The Snowman Diet

I've finally found it - the fastest, simplest, biggest weight loss diet ever. It's called The Snowman Diet after our very own little Olaf who trialed the diet whilst wasting away on our balcony. Here is the chubby little fellow at 10:30 am on the day he came into our lives:

Six hours later on The Snowman Diet and he looked like this:

There were a few side effects such as the loss of an eye (his only good one in fact) and an elongated nose but his clothes were literally falling off him so it was all worth it. I swear to you that there has been no photoshopping on these pictures whatsoever. This is the genuine article, he really did drop about 30% of his body weight in only six hours!

We next weighed in after another couple of hours. So this next picture shows 8 hours on the diet. Notice his long, elegant, slimline, nose:

So far the diet had involved just sitting in the sun. No food was imbibed but, on the other hand, no exercise was necessary. This diet is especially suitable for those who abhor exercise.

Anyway, just as a plateau was seen to occur, as it does mid way through most weight loss programmes, we changed tactics. Our subject, Olaf, switched to sitting in torrential rain for the next few hours. Once again, for those worried about the exercise requirements - he didn't move an inch, we brought the weather to him. And only 3 hours later, 11 hours after starting the amazing Snowman Diet, Olaf looked like this:

At this point we, the professional dieters, thought that he'd gone far enough and should probably stop the diet. However, he wouldn't hear of it and insisted on staying out in the rain. Between you and me, I think a tinge of anorexic psyche had crept in. Whatever, the client is always right, so we went with it. Two hours later we had to concede that this is not a diet you want to try at home. Our subject looked like this and was ailing fast:

And here he is at half past midnight, after 14 hours on The Snowman Diet. After this distressing photo shoot, I went to bed:

Surprisingly there was still something left of him at 9.30 in the morning after 23 hours of dieting:

But by 10:30 am, exactly 24 hours after commencing the [now controversial] Snowman Diet, there was nothing left of him. R.I.P.:

There is a conspiracy theory that at the 23rd and a half hour, the pizza delivery guy smuggled in some garlic bread and spicy dip, thereby providing enough sustenance for the snowman to ride away with him on the back of his motorbike and go live at the pizza parlour, near the stone oven, where there is loads to eat, and it's nice and toasty. There's a flaw in this theory, however, or several.

No, we must sadly report that our subject did not survive The Snowman Diet. This means that 100% of snowmen who trialed The Snowman Diet did in fact die.

Verdict: This is not a diet to follow if you want to live as well as lose weight. For people who don't particularly care about living, as long as they are slim, The Snowman Diet could be the answer to your dreams.

Disclaimer: It's Purim next week, a Jewish festival in which we are encouraged to be very silly.

Why The Downton Diet Won't Work

I have just watched all five seasons of Downton Abbey in about two weeks - I usually made it to bed before 2 am (just) except for one memorable night morning when having watched a whole season in one sitting, I crawled under the covers at 4.30 am.

Being obsessed with food and diets, I came up with the brilliant idea of a Downton Abbey Diet. I googled Downton Diet to check that it'd not already been done and got 27,700,000 results in 0.45 seconds. Oh well.

The thought is an obvious one of course. Here are a family of stick thin women who never go to the gym, don't do pilates or yoga, do not jog (heaven forfend) and eat without ever considering calories, carbs, fat, or any other nutritional science. They eat three meals a day and afternoon tea with cake.

On the surface you could make a good argument for the Downton Diet (other than the catchy alliteration). I thought about it a lot and made a study of what and how they actually ate. Of course I'm only talking about the family upstairs. Downstairs they can eat whatever they want as they are engaged in physical labour for upwards of 14 hours a day and running between four storeys to do it. Upstairs, one writer has already pointed out that though they do walk a lot, on the other hand they don't even lift their own hairbrushes to do their hair.

It seemed to be done by eating meals of basic ingredients cooked from scratch, no foods with added chemicals or trans-fats, small portions, eating slowly, no seconds and no eating between meals. I noticed that the women drank a cup of tea at teatime but never took a slice of cake. Every meal was an occasion. Marielle Guiliano says to do that in French Women but she doesn't go so far as to recommend dressing for dinner every night.

I was all set to write the book me. So to extend my research I did a bit  more googling around the subject. Turns out things weren't all Downton Abbey in the 1900-1920s. In fact far from it. So here are the reasons The Downton Diet has been scrapped.

