of wading knee-deep in melted butter profoundly sexually arousing?)

(What? I like butter.)

Takeaway sandwiches are always bigger than they need to be, the bread/filling ratio is always high (or low? Whatever. More bread than filling, that’s what I mean) and generally bulked out with mayonnaise or cheap spread. Plus, they cost a fortune. A sandwich, a drink, a yogurt and a couple of pieces of fruit will set you back between £4.50 and £8.

No wonder we’re always hungry. And strapped for cash.

I appreciate that the whole browniegate thing earlier in the week has somewhat dented my credibility as a healthy eater. But I am about to redeem myself. Follow me past the “read more” tag, my friends, for a couple of simple, tasty, filling recipes that are both reasonably priced and nicer than anything you could buy.

Home-made brownies are not diet food.

If you’ve looked at my food diary for today, you’ll have noticed that I had 3 home-made peanut butter brownie squares for lunch AND 2 for my afternoon snack.

You will probably be thinking that I am a bit of a fuckwit. It’s hard to disagree, really. I could say that they are made with peanut butter and not chocolate, so have more protein in them than normal brownies, and that would be true, but it is also not the point. Somewhat more to the point is the fact that each brownie is barely 1 inch square, and therefore it wasn’t quite as much of a binge as some of you might be thinking.

Nonetheless, this wasn’t my best day on the nutrition front. It was, however, a good example of how easy it is to make stupid choices when you don’t plan ahead. The long and short of it is this: I made peanut butter brownies because it was a special occasion for someone at work and the peanut butter brownies make people very happy. I took them into work in a big cake tin and I confidently expected that they would all be gone by today. But this morning I left the house in a hurry and didn’t make myself lunch. When I got to work there were about fifteen brownies left. I had had a pretty filling breakfast and I didn’t feel like having a brownie, so I ignored them. As for lunch, I planned to go out and get some sushi later. Unfortunately, of course, I suddenly became very busy and couldn’t leave my desk to get lunch until about 4pm, which is waaaaay past the end of the lunch window in Central London. No lunch for YOU, sucker.

I was STARVING. I wanted lunch. Proper lunch. Carbs and protein and stuff. But there was no lunch. There was no food. There was, in short, nowhere to turn. Except, of course, towards the large tin of sweet, unusually proteinacious brownies on my desk.

Kitchen Despatches: Ice Cream for the Pleasingly Plumper

For years I filed ice cream under “things that are not sufficiently nicer when made at home to justify the bother of making them at home instead of buying them from the supermarket”.

(I often feel that I should have taken my feel for a short, sharp, punchy tagline to the cut-and-thrust world of advertising, but it is too late now.)

(Anyway.)

The problem with buying ice cream is that you never quite know what you’re getting. Cheap ice cream - the fluorescent stuff in the gigantic tubs - often doesn’t have any dairy in it at all; that’s cold churned vegetable fat you’re eating. Mmmm hmmm. And posh ice cream like Ben & Jerry’s or Haagen-Dasz is full of cream, £4 for 500ml and can you ever find a shop that stocks the coffee flavour? No you bloody can’t.

And that’s if you aren’t watching your weight. If you ARE watching your weight, forget it. You can’t have any ice cream, thunderthighs. YOU, my friend, will be directed straight to the murky realm of the “frozen dessert”. Ice lolly? WeightWatchers Frozen Desserts? Skinny Cow? Tofutti? They’ll do in a pinch, but let’s face it: they are all part of the huge anti-fatty conspiracy, a product of the giant collective mind that not-so-secretly believes that fat people MUST NOT enjoy their food.

The amazing thing is that a lot of the members of the anti-fatty conspiracy are fat themselves. And also that it is demonstrably RUBBISH. We can lose weight on delicious, healthy food that doesn’t make us feel like slitting our wrists when we look down at our plates.

Now follow me into the kitchen. Because I’m about to show you how to make 1.5 pints of ice cream that can compete with Ben & Jerrys and Haagen-Dasz at their best, but - divided into 6 servings - comes out at about 3.5 Weight Watchers points per serving (about 3 scoops), as compared to 3.5 points per scoop of Haagen Dasz.

