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February 22, 2008 at 12:15 pm My grandmother knew what she was talking aboutMy grandmother, as a good Victorian, was brought up in a household run with Mrs Beaton’s Book of Household Management as the bible. She always swore, but in a most refined way, that good food meant real food. The supply chain was shorter in those days. You never lived far away from the farms where the cattle grazed or the corn ripened. The milk was fresh from the cow, the butter freshly churned, the bread freshly baked using whole grains (they were lucky enough not to get caught up in the fashion for milling the corn into white flour with all the nutritional problems that caused), and the meat from animals hung after being freshly slaughtered. As one of the middle classes, she lived on a reasonably healthy diet of protein, bread, potatoes and other fresh vegetables. If she hadn’t had to decant her body into one of those boned corsets that made it impossible to breathe properly and redistributed her internal organs, her life would have been perfect. Although, looked at from another direction, forcing such a narrow waist was a first version of this new wrap-an-elastic-band-round-your-stomach-so-you-can’t-eat-as-much surgery we hear so much about these days. |
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January 30, 2008 at 10:25 am Back in the Stone Age when times were goodSo there we are, huddling round the dining table with our portions looking larger because they’re on small plates. We’ve also started to look out for sugar in our diet. And our will is strengthening because, so far, we haven’t really challenged ourselves. We’ve started to take our phentermine, Acomplia or Meridia. We’re slowly reducing our sugar intake. It’s the first plateau. Plateau? I hear you mutter. As you climb a hill, there’s steady effort to move your weight up the incline. But, once the routine is established, you fall into the rhythm and it grows easier. Well, it actually becomes so easy after a while that it’s like you’re walking on the flat again. And your body goes into a steady state, neither gaining nor losing weight. There was that initial slight loss when you started, but then your weight stabilized at the slightly lower level. |
