Diets and the battle of the sexes

Diets and the battle of the sexes.

 For the last three weeks I have been on a diet, although it has been a long time coming as it all started about the time of the riots. I was working remotely from France and bemoaning the fact that David Cameron was returning home to sort out the country, thus putting us remote workers back several years in the process, and Mrs LG, who is far more comfortable delivering rather than receiving personal information, and has no problem with wandering off on tangents, remarked that I should go on a diet.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you are fat”.

I rushed to the nearest mirror and discovered that it was true. I was not a dead ringer for the lithe energetic hoodies leaping from Currys with forty inch plasmas. I was the outraged Daily Mail reader; in pink shorts; bald, chubby and with a slight whiff of a middle-aged homosexual gone to seed.

This, in itself, did not force me into any change of habit (unless you count avoiding mirrors) but since then there has been an ever increasing stream of hints about my (over) weight, and then three weeks ago I returned home to find that my wife had bought me a book.

Mrs LG doesn’t buy books, because there’s already plenty of unread books scattered around our house, more that you could ever read, because I make a point of buying books, particularly books from small independent bookshops. And as I make a point of passing small independent bookshops, this is quite often. It’s a weakness of mine to buy books from people who love books, just as it is a weakness of mine to buy my meat from nice people dressed in large cotton aprons covered in large splatters of blood. Because just tastes nicer that way.

The book that she had bought me was The Atkins Diet

Now normally when a woman (and it’s always a woman) starts talking about diets (and Mrs LG has many friends who pop over and indulge each other upon this subject) my brain automatically shuts down all vital response mechanisms other than the occasional nod so that I can appear to still be listening while free to roam on autopilot, but, being a clever old sausage and knowing that I am a bear of very little brain she was quick to give me a brief synopsis before I slipped into my comatose state and that synopsis of 366 pages was two word, which were, No Carbs.

OK. I get that. And, well I’ve never quite understood pasta, noodles and rice anyway, so it sounded like a rule that even I could follow. And so I have been, and, in three weeks, I’ve lost a tone and a half; or perhaps a stone and a half.

So you’d think Mrs LG would be happy, but far from it. It appears that diets are supposed to be traumatic challenges that are agonised over and debated at length. They’re not supposed to work.

Mrs LG - along with all the other yummy mummies who shove their kids into class and then rush off (five past nine is gym time) - invests a lot of time, energy and money on a rigorous training programme. This seems to involve a variety of jaw-droppingly terrifying exercise programmes run by someone called Claus and then sitting around my kitchen complaining that they’ve only lost two pounds while shoving in another handful of quavers. So my weight loss has been greeted with distinctly muted enthusiasm by the ladies who lunch. As has my answer when asked how I did it, which is – by following the instructions.

Men, unlike women, don’t need to give themselves the odd “day off”. We either crash diet or fall of the wagon completely and keep rolling, lacking the long term commitment to something as boring as a diet. And the good thing about Atkins is that the effects are pretty quick. Possibly because eating becomes so dull that the laws of mathematics kick in and the less food you put in your mouth, the more weight you lose.

And it also helps if you’re pretty fat to start with.

But when she looks at me distastefully as I scoop a selected Sainsbury’s £2.99 seafood medley directly from the box into my mouth at breakfast time, I know it’s not the smell. It’s the fact that it’s working.

Because it only smells when I burp.