Get healthy... hit the cheese

Food for thought isn’t nearly as much fun as food for eating. You might have noticed if, like me, you are a gutbucket of the first order who just loves her grub. Having said that, there is a fine line to be trodden between hedonism and meanness and I have to admit that I have recently crossed that very line.

It’s all very well eating for Scotland and enjoying it but there comes a time when you have to draw that pesky old line at the concept that buying bigger and bigger frocks is the answer to an encroaching weight problem.

Since I now have more than half a (three-door) wardrobe into which I cannot fit – and it was not going to be long before that meant not being able to go in search of Narnia without a bit of a squeeze – that is when that dreaded four letter word looms, aptly larger and larger. No, not Food. Diet. I don’t actually believe in diets and, here, medical opinion and I converge, something that rarely happens in my universe, me being a bit of a stirrer with authority issues and all that.

Of course, the government (and that nice Jamie Oliver) keeps harping on that there is too much sugar in everything, mainly us.

I’ve often wondered if this incessant stating of the obvious transfers from the world of wellbeing into other spheres of life – the political arena itself, for instance.

Don’t fast

Beware, the Tory party may contain Tories. The Labour Party may contain elements of socialism (if they’re not careful) and traces of nationalism have been found in branches of the SNP. It’s a puzzle and no mistake.

But the docs are generally correct, I believe, when they say that you’re not going to get anywhere very fast if you fast, or afflict yourself with the kind of regime of inconspicuous consumption that means you can lose the weight but not keep it off for any length of time.

Since I reckon it is extremely unlikely at my time of life that I am going to find an alternative source of income that allows me to purchase a new set of clothes every season, the only alternative is to eat less, work more or burst.

I know which one of those three is most likely to work for me.

Any road up, I can report with a certain level of smugness that since the end of January, I have managed to shed a stone, thus looking marginally less like a shed.

This has been down, purely, to eating less. The problem with having a great cook in the house (clue: it’s not me) is that when he makes enough of any delicious dish to serve four, the chances are that the two of us will scoff the lot.

This does not lead to a level of svelte that comes anywhere near even a size 16 – and counting.

It doesn’t help that what you do socially, if you’re me, is eat.

And drink, of course, but that’s another thing.

We have cut down on that, too, although probably not even to anywhere near the recommended intake regarded as healthy and safe.

Dairy delights

But given our usual contributions to recycling, we are still in grave danger of being foreclosed upon by the bottle bank.

I haven’t had a piece of cheese since February and I am GAGGING for a slice of Stilton, a sliver of Black Bomber or a chunk out of Paddy’s Milestone.

What I want to know is, however, why did no one tell me till earlier this week that I should have been eating cheese, drinking red wine and munching on chocolate so as to cultivate lots of good bacteria in my much-tried gut to do the weight loss job for me?

One Professor Tim Spector, an academic whose textbooks I intend to devour as soon as they become available on Amazon, reckons that the average human tum contains four pounds of such bacteria and that cheese, chocolate, dairy products, nuts and red wine are what is needed to aid digestion.

And other things, of course, in this world of diversity where apparently regular cheese eaters have lower levels of heart disease and slimmer waists.

Than whom, I am not quite certain, but all in all, who knew?

Chocolate I can live without, except when I have to do without it.

There is a particular brand of triple chocolate biscuit made by a sainted company called Ringtons that delivers these goodies to your door, thus obviating even the notion of earning your calories by walking to the corner shop to buy them.

With moveable feasts in mind, Easter being early this year lured me into the ways of iniquity in the form of a large egg and mixed selection of Thorntons Continentals.

The Seville caramel ought not to be allowed.

It’s also an interesting sidelight on your lifestyle, however, to reach the age of 59 and have your mother still insist that the assistant in Thorntons pipes your name on to your chosen egg.

It’s probably a good thing she rarely comes with me to the off licence.

Handy for digestion, apparently: cheese is the way to go to cultivate lots of good bacteria, it is claimed. Helen tends to agree.