Has your boyfriend ever put you on a diet or is it just me?
I don’t even mind that there’s an animal unhygienically placed next to these delicious hot dogs. I’ll still eat ‘em.
Two days ago, my other half announced he intended to start a diet, which followed the announcement that he’s away to climb some mountains this summer for a few weeks of man time. This would be no ordinary diet, it’s one that’s become curiously popular amongst men. Called the “5:2” diet, and based around intermittent fasting, it alludes to rapid consistent weight loss and maintenance, cutting the risk of some cancers, and making you live till a zillion. Better get that pension plan going, or maybe invest in a revolver and some suicide lessons for when you hit 200.
Anyway since he hates to shop, cook, or have to wait while food is prepared, yet full of zeal for this new plan, he cheekily suggested I join him because then ‘everything would be ready for him’. Also he doesn’t know anything about nutrition and kept asking me how many calories were in everything which made me want to stab myself in the eye. The only diet he’s ever done in his life involved being too lazy to buy/prepare food as a bachelor and having to wait till Pizza Hut delivery opened at 6pm.
I realised that unless I wanted to be pestered by continual questioning of a dietary nature, it would be the lazy woman’s way out to just join him and serve up some 5:2 goodness. I looked into it: 2 days a week, not necessarily consecutive ones, women get 500 calorie allowances a day and men, 600. The rest of the week you eat as you normally would.
Day one did not start out so bad. I had a tiny pot of Greek yoghurt for breakfast. I made some very plain spinach soup for lunch. I hit the gym, ran some intervals for half an hour then did some lifting and crunching. All on a tiny bowl of soup. Then I walked home because I felt so great. That evening I roast some mixed vegetables in herbs and balsamic vinegar and ate a bowl of that for dinner. 500 calories, wham. I was three pounds down the next morning but I’m presuming that was water loss or there was a tapeworm in my spinach (hi, little guy, welcome!!).
Day Two.
I didn’t feel too amazeballs when I awoke the next morning. I felt hot and cold and woozy. No yoghurt in the house either. I tackled the grocery store while light-headed and faint and picked up 5,000,000,000 pots of plain old boring yoghurt of which I ate precisely one.
Then I got this weird burst of energy and cleaned my whole house. I did so much laundry the machine broke and started pissing foamy water all over the floor. I too was running to the toilet with all the vegetables and water and nothing else in my system.
The afternoon was when hell started. I ate my lousy, tiny bowl of meagre gruel. I couldn’t concentrate on my studying, and retired to bed for three hours of ‘Dining to Date’ and ‘Jeremy Kyle’ because my synapses had stopped firing due to the caloric deficit, thus leaving me with the intellect of a fat woman with a mullet who lives in a trailer and is married to a ‘Skeeter’. Then I switched to the Food Network just to torture myself.
I did some errands later that afternoon in a haze of food-obsessed delirium. Someone had thoughtfully left a pile of chopped logs in their front garden, and for a second I considered peeling and eating them. A man walked by me eating an orange and it smelled to me like I imagine blood to a newborn vampire would. He’s lucky he got away with his life. So yeah, day 2: not great.
Conclusions:
I might just spread the days. One day on its own was fine. By day two my stomach thought my throat got cut. But in general, this is awesome. No, really. You lose mad weight, and you go straight back to your normal (for me, relatively healthy since I already love to cook) diet without restriction. So wahey for wine and burgers at the weekend and still looking hot in my skinny jeans. Oh yeah, and that bullshit about living a long time, yeah that too.
