Monday holiday

On holiday...back tomorrow!

Dream cuisine

Friday fever has kidnapped me again. I’ve been bouncing around like Tigger since 6am. Not sure why as it’s not like I’ve got anything wildly exciting planned for the weekend. No, there's nothing else for it, this weekend I must do a bit more experimentation in the kitchen.

I’ve discovered that cooking laziness is this slimmer’s biggest enemy. Last week I found myself making bean tacos once too often, only because it was fast. But it’s definitely not a good idea. Apart from the fact that the ice caps can’t cope with that, not eating a varied enough diet really does seem to slow down the weight loss. It’s like your gut downs tools and says, ‘Enough already, if you don’t give me something different to eat, I’m going to sabotage your entire mission!’

So it’s time to try out some new quick and easy recipes to get me through the week. That means I'll no doubt spend hours drooling over recipe pictures, pick one I like and then get mightily annoyed when I read: Preparation 50 mins, cooking time 4 hours. I mean, come on, I'll be a pensioner before I get dinner on the table!

Oh how I'd love to be Captain Janeway on Star Trek Voyager. All she has to do is bellow, “Beef Wellington, hot!” into her ‘replicator’ and hey presto it appears out of thin air complete with vegetable sculpture and a nice glass of red!

Forget bagless hoovers, when are the boffins going to put me out of my misery and invent the replicator?

So how EXACTLY do you do it?

I keep being asked ‘EXACTLY HOW’ I’m losing weight. And it’s funny because if you don’t respond with the ‘name’ of a well known fad diet, slimming club or strange underground cult, people look at you like you're short-changing them!

‘Oh, you know, just cutting down the old portion sizes, eating less cakes and choccies, drinking less beer, and learning to cook more healthy meals,’ just sounds so, well, AMATEUR.

It doesn’t matter if it’s working, it’s obviously just not sexy enough for some people. Inner Bitch keeps egging me on to respond with a dead pan ‘Oh, you know, half a pint of newts blood for breakfast, for protein you understand, a light snack of sauted chickens feet midmorning, and one of my favourites like boiled bat balls for lunch. You?’

But that’d just be unkind. Anyway, I’m kind of proud to be doing it the old fashioned way. So here, for the record, is my master plan.

1. Eat three healthy balanced meals and two fruit snacks a day. I just choose healthy recipes and get stuck in.
2. Drink lots of water. Tap's fine by me.
3. Cook healthily and mainly from scratch so I know what I’m eating.
4. Get a grip on my portion sizes. No more Daddy Bear bowls of chow for me!

Combined with:

1. The discipline of this blog. It really, really helps!
2. Move more! Otherwise I’ll keep writing and lose the use of my legs!
3. Going easy on myself. Expecting to have off days and not bothering too much if I do because it’ll all balance itself out by the time I get back on the scales next week anyway.
4. Staying positive about it, not rising to Inner Bitch’s (or anyone else’s) negativity if possible, and focusing on the end result: a new wardrobe of clothes I actually LIKE in a size 14.
5. Saying: "I want to be a size 14 more than I want that cake, chocolate" every time I'm about to fall off the wagon! Of course, I do 'allow' for a bit of wagon trapezing now and again. I am human.
5. Hynotherapy/relaxation cds – I am the epitome of a ‘chilled’ slimmer. Oum!

And that’s it. There’s really nothing sexy about it at all. I’d love to say there is, but there just isn’t. And while I’m busting to invent something else like,

6. Eat one’s cereal off Brad Pitt’s six-pack…

… that would just be fibbing!

Talk about the tears of a clown...

Because I’m about as flexible as the tin man, I’ve always been impressed by bendy people. So at the weekend I joined the queue of kids high on candy floss and got ready to ooh and ahh at the Moscow State Circus. http://www.moscowstatecircus.com (there are half price ticket vouchers lying around cafes all over Edinburgh if you’re interested!)

And I was not disappointed. Sure it seemed a little bit retro here and there, but the show's theme based around the infamous and mysterious life of Rasputin, the Black Monk, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin quickly caught my attention. Like the bit at the start when Rasputin was apparently ‘escaping into his dreams’ just as two lycra-clad temptresses appeared and promptly draped themselves over him.

So that’s what monks dream about! Glad they cleared that up!

Anyway, Rasputin dotted in and out of the show, accompanied by an awkwardly translated voiceover delivered in a thick Russian accent which kept making me think of John Cleese in a Fish Called Wanda, but his main role was as ringmaster. One after the other he presented a fantastic troupe of super-bendy, bouncy and unspeakably coordinated performers.

I mean, even the clowns were bendy, for heaven's sake!

So when I bent down to pick up my brolly at the end of the show and felt my back ‘go’ the irony was not lost on me. ‘No, not now, not here of all places!’

Time to roll out the yoga mat methinks.

Fat blind terrorist cows and other stories...

Yesterday was a funny old day in the news. Beyond the Lockerbie furore, there was the story about the terrifying trend of ramblers being trampled to death by… cows! (The cynic in me just can't help wondering if that was a plant of a story - Forget Lockerbie, folks, cows are the new terrorists!)

But the story that really caught my eye was the one declaring that we are now officially the second fattest nation on earth. No prizes for guessing who takes the gold!

But wait, it gets even better because apparently we are not just a nation of fatties, we are a nation of ‘blind fatties’ that aren’t even aware we are fat!
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/uk/39Fat-blind39-Brits-told-they.5580417.jp

Blind? I don't think so. We may only be a little devolved nation these days, but when it comes to stubbornness, we are world leaders.

If we aint going to let anyone tell us what to do with our legal process, we certainly aint going to let any begger tell us to stop eating deep fried mars bars either. So there!

But maybe I will cut down, just a tad!