It's 10.39am and my word count is seven. Ten if you count the guff about my email at the bottom of the page. I'm hungry, I'm hungry. No, you're not. Think about something else. Anything. What will we have for dinner? There's some salmon in the fridge that should be used up. A quiche? An omelette, maybe. A salad with the last of the rocket. Enough already! Think about what we need to pack for camping. The portable clothes line, buckets, chips, lots of chips. Bags and bags. Salt and vinegar, ready salted … Lordy, lordy. How many words now? One hundred and two. Woohoo! Two-thirds done. Almost there. You can do it. You can do it. It's 11.01am. At 150 words I can take a break. At 150 words I'll put the kettle on and I'll check the fruit bowl to see what needs eating. I'll chuck a small handful of nuts in a frying pan with a little honey and sea salt. I'll get out the oats I left to soak in the fridge and chop the fruit and a couple of prunes over them. I'll spoon some Greek yoghurt on top and sprinkle on the nuts. You see, this will be my first meal of the day and I can't wait.
From my mid-teens until well into adulthood, I wasted a lot of time starving myself, stuffing myself, loathing myself, swinging between trim and tubby. Sometime in my early 30s, between my two babies, I decided I would not squander the rest of my life in this way. That I was getting off the lousy roller coaster of diets and self-hatred. There was no magic bullet, no easy answer, but it's been well over a decade now and my weight has hardly shifted. Now, I'm not suggesting you do as I do, but if you're desperate to get off that messed-up ride, maybe you can find something in my travels, in my habits, to spur you on.
First and foremost for me has been figuring out what I can live with and more importantly what I can live without. I'm not a snacker, but when I do eat I want to sit down to a delicious and decent feed. Reading about the benefits of intermittent fasting I realised I'm perfectly happy on two meals a day, and while I could never skip dinner I'm happy to forgo breakfast. Many nutritionists will tell you to eat most in the morning and least at night, but I'm not interested in food when I get up. And I need a carrot, not a stick, at day's end to look forward to, to keep me going. For many of my peers wine is their weakness. I like wine, however, given the choice between spending my daily calories on alcohol or sugar, for me sugar always wins out. So often I won't join my husband in a chardonnay with dinner, because I'd rather have a Mallowpuff with a cup of tea on the couch once the kids are finally in bed.
I love food. Vast chunks of my life are dedicated to anticipating it, making it, eating it. I am instinctively greedy. Most weight-loss regimes involve constant moderation, maybe some half-arsed treat if you're lucky. (Half a cup of sorbet, I mean whoop-de-doo!) With nothing to look forward to, dieting used to make me want to not get out of bed in the morning. I have learned to eat far less most of the time, so that some of the time I can go to town to no great effect. And now I am no longer scared of the scales, I weigh myself regularly and can rein myself in before I've gone too far.
I exercise a lot but whereas once it was to lose weight, now it's for the pleasure of being fit and strong. I never use a work-out as an invitation to eat; it's surprisingly difficult to burn off the calories in just one slice of bread or an apple.