1. The Crawley women are all actresses in 2015, not real women from the 1920s. I know this will come as a shock (it did to me) but they are probably all working out for two hours a day and doing the Atkins/Juicing/5:2 diet.

2. I looked at pictures of real women from that era and whilst none of them is obese (no fast food, processed calorie laden snacks, or take-aways) they are all shapes and sizes. They don't look as skinny as the Downton ladies that's for sure. Some are less curvy and some more so but it looks like no one cared or even gave it a second thought. And in fact men preferred the curvier figure that suggested a life of ease rather than one of a starving skivvy.

3. After The London Season Edwardian society departed for the The Season Abroad, attending spas in Germany and Austria, or Switzerland. There they would be put on a strict regime of diet and exercise. After a month they would return home with their stomachs settled and their weight down. Some people repeated the spa experience again after The Christmas Season. They had to do this every year as, in fact, they lived a life of gluttony. All they did was eat and socialize. Pre-breakfast, sit-down breakfast, mid-morning snack, luncheon, afternoon tea, a fuller tea for when dinner would be late, a multi-course dinner, a late night supper, and nibbles placed in bedrooms in case they were peckish during the night.

4. The cook worked full time in the kitchen. She had no other duties. The raw ingredients were delivered so she didn't even have to go shopping. They do say you have to make the time for a diet but this arrangement might be a bit excessive for anyone with a life. Having said this, Sarah Ferguson did take a few months out to do a full-time diet in Switzerland with a private cook and diet coach. Although she came back ready to teach us all how we too can lose weight like her, we all understood that we may be able to lose weight but not 'like her.'

5. Even the raw basic foods we buy now are not as pure and basic as the food was 100 years ago. Our meat and dairy is full of antibiotics and hormones, our eggs might be too, our fruit and veg is genetically modified and sprayed with dangerous pesticides, much of it comes frozen and vacuum packed from half way around the world, and salt and sugar is added to anything you didn't pick/kill yourself. I'm exaggerating but only because the food industry is so large, powerful, convoluted, and secretive that no one really knows the truth.

So there you have it. The rise and fall of The Downton Diet. Anyone fancy some cabbage soup?

The Silliest, Most Unhelpful Response To Diets

As you know if you've been reading this blog recently, I'm doing Herbalife. With mixed results and another two weeks to go, I'm not making any final judgments until the end. You can read my Herbalife posts here.

However, I have to comment on what to me seems like the silliest response to anyone who announces they're on a diet. What overweight person hasn't heard it? As soon as you say, "not for me thanks I'm doing Atkins (or any of the other diet plan)," someone is going to respond with, "diets are all rubbish, all you need is to eat smaller amounts of healthy food." This is usually said by a slim person.

Whether it's Herbalife, The Cambridge Plan, Atkins, South Beach, Slimming World, Weight Watchers, Billy Connolly (it's not Billy Connolly - what's that woman's name who sells whole pre-packed meals and exercise dvds?), etc... I agree that all of them have a way of eating that you would not want to keep up for the rest of your life. Some are faddy and unhealthy for a long period, some too expensive, and some just too complicated to think about for more than a few months.

But how does it help to tell a fatty that all they need to do is eat smaller amounts of healthy food? Do you think they don't know that it wasn't a healthy diet that made them fat in the first place? Do you not think that if they were able to sustain a diet of smaller amounts of healthy food they would have been doing it for a while and not be fat?

It's not just a matter of willpower. I know fat Jewish women who, if you presented them with a sumptuous buffet and said, "by the way it's not kosher, everything's made with ham or cooked in lard," they would not touch a morsel. However hungry they were and however delicious the food looked, they would not even be tempted. It's not kosher so it's not for them any more than if you'd served a wonderfully presented dish of dog food. Yet they cannot restrain themselves from overeating in any other [kosher] setting.

Nor is it ignorance. Fat people often know more about nutrition than anyone due to years, lifetimes sometimes, of researching the solution to being overweight. They are not fat because they don't know that too many carbs result in too many kilos of fat. They don't eat those excess carbs because they think it's healthy. Fat people eat as compensation for something else in the way that an alcoholic or drug addict is tempted by their own particular poison when certain stress buttons are pushed.

If I'm upset, frustrated, angry (or even just a bit cross), nervous or agitated in any way, I find myself heading to the fridge for comfort. Under stress for long periods of time I've not had a heart attack, migraines, stomach problems, skin eruptions, a stroke, or a nervous breakdown. I've got fat.

