Well I have to say that The Daily Mail this week has produced it’s finest work yet in terms of a string of enlightening articles about diet, weight loss and fitness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of their website in general…it’s free, and who wouldn’t want a running commentary on which bland-and-yet-famous person is sleeping with which other bland-and-yet-famous person. Still, far be it from me to cast aspersions on this goldmine of gossip, I can hardly diss it when I check in most days and have a flick through – besides, one of my biggest fans keeps posting snippets about us in the comments section of anything vaguely diet-related and as a result we’ve acquired some gorgeous new additions to the posse. No, it’s all good…and it just got better. Seemingly there’s a diet where you eat nothing but cake, and still lose weight. Mama I am home!
Oh. Oh dear. It seems that they missed the point a bit. How unlike them! I nearly broke my neck to follow the link and look at some sample food plans – I felt quite giddy as the webpage loaded…I’m thinking muffins for breakfast, maybe a nice victoria sandwich for elevenses…sachertorte at lunch, madeira cake with afternoon tea and how about a huge coffee and walnut wedge at teatime? Er…no. I realised that perhaps this wasn’t quite the Utopia I’d imagined when my eyes latched onto the words ‘unlimited salad’ halfway down the sample food plan.
On closer inspection, a towering tiered cake which positively gleamed with ‘eat me’ sheen appears to be made of melon. So basically a melon cut into a cake shape. I love melon…but it’s melon. Not cake. So the headline certainly captured my attention, and the photos whetted my appetite, and I’m sure there are some lovely sugar reduced cake recipes inside the book they’re selling for the princely sum of fifty five US dollars…I suspect you may even be actually be able to scoff a piece of reduced-fat-no-sugar cake daily but it’s certainly not the fat girl fantasy food plan I had first imagined. *Sigh* When will I learn?!
Ironic thing is, if they’d marketed it as ‘here’s a few cake recipes which are quite low on the ‘blow your diet’ richter scale and actually incorporate some healthy stuff too, I’d probably have been first in line to buy one – but I can’t help feeling a bit insulted when marketeers assume that to hook fat girls in, you have to fool them into thinking they can get skinny without putting in the work. That says something about the marketeers. Falling over myself to believe it..? That says far more about me.
Even now, when I’m locked in for the long game, I’m trying out of my socks in terms of sticking to my food plan and I’m basking in the glow that standing in the sweet spot gives me, were someone to offer me the option of getting skinny without changing my broken relationship with food, I’d be out of that sweet spot and all over it like a horsefly on a turd.
Note to self: it’s not possible to live on cake and get skinny. Move on 🙂
