A Tale of Two Fatties

“Turkey?”

“Yes please. and three roast potatoes.”

“Carrots and peas, Sir?”

“Yes please. Cranberry and bread sauce, lots. And a merry Christmas to you.”

“Thank you Sir, Bon Appétit.”

A giant slice of Blackcurrant Cheesecake with cream and you are set.

This is Christmas lunch in the company restaurant. It is a culmination of a whole year's worth of company subsidised gastronomic extravaganzas. Highlights being the special French day for Bastille day and an extra-special American Independence day menu. The concessionaires for the staff restaurant were doing all they could to curry favour with the restaurant committee to make sure that they continued with the lucrative contract to feed the well-heeled overweight employees.

And then to follow: a coffee: and may be several coffees during the day. Two at a time. I so enjoyed working with my computer screen that I did not appreciate the creeping insidious problem of being overweight. I drove my motorised armchair morning and evening. The company car park was only a waddle away. Everybody else was slightly chubby. Seemed to go with the territory. I never gave it a thought.

I’d heard about slimming: well who hadn't? It was something that over-anxious housewives worried about. I was a comfortable fifteen stone and five foot ten inches tall, so according to the charts I was considerably overweight. But it was something that didn't worry me. True; I could hardly run. But on the other hand I could do heavy, slow jobs like digging the garden.

I used to get a lot of stick from my Captain when we went out sailing. It was a small boat and in light winds the boat sat in the water like a crust in a thick soup.

No! It was none of these events that made the difference. The event which caused the change was that my wife was also overweight. Now she was five foot two and twelve stone - now she was a fatty.. Now that is not said unkindly; it was just the truth. But now she has a waist and looks quite trim.

She had planned for a family holiday at a Centre Parc. That is the holiday park with the gigantic dome covering a superbly heated water playground. She had tried on her swimming costume and looked in the mirror; and she had decided that a CHANGE was required. A significant moment, that at the time, passed by without due pomp and ceremony. Now, it is very difficult for one partner to resist a snack of beer plus digestive biscuits, cheese and pickle in the middle evening while the other party (i.e. me) is tucking it away and crunching and munching and umping and gurgling. So it was down to me to be as abstemious as my wife. She needed my support at home to maintain a regime of dieting.

Now as it happened, just at the right time my wife had stumbled across a dieting book: It war a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Maybe she was half looking for the book or maybe just glancing at the ideas in the book that set off the revolution.

The essence and the simple logic of the regime to be followed was bound up in the first few pages. It did not ramble on and on like those “How to be a millionaire” type of book. I can condense the message in few words - EAT LESS FAT. Now that is a harsh summary and I would advise the would-be slimmer to read the first three pages of the book. It has convincing logic. The truth shines out. You only need to remember the truth of the argument.

The best salesperson is one who is convinced by and believes in, the product. Now rather than moronically following a diet unconvinced at every step, the slimmer is convince of the success of the method before starting.

The simple logic of the argument (read the book if you are unhappy with my summary), is that body weight is controlled by the input of calories, i.e. eating. When we eat we tend to continue till we feel full-up. There is a slight logical blur about what constitutes feeling full-up, but I think it is mostly about the volume of the food. So the book is recommending large volume, low calorie foods.

Now, on the other hand, if we eat small volume and high calorie foods, like butter or cheese then we can over-supply the calorie needs of our bodies. The human body then obligingly stores this surplus as body fat. Do not imagine that the butter is physically transferred to our thighs or waist. It is a chemical process. The fats we eat are broken down into their constituent chemicals and then assembled into our thighs or around our waist as fat. Our own particular variety of human fat.

But enough about the theory. This is really about the success of two people who suddenly realised that they had a problem.. Not a problem truly but just an awareness that they were not satisfied with how things were. They were too fat. Not visually acceptable to themselves. A change was required.

Recognizing that one has a problem is a large part of solving that problem. The answer was there in the book. The principles of the new regime were agreed. A target was set. We were going on holiday to a Centre Parc in three months. So that we could see that we were on target I set up a graph of weight against time. As a target weight we aimed at the recommended maximum weight in health tables for our height and sex.

We were so pleased that in the review at the end of the first week we were both down by over two pounds. Week by week we congratulated ourselves that we had lost another two or three pounds. But do not imagine we were starving or even hungry; we were eating lots. It was part of the insurance policy to keep ourselves to the diet. Lots of potatoes, carrots and parsnips. But no butter with them. We even had corn-on-the-cob: but no butter. Sounds like heresy, but they really taste good underneath the mask of the buttery taste. Without butter we didn't suffer from buttery beard or buttery chin.

Money wise this was also a success. The price of potatoes, parsnips and cabbage is nothing compared to the price of red meat, pate and cheese. We were spending less on eating.

The regime worked. I'm down to just under thirteen stone. We went on holiday and were very pleased with ourselves. Neither of us felt embarrassed in our swimming costumes. But like the newly converted we saw so many tubby people, that we were perplexed. The fat people were just like me before I started; they did not acknowledge that they were overweight. They need to be told. Told that being slim, or at least the correct weight is much better than rolling along through life being a FATTY.

There are a few surprising side-effects to being slim which I should tell you about. The most obvious is that ones trousers hang baggily loose at the waist. So a lump of money needs to be spent on new clothes. Another aspect is; in my personal experience; and I expect the doctors and experts would disagree with this; is that I feel the cold more. So I have to spend more on heating.

Putting all the pros and cons together it is easy to come to the conclusion that being the correct weight feels better.

Slimming is easy. Now I have done it, I can say that. We still shop at the same shops. We still sit at the same table. WE still use the same knives and forks. We still eat till we are full-up. The real change is the different mix of the foods that we eat.