I can make you thin

This is a lie. Clearly I cannot make you thin. I don't know who you are or whether indeed you are fat. However, I have taken the plunge, in keeping with New Year's resolution number one for the past two? three? years, in purchasing a diet book.

Actually, that's a lie too. What I have actually bought is I Can Make You Thin book and hypnosis CD.

Now I'm not a sceptic per say, but I do have a healthy sense of the likely and the really quite unlikely. I am also extremely knowledgeable about what does actually make you thin. Only one thing - eat less and do more (well, it's hardly rocket science, is it). But that's actually quite hard really.

I know how diets work and more importantly how they don't work (being completely unattainable and impossible to follow, forcing you to start eating things you hate and stop eating everything you like). I know quite a lot of things about being healthy and indeed I do eat a lot of fruit, veg, brown rice and wholemeal bread. That's my problem, really, the eating A LOT of it.

I've toyed with the idea of weightwatchers before. I even photocopied some of the info sheets off a mate. And I don't dispute that for some people, it works. But for me, it's just far too prescriptive - keeping track of every single thing you eat, buying all kinds of silly things most of which will go rotten cos really, who eats that much purple sprouting broccoli in the three days before its past its sell by date, and generally spending a lot of time hungry.

I was bored and curious so I looked up the Paul McKenna thing on amazon. The advice fits in with what I know to be true (your body goes into starvation mode if you don't eat often enough, there's no point in forbidding yourself stuff you're going to crave) and more importantly, virtually every reviewer said they had lost weight and felt better. Also, it represented no extra strange shopping, a one-off payment of less than a tenner and something entertaining to write about.

So I bought it. Read the book last night - rules are as follows.
1.eat when you are hungry
2.eat what you want to eat not what you think you should
3.eat slowly and consciously enjoy every mouthful
4. when you think you are full, stop eating.

Sounds simple enough. Except, err, how can you tell whether you are really hungry and when you are just experiencing an unnecessary craving? Practice, I guess, but I do know one of my big problems is eating when I know I'm full. So I'm going to think really hard about that.

I also listened to the CD. Don't think I was enormously hypnotised, but a lot of the stuff made some sense - it's not like he was telling me that food would turn me into a heffalump and all I could eat was celery. No, it's more along the lines of "you want to taste lovely fresh, healthy food" and "imagine your thinner self" "fill yourself with positive thoughts".


Oh, and you're also not supposed to weigh yourself for at least two weeks. Not too much of a problem, I stopped weighing myself long ago when I had a hissy fit that all the scales were AT LEAST TWO STONE OUT. But I should get a beginning reading and am going spinning tomorrow, so I'll try and surreptitiously hop on the scales then.

Am supposed to listen to the old CD every day when I can, so I shall try to keep that up. Will keep you posted on my success.

Here's to a slim, healthy, me.