FACING TEMPTATION

At 6ft 3in and 114kg, chef Tom Kerridge has always been “a big lad”.

But he stretched that description when he left school and gave up playing rugby to work in a kitchen. In 2005, he opened the Hand and Flowers in Marlow, which became the UK’S only pub with two Michelin stars. He found release from the pressure of running a business in booze – he would start sessions with a pint of negroni – and eating cheese on toast at 2am before sleeping for four hours. By the time the TV show Great British Menu brought his gourmand’s pub grub to a wider audience, he was tipping the scales at 190kg. As he approached his 40th birthday – “halfway to death”, as a friend morbidly put it – he thought, “I might not make it to 50 if I keep going like this.”

Banning butter wasn’t a menu option for a chef known for his indulgent cuisine. Instead, Kerridge cut out carbohydrates, which he now describes as “dull flavour vehicles”. “Nobody goes out for a curry and says, ‘I had amazing pilau rice,’” he says. Refreshingly for a purveyor of cookbooks – he recently published Fresh Start, a practical guide to home cooking – Kerridge doesn’t claim that his regimen has any magical qualities. After all, most diets work, and all involve some form of sacrifice. But by focusing on what he could eat, not what he couldn’t, he made that sacrifice more palatable. “So many people give stuff up, then spend their lives thinking, ‘I wish I could have a burger,’ rather than, ‘I’m really enjoying this,’” he explains.

When he gave up smoking on the cusp of turning 30, Kerridge extinguished his cravings by sucking on “a pretend, nothing-in-my-hand cigarette”. A decade later, if he hankered after carbs, he’d visualise a potato with a face and refuse to be beaten. Instinctively, he was employing simple but effective “if-then” strategies, whereby we train ourselves to respond to cravings with a reflexive but nonsabotaging action: for example, if you feel a sugar craving, you eat an apple. “Such if-then plans, when they become automatic,