In Praise of Bread

Bread is pretty taboo in dieting circles.

You can’t have bread on the Atkins diet. You can’t really have bread on the low GI diet, although some breads are less bad for you than others. You can have bread on the Weight Watchers Points Plan, because you can have anything you like on that plan, but two slices of shop-bought bread are at least 3 points, which is quite a lot if you’re on 18 points a day, which fortunately I never was because I would have wasted away. However, if you are following Weight Watchers Core, you have to use some of your weekly Points for bread, even though you could substitute it for unlimited brown rice or oats or Ryvita or any number of other grain-based products that you wouldn’t have to Point at all.

That doesn’t make sense. Does that make sense? I don’t think that makes sense.

Poor, neglected bread. Everyone seems to hate it. If they aren’t counting carbs, they’ve got an allergy; if they haven’t got an allergy they’ve got an intolerance. You’d think the bread basket was full of poison, the way people recoil from it as it passes them.

Until recently, I never ate bread; it was a leftover from my hazy, hallucinogenic days on the Atkins diet, of which more later. The reason was that I didn’t really like it very much. What I didn’t like about it was:

(a) It didn’t really taste of anything. Wholemeal was better than white, but both were pretty bland; and

(b) It didn’t really seem to have much in it. Even the posh baked-in-store stoneground multigrain seeded loaves only ever seemed to contain one lonely little pumpkin seed, cowering miserably in a sea of unadulterated flour. And even the most robust, sturdy, authentically crusty rustic loaf disintegrated upon toasting, especially if you buttered it whilst it was still hot.

All in all, I’d eat two slices of toast, and for ten seconds I’d feel deliciously full. And then suddenly - *pop* - and I was starving again, and battling the urge to just toast, butter and devour every slice in the bag.

It was like crack, except, well, no, okay. I’m not sufficiently thick to think that toast is anything like crack. Sorry, crack addicts, for trivialising your situation. I won’t do it again. Jesus, it was just a figure of speech. Whatever. Anyway, what I mean is that I realised that I couldn’t eat bread without either immediately eating too much bread, or eating too much of something else later because I was still hungry. And not because it was particularly nice to eat, either. So I stopped eating it at all.

Funnily enough, much though I love baking, I’ve never baked my own bread. It looks like too much effort and I’d always filed it under “things that are not sufficiently more nice when made at home to justify the effort of making them”. So I didn’t discover the difference between home made bread and shop bread until I got a bread maker, just after Christmas. Yes, it’s a Russell Hobbs Bread Man, actually, and it is Miraculous. What you do, right, is you put your ingredients in, just sort of on top of each other in the tin, and then you put the tin in the breadmaker and you programme it and the next morning you wake up with the scent of fresh bread wafting deliciously past you.

And it’s amazing. The bread is amazing. I don’t think it’s quite as good as hand-kneaded bread, probably, but it is a real revelation after Tesco’s Value White Bread. It is delicious and crusty and warm. It is robust enough to withstand the most immediate post-toasting buttering. And - it feeds you. Especially if you add oatmeal or seeds or fruit or wholegrain flour. One slice of bread from the breadmaker for breakfast, with a low-fat natural yogurt and a couple of pieces of fruit, keeps me going until lunchtime. Two slices left me uncomfortably stuffed.

Now, I’m sure that there are at least a couple of people out there thinking “Well actually Katy one slice of shop bought bread leaves ME feeling stuffed to the HILT actually and that’s WITHOUT butter, you great big porketeer” and to those people I say, through gritted teeth, that I am VERY FUCKING HAPPY FOR YOU. Seriously. I wish you nothing but good things and certainly no bad things. Really. But for me the bread maker was a revelation. It was, in fact, the colossal difference between the bread from the breadmaker and the bread from shops that got me thinking about the quality of home made food versus ready-prepared food, and whether I should start cooking more from scratch and worrying less about how much I ate. It made me realise that if the food you eat is really, really good and full of good things, you don’t need to eat as much of it.

And now I give you a recipe.

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.