Chocolate and Beyond

Festive fun and now for 2007 without a diet...

I have neglected my site over the festive period, I have to admit, and as I'm away on holiday tomorrow for a week I thought I'd better just post a quickie to show I'm still alive and eating. Eating a lot, as it happens.

I'm not sure I have been altogether as mindful of my eating over the last week or so as I intended to be, and I have most definitely been stuffing chocolates and peanuts into my mouth when I'm not hungry for them. As well as glugging on copious amounts of Bailey's and other such drinks of creamy gorgeousness.

Christmas is coming and the goose is bound to get fat...or is she?

Well, here we are again closing in on Christmas and no doubt people are already planning their new year diet. It is the first Yuletide, probably for about 12 years, that I won't have that option - if I am to keep up all the good work that I've done with this diet-ditching malarkey.

I kind of feel slightly panicked. What will I do if I can't help but overeat over the festive season? In the back of my mind though, I am considering one probability.

French food never tasted so good (not being on a diet)

There has been a gap in my postings, because I've been away. I've just had a wonderful press trip to Club Med La Plagne 2100, in the French Alps (the picture is the view from my bedroom window!), and there has been more delicious runny cheese available than I had deemed imaginable.

Much to my delight, I haven't returned from my trip feeling all cheesed out (or cheesed off that I couldn't fit into a single item of clothing, for that matter). Yet before I went away (strangely) I was having a down patch.

Time for tea? Don't wait for dinner then.

Whether on a diet or off a diet, my hungriest part of the day used to be around 4-5pm, but I was conditioned to think that if I ate my 'dinner' before 6.30pm, then somehow I was doing something wrong.

So I'd munch on fillers until I felt it was time to cook the evening meal, and then eat it regardless of whether or not I was hungry. Which isn't good when it comes to weight maintenance, of course.

But this is no longer the case.

Substituting real food with meal replacements doesn't make sense

Where did it come from, this desire to guzzle down meal replacement drinks as opposed to eating a nutritionally balanced plateful of tasty grub? I mean, where could that behaviour ever get us, if we thought about it rationally?

It fathoms me on how anyone could get through the day on a 'shake for breakfast and a shake for lunch,' yet the diet industry tries to tell us that this could be a reasonable substitute for eating properly. Errrr????