‘AND ANOTHER THING’ .... CELIA WALDEN
TWith every spare minute spent logging their macronutrient levels on My Fitness Pal, they’ve lost all interest in whether Wenger should stay or go, spend their evenings secretly watching diet porn, and are more likely to have “calories in a bag of Twiglets” on their internet search histories than “Aston Martin V8 stats”.
They turn up to other people’s houses with cartons of non-dairy substitutes, keep family-sized packs of Extra spearmint gum on them at all times (“Paleo breath” can take out whole suburban hamlets in a single exhalation) and are able to winch the diet plans of male celebrities into the least relevant conversations. “On the subject of German coalition talks, did you know that Ryan Reynolds doesn’t eat carbs after 8pm? Although, of course, Hugh Grant swears by the Clean and Lean.” When I raised an eyebrow at a friend’s unaccountably glum husband on a recent dinner date, she mouthed back: “Having a fat day.”
Motivated by an enviably short and sharp bout of gastroenteritis, my husband has joined the Bro-diet Bore brigade. He’s lost a stone and gained a bitchy streak. “Did you see how much weight Alex had piled on?” he sniggered after the birthday party in question. “What do you mean you didn’t notice? How could anyone not notice?” And actually the sniping, along with my husband’s sudden enthusiasm for errand running (“got to get my step count up”), I rather enjoy. More patently competitive than us, men fight their diet wars out in the open, making jibes, boasts and bets and eschewing any of the duplicitousness and doubledealing of women. But I won’t lie, it’s hard to be married to a man who can look you in the eye and ask without a trace of irony: “Isn’t ‘good fat’ an oxymoron?”
Is it that men are supposed to be hedonists? Fly by the seat of their XXL pant free spiriters that women secretly like to be able to keep in check themselves? It seems more likely that after centuries of boring men witless with our own “does my bum look big in this?” neuroses, we’re finally realising what giant asses diets make of us all.
Bro-diet Bores
The she-men who have sacrificed sex appeal for smugness ‘They’re more likely to have “calories in a bag of Twiglets” on their internet search histories’