The big anxious tabby was very sick on the kitchen floor. He made a strange whooping noise from behind the table, in front of the Aga, and then began to heave. Lumps of chicken appeared, and then gobbets of cat food. He had the chicken for his lunch, after I'd picked over the carcass of a roast bird that had boiled overnight for stock, and I noticed that he seemed not to have bothered to chew it.
He is an old beastie, and I worry when he throws up in case it is a sign of something wrong with him. But on this occasion it may have been a simple failure to masticate. The Systems Administrator suggested that maybe chicken is too rich for him, but I'm not sure about that. It was simmered for over twelve hours, and must be about as bland as you could get. His next meal had better be very, very small. It is a job keeping weight on him while keeping it off Our Ginger, a snapper up of unconsidered trifles and other cats' unfinished dinners if there ever was one.
Meanwhile, the SA and I have both lost weight since the start of the year. We have not adopted the 5:2 diet, or the 4: 3 diet, or the Atkins or Dukan, or ceased to consume sugar in any form (the latest fashion, it seems. Even the monkeys at Paignton Zoo are on a low sugar diet). We haven't gone for meal replacements, or the California Diet as achieved through the illegal use of amphetamines. We haven't been doing fifteen second bursts of intense physical activity to boost our metabolisms, or forsworn alcohol for January.
Instead we are on a diet which every expert and journalist who expresses any views on the subject now seem to agree Does Not Work. It is called the Eat Less Diet. It began as an involuntary process, because I spent the first eight days or so of 2014 feeling sick. I wasn't actually sick, but always felt as though I might be, so eating less came naturally. The SA soon joined me, equally involuntarily. After spending over a week eating only tiny meals, or no meals at all, and absolutely not fancying a drink, we found our stomachs had shrunk, and we didn't want to eat as much as before. Food that would previously have served for one or two meals was suddenly enough for two or three.
I helped things along a little by donating an unopened box of chocolates left over from Christmas that had to be eaten by the end of January to my father's cousin's hospital. Apart from that we cooked meals from our usual repertoire, albeit the plainer end of it, once we were cooking. We started gingerly with corned beef hash, which stretched to three meals when in the past we've demolished a tin in one sitting. The Systems Administrator made a very plain pasta sauce, which ran to three goes then we had to chuck the last bit out, and I roasted a chicken which yielded two hot and one cold portion of breast meat, plus a retro 1970s curry that stretched to lunch as well as supper.
I suppose I haven't eaten a lot of sugar. I ate one chocolate when I gave the box to my cousin, two teaspoons of honey when I felt as though I was getting a sore throat, and a shortbread finger after my talk at the ladies' club, and put a spoon of syrup in my porridge one morning when there wasn't enough milk for muesli. I had a slice of ginger, date and apricot loaf for lunch at the V&A, and it tasted horribly sweet. The only time I've actually opened a sugar jar was this morning, when I needed a tablespoon for some pitta bread, since the recipe had sugar in it, but at the rate of two millilitres per helping of bread I think that's neither here nor there. I have eaten several oranges, some apples stewed with raisins but no refined sugar, some dried fruit in the muesli, some tomato ketchup, and probably some sort of tinned soup or beans, though I can't honestly remember which, and drunk some red wine and a small quantity of gin, so there has been sugar in the mix, but not a lot. We don't normally have puddings or biscuits anyway.
I don't know how much weight I've lost since I didn't weigh myself on New Year's Eve before the lurgi struck, but at eight and half stone am within a pound or so of being as light as I've been at any time in the past thirty-five years. The great thing about the Eat Less Diet (especially when kick started by a gastric bug) is that it doesn't make you think about food and drink all the time. You don't have to prepare anything special, and nothing is forbidden, so there is no guilt. It's a shame that modern opinion says that it doesn't work.
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