I am on a new diet. It’s based on really scientific principles blah di blah… yawn. Blood tests blah, balancing of hormones, blah blah blah blah blah, serotonin, yeah, heard that one, insulin, got it, human growth hormone, blah blah blah, 5kg in one month – not bad at all! Ok it works, but I get to eat next to nothing. Supposedly, I am told, it is worked out to my body’s exact nutritional needs and absolutely no more. Without the extra ten kilograms that I am trying to ditch, I am not a very big person, so my minimum nutritional needs are quite small,so the diet supervisor (yes, I paid a lot for this diet) can’t understand why I am always hungry.
That’s easy to understand. My nutritional needs and my appetite got divorced a long time ago and are now living happy and fulfilled lives on separate continents and haven’t spoken for years. I eat the same, if not more, than my 6 foot 5 inches, 90kg husband. My goal weight and actual height are two thirds of his, so logic dictates that I should normally eat two thirds of what he does and half of that if I am trying to diet. That fits the logic on the diet sheet but doesn’t explain why I have the appetite of a Tour de France rider at the end of a mountain stage. (Did you know they get to eat 7000 calories a day – that is as much pasta and potatoes as you want and then some more! They struggle to eat enough. If it wasn’t for the 6 hours on a cruel little saddle it would be a great job.)
I put it all down to early childhood conditioning, my Dad owned a restaurant, so I was trained to eat high level food, in catering quantities from toddlerhood. I could polish off a junior T-bone at the age of 7 and knew my prawns from my langoustines before I was ten. My mother is also Greek. The exact English translation of the Greek words for “I love you” are actually, “Have some more baklava, I made it especially for you with extra butter!”. My husband on the other hand grew up in a WASP household that yearned back to the good old days of post World War II rationing with nostalgia. Anything excessive or lavish was, and is, considered to be in slightly poor taste. My father on the other hand starved during the war. No amount of food will ever be enough. I wonder if we genetically inherit our parent’s learnt fears. Mine would be, ” Eat everything you can, because there may never be anymore,” and my husband’s would be, “Don’t eat everything, because there may never be anymore.”
The bottom line is that in order to be thin, you have to eat very little, halve it, and then only eat some of that. Supermodels know this, anorexics know this, so do concentration camp victims and ballet dancers. The rest of us waste a lot of time on GI, low fat, fat free, high protein, low carb, no carb, good fats, bad fats, calories, water and getting enough sleep at night. There is very little that I don’t know about nutrition. All of it is conflicting, contradicting and medically contra-indicated and has not helped me one little bit. Do you know what Angela Malan, prima ballerina for the South African Ballet Theatre eats? According to an interview in Shape magazine, she has a really good breakfast because she has to set herself up properly for 6 hours of dancing and teaching and coaching every day and a possible performance at night. She has, wait for it…… either a bowl of bran cereal or (not and) a slice of rye toast with a sliced banana on top. She is too busy for lunch and never eats before a performance. She does allow herself some Energade on performance nights when rehydrating between acts. To summarise: for a full day in the studio and a marathon on stage at night she shovels down a single bowl of bran cereal.
I don’t even have the capacity to burn off what I eat. I have an extremely low boredom threshold for excercise. I just can’t find the motivation to work hard enough to get strong enough to be fit enough to burn enough calories. As a result I have done just about everything there is to do in a gym and am now on my last option, which is swimming. I was a really poor swimmer and had never voluntarily got into water since early high school, and even that was under duress. When I was 28 my mother admitted to me that I had nearly drowned when I was 2, and had to be fished feet first out of a fish pond at a lunch party. I really could have done with this excuse earlier, it would have saved me much humiliation.
So at 39 I discover that the lady that teaches my very small daughters to swim also does “fitness training for adults”. I sign up for swimming lessons at the gym and promptly get thrown into the shallow end of the overheated baby pool to learn how swim from scratch. Yeah, it was that bad. For many weeks I did the same exercises in the pool as my three year old. Now I am pleased to say I am doing the same drills as the 12 year olds in the BIG pool.
My efforts to get other people to swim with me have been in vain. All are too self conscious about their bodies to appear in a swimming costume in front of the bank of treadmills. My attitude is, ” If you didn’t want to see cellulite you shouldn’t have been looking.” I have also spent long enough on those treadmills to know that the bored and wandering eye, with 7 minutes to go on the clock, is going to linger on the firm buttocks sashaying past and not on the less pleasing thighs straining away on the neighbouring equipment. Anyway, one is anonymous in the water. Goggles and a cap face down in the water cannot be recognised and if you make the right amount of splash the exact shape of your bum cannot be determined, even from the gallery above. I spend a lot of effort on style and grace in the water, concentrating on glide and rhythm, rather than on speed and stamina so as not to appear to be thrashing helplessly in the water . As a result, although I was promised that the weight would fall off, I have lost absolutely none from swimming. On the contrary, swimming has pushed the envelope of my already excellent appetite to new and frightening depths. I can barely get home without chewing on my towel.
I am not going to tell you which diet it is that I am on. If you are reading my blog I am very grateful to you and would not inflict the torture of slivers of lean protein and carefully regulated vegetables on to you. Unlike other diets, which allow you to gorge on vegetables, only certain fruits and veggies are prescibed on this one. They are supposedly selected to increase serotonin levels, which will make you feel better about the 95 grams of steamed fish you are about to consume. ( I thought that chocolate was a good source of serotonin.) Broccoli is not allowed on this diet, now that made me feel better already! Any diet works if you stick to it, but the mind and soul have to be ready for the abuse. I struggled for the full three months of my sabbatical before I got it together to call the dietician. I remember telling the psychologist that dieting was going to be too hard for me to do because some days eating was the only pleasure I got, and if I couldn’t do that, then life was too grim to bear. Even now, although I can see that the diet is working, I still cheat if I am feeling bored, lonely, frustrated, cross or tired. Pleasure is an antidote for all of these things and what could be more fun than eating?
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