Diet maths
The only tips midlifers will ever need
Hands up who can’t take any more of the diet talk? Not just the diet talk: the fitness talk, the metabolism boosting tips and the interviews with personal trainers, because it’s getting out of hand.
Usually at this time of year midlifers could reasonably expect to have had a bulletin from Elle “The Body” Macpherson; a celebrity downsizing surprise, eg James Corden losing a couple of stone; and maybe a new dietary fad such as No Raw After Four, or Only Eat off One Doll’s Plate. But this year there’s been a deluge of diet news. Most days are This Diet Will Change Your Life days. And, aside from the sheer volume of body reducing and improving information, the remarkable thing is how unattainable it all is.
Take those recent pictures of Halle Berry – at 54, still in Bond Girl shape, 18 years and two children later – no difference whatsoever in the way she looks now in a cut-out bikini from the way she looked on the beach in Die Another Day. Quite astonishing. So how does she do it? Quickly, we must know the secrets so that we can look like Halle Berry one day.
Halle swears by a ketogenic diet (no carbs, no sugar, nothing white), daily workouts with her personal trainer (not for sissies) and, if you’re still up for giving it a go, fasting until 3pm. Or, to put it another way, you too can have a Berry body if you eat one meal a day and spend the morning squatting with a resistance strap between your thighs.
Maybe you’re available for this sort of commitment, or maybe you’re no longer interested in the dietary tips of the rich and famous because it sounds like really hard work, and that’s just the parts they’re prepared to admit to. Do they tell us about the green-juice-only weekend
detoxes? never people’s would the matter programme, agreeing be of food, Do their to risk they because gastric to slipping or mention eat the other band? that small off (Please… you think that’s just portion control?)
need Once to stop and for kidding all people, ourselves we and eat healthily and sensibly. Don’t want to be presumptuous but if you want midlife diet tips you might as well follow these and kick all the others into the long grass.
Here goes – the only 10 tips you will ever need:
Don’t get plastered, because at 1am you will find yourself eating all the leftovers from supper, stuffed between two slabs of bread, and unless you have a big high carb breakfast the following morning, you’ll be no use to anyone. When people say alcohol is fattening, this is what they’re talking about.
That sourdough that you spent lockdown perfecting? Enough already. Also potatoes with everything. Berry is sound on that.
Put too much chilli in your food occasionally. You’ll struggle to eat more than a couple of mouthfuls.
children they’re cake Forget of and teatime. the – biscuits, or worst the your whole If – your leave parents, insist concept them on out into and the absent garden yourself. and deadhead. Go
Go easy on the cheese. Cheese can feel like the Scandi woman’s healthy alternative to creamy puddings but it is not the slimmers’ dessert, as you have come to believe; just say no to cheese on an average weekday.
Try on the dress that fitted you in March, admit it’s straining under the arms, abandon the fried halloumi starter. In fact, forget starters.
Drink water or alcohol, and forget cordials and fizzy drinks (unless Cawston, for a treat).
Never ever have seconds.
Say no to dips. Dips are the devil.
Have a clear line between Holiday Eating Rules and Real Life Rules. Especially now when, let’s face it, since lockdown our eating habits look a lot like our holiday eating habits, and still we haven’t taken the steps to rectify that.
The diets of the rich and famous sound like really hard work – and that’s just those they admit to