39 and counting
By Vicki McLeod
This diet lark isn’t as easy as it looks you know – eat less exercise more, I thought, can’t be that tricky.
Having publicly declared I’m on a mission to not be the ‘fat chica in the pictures’ by the time I turn 40 it seemed like a good idea to start with roping in the support of Margaret Whittaker OBE (the founder and chairman of Slimming World, and the owner of Mood Beach restaurant). There’s nothing that Margaret doesn’t know about nutrition, weightloss, and slimming psyschology. So over a large café con leche for me (‘Darling, you’re going to have to stop drinking those – it’s all the hidden fats you know’) and a cup of tea for her (with leche desnatada) she explained the principles of Slimming World. I used to know about healthy eating, somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory, I’d just not actually put them into action in a very long time. So it’s low fat, low sugar, and plates groaning with veg all the way.
It’s got to be said though that diet friendly food in Spanish supermarkets is a bit thin on the ground. You can’t even rely on old faithful, low fat cottage cheese, being on the shelves. And what’s happened to yoghurt since I last looked? I know that Quark is a good option instead of adding creamy things into sauces, but it took me two weeks to realise that there were two different types of Quark – 20% fat, and 2% fat. Bet you can guess which one was in my basket. Doh.
So in hindsight it shouldn’t have been a surprise that in the first official ‘on a diet’ week, I only lost a lb, but it was quite disheartening. Back to the drawing board to figure out where I was going wrong. One of the culprits was staring me straight in the eye, my lovely (ex pro chef) husband admitted that the low fat cooking spray I had (designed so that you can grease a pan without having to use loads of oil) was ‘great stuff if you pour half a bottle in the pan’, and the other big one, oddly, was my job – many sedentary hours spent in front of a PC interspersed with regular attendance at parties and openings of envelopes where cava flows freely. With those two revelations established it’s got a bit easier (plus a quiet word with the wine and chocolate-loving devil who turns up on my shoulder waving Cadbury Twirls and glasses of cool vino Rosado when I am either tired, or bored) and I’m on my way.
12 lbs down. Only 36 to go. Gulp.