The best antidote is to get into the right mindset and cure oneself by eating smaller amounts of healthy food. No Nobel prize for stating the obvious here. However, I bet a Nobel prize would be awarded to the billionaire (and they would become billionaires if they cracked this one) who discovered a sure way to get yourself into that mindset. I've done it a few times in my life and ended up slim and feeling great. In every instance I kept off the weight until I was sabotaged by extreme stress or upset. And every time it took me years to achieve the same mindset that enabled me to lose the weight in the first place. If I could only pinpoint the trigger I'd be writing the book as we speak.

In fact I did manage to lose a stone (14lbs) in the four weeks before I started a month of Hebalife. In my case it was desperation followed by ten days of a urine/kidney infection that left me without any appetite. Experience has taught me that a few weeks of eating smaller amounts of healthy food is not enough to keep me on the straight and narrow for the long haul.

I chose to do Herbalife because it would give me a strict programme to follow, without being complicated (involving too many choices or loads of preparation), for another month. Never mind how effective Herbalife is as a nutritional product, for me the success would come from knowing I'd paid quite a lot of money for it so I jolly well wasn't going to waste that, and from adding to my 14lbs of weight already lost as extra motivation to continue losing afterwards.

For those who cannot get themselves into the right mindset, diets like these (choose any of them, they all work if you stick to it) get you to the starting post without all the excess baggage. In the end if you want to stay slim and healthy, of course you must eat smaller amounts of healthy food. Nothing will take the place of changing your eating habits for life. But how much easier it is to do this from the starting line of being fit and healthy. How much easier it is to eat healthily without the added burdens of depression, low self esteem, ill health, restricted mobility and general sluggishness of being overweight.

So no we haven't been conned into paying for rubbish (rubbish is all the processed and fast food we might have been buying beforehand) or even wasting money on something we can do ourselves without paying for it (I clean my own home but I wouldn't ridicule those who employ a cleaner and don't do it themselves). Sometimes you need a little help to get started and you pay whatever takes. For me it's three weeks of guaranteed not falling off the diet wagon. And when I've reached my target weight, then it might be useful and helpful to remind me to eat smaller amounts of healthy food.

Listography: 5 Truths According To Women

With the wisdom of a certain age (beginning with F and rhyming with nifty) and the experience of being a woman, here are five things I've learnt and feel compelled to share (in no particular order but there's something for everyone). You can read more truths according to women at the Listography HQ, Kate Takes 5.

1. No matter how many times Trinny and Susannah say that figure hugging clothes are more flattering to the fuller figure, it is usually more comfortable to wear something floaty. And that's the secret. Comfort outweighs fashion every time. There is no point in looking like a magazine fashion plate if you have that pinched look of pain or discomfort on your face all day. Why would anyone choose a pair of shoes (or a long tight skirt) that effectively turns them into a cripple? Floaty, comfortable, glam, fabulous, happy and relaxed works best. Just remember FCGFHR - it stands for floaty, comfortable, etc... ;o)

2. No one has as charmed a life as you think. Everyone has their problems, hang-ups, regrets or worries. At the end of the day you want to bring your own problems home with you rather than someone else's problems.

3. That fantastic amazing diet that made your three best friends lose upwards of two stone each and you can't wait to get started (just as soon as you can get your hands on 14 grapefruits and a suitcase of cayenne pepper)... it's not the diet. It wasn't the diet that was fantastic and amazing, it was the women who stuck to it. Most diets work, none of them are magic. You just have to choose one and stick to it.

4. The way you spend your days is the way you live your life.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Look after the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves (I adapted that one myself).
You can't have your cake and eat it.

All of the above are true. Take it from someone who has recently turned 50 and is still making the same resolutions she made when she turned 30 (and every year since). I have to admit that it was a grey day when I finally realized that most worthwhile careers come with a lifetime of homework but get over it and just do it.

5. This one is a bit spiritual and out of character for me, but I do believe it to be true. If you are in tune with the world it will work for you. Coincidences and good luck are your own personal miracles and they happen if you are open to them. There is plenty of money and love to go round as long as you are in the loop. Let go of the need to control everything and the universe might just show you good things you never even thought of.

Note to publishers: I could probably expand this wisdom into a book with lots of made-up case studies, some photos of sunsets off Google Images and a large advance. Contact me privately.