I have a wardrobe full of old trousers I never wear.  I don’t wear them because I can’t get into them but I don’t throw them away because I tell myself that this little bit of weight I’ve gained is only a temporary blip and very soon I’ll emerge from my fat cocoon the slim butterfly I always was. I’ve been telling myself that for twenty years.

A couple of months ago, after sweating my way up a Scottish mountain on the one day we have had this year that was officially Summer, I decided I had to do something about it.  I’ve now been on my diet for almost two months.  I’m on the Dukan diet, which you may know is a mainly protein diet.  I have lost around a stone and a half or just over 20 pounds as our American cousins would say.

I am now wearing some of my lost trousers; they cling to my legs like dogs I haven’t seen for a long time.  Do I feel better?  God yes, more energy as I’m not carrying a rucksack full of lard on my stomach.  I managed to run six miles yesterday and I’m thinking about entering the Aveimore half marathon.  My knees, which groaned and complained every time I thought of walking down hill, have not spoken to me for weeks in what I take for contentment and call the silence of the knees.

This is despite me having to come off the diet when staying with my old dad, having flu, not getting out on the hill because of the bad weather and the afore mentioned flu and not sticking to the diet as strictly as I should.  Between you and me I have not stayed on the straight and narrow all the time.  I have eaten three whole chocolate biscuits in the last two months, may God strike me dead.

Now, this might help you if you are contemplating taking the hunger march.  When it’s bad and the baked potato dripping with golden butter and oozing that most delicious of all foods, cheese, calls to you urging you to devour it, I say the following things to myself…

 

It’s only food.  (LOL)

People are enduring worse than this in earth quake zones etc.  Get over it.

This won’t last for ever.

You’ve come this far not eating another slice of bread won’t kill you.

And my personal favourite…

This diet will end one of two ways; I’ll either be thin or dead.    

Finally, it is certainly true that if anyone with as little will power as me can do it anyone can.  I’m starting the final push on Monday to lose the last ten pounds.  Keep the cheese on stand-by, I’m coming for that baby, French bread, lots of butter and stilton, I can almost smell it.  Okay I’ll run the bloody half marathon afterward but that baguette is mine!