Photo / Getty Images

Photo / Getty Images

I'm not drinking that," I told my husband, who was holding up a bottle of lime cordial. "It's artificial. Not going near it." I'm not sure what has happened to me since I went on holiday but I have become a walking diet inventor.

Last week, as you may well know, I started my cellphone diet, which will last a month and is going very well, even if it did take Vodafone six days to disconnect my phone. Thank you for asking.

This week I have started my "only eating foods with a maximum of five ingredients" regime. Which is also my "only eating foods with a maximum of five ingredients that are natural" regime.

This means when you're dying for a gin, lime and soda (part of my "only drinking wine on a Friday and Saturday" regime) and your husband arrives home with a low-calorie lime with artificial sweetener, the gin is off the menu.

And you're an unhappy diet dictator.

"I thought you'd prefer fewer calories," he said, disappointed that his thoughtfulness had been rejected.

He should have known better. We have just returned from a holiday in the United States, which he could successfully write up as "The great corn syrup hunt".

Having a passing interest in food activism, I was acutely aware that high-fructose corn syrup is put into just about every food an American eats.

This highly processed sweetener is being blamed for the nation's rising obesity levels. All because the Government, having subsidised farmers to grow lots of corn, needed to find a way to use it all, so it went into food.

Everything from mayonnaise to bread and so-called health foods such as cereals and yoghurt.

"Corn syrup!" I would announce, having taken the trouble to get my glasses out of my bag and read the fine print on whatever I was eating or had picked up in a supermarket. And if it wasn't corn syrup it was aspartame, an artificial sweetener I won't go near.

My husband should have known about this before he bought the offending lime cordial because while in the States I had bought a box of "natural", "wholegrain" and "sugar-free" high- fibre cereal in my effort to avoid yet another lethal dose of corn syrup, only to find it had aspartame listed on the label.

"Disgusting!" I announced. "Why does everything in America have to be sweet?"