Bohemain Cafe - Be inspired

Have you cake and eat it

Go into any bookshop worth its salt and you'll find a pile of books and magazines offering the latest 'loose-fat-and-still-eat-chips' diet that will allow you - money back guaranteed - to have your cake and eat it. Now I don't know about you, but in my time- and as a man with the propensity to grow to the size of a small continent after as little as a two week holiday in the fat-capital, Florida USA - I have tried them all, and they all work…but only for a while.

Almost as soon as you lose the pounds, some times stones, and the jeans stop creaking at the seems the very same weight - and a bit more (for inflation I presume) - returns with a vengeance and new holes have to be made in your belt (usually with the point end of the scissors) to hold the button-bursting balcony-creature that has reappeared demanding a large Pizza and several beers NOW!

It's so depressing. Isn't it?

It wouldn't be so bad but all the really tasty stuff simply oozes fat-gut weight-gain, I only have to look at biscuit barrel and I grow another chin, and as little as a week on a take-away fest leaves me with a skin-coloured bum-bag that wobbles in time with my step. I can be good for months at a time, some times even longer, and my weight stays at a comfortable 13, 9, but the minute I get a fry-up down my neck my legs start going all Sumo.
When I was 19 and clothes-line thin I could empty the contents of an industrial fridge without clocking up a single number on the bathroom scales. In fact I was so thin I wanted to put on weight, but my in-a-hurry metabolism burnt calories as quick as I could extract them from Kit-Kats and Kormas.
Then I hit thirty.
To be honest at (a very young) thirty I still felt 19, even though my hair-line looked a withered 50-something, but my internal calorie-crunching gizmo went on a lazy three-day-week. All of a sudden the nuts and crisps, the beers and curries started to take their toll and I developed what can only be described as a wide-load arse, the perfunctory by-product of daring to eat anything more in a day than I burned up. My food-abuse period was over; the salad and chicken renaissance lay in wait.
From then on in my weight has gone up and down like a busy lift.

When the weight is off I float around d like a light thing in tight fitting tee shirts tucked into bottom hugging jeans nibbling on health biscuits that taste like manila envelopes. I take every opportunity to remove my top and bare my torso, even when the wind is whistling my nipples into biker studs.

Thin, my esteem rises to the rooftops.

When the weight is on however a dark cloud descends on my day. My world becomes one of chip dinners (in hide-away greasy-Joe cafes), rationalisation, take-away curries, wine and beer and puddings that I might as well mould right onto my belly. And the apparelle changes accordingly too with belt-less trousers, undone at the top two buttons, hidden by trench-coat sweatshirts that hide every thing from the neck to the knees. Even sex takes a back seat because it involves nakedness and hours of holding your belly in. Your self-esteem drags around like a wedding trail.

As I said I have tried them all; high protein diets that lose you the weight but turn your stools into rocks (ouch), high fibre diets that have you shitting through the eye of a needle, low carb diets that leave you so hungry you start nicking food off the kids plates and snacking on carpet tiles, food combining diets that are so complicated your brain throbs like a hammered thumb and sends you racing to the nearest chippy for a carb-fat-calorie top up. A man needs his strength after all.
And the fruit diet! What's that all about then? I've tried it and no matter how hard I've tried I cannot make a grape look or taste like a Malteser!

So what is the answer, how do I keep this sylph-like physique with all the culinary temptations constantly battling to fatten me up?

After 40 years of counting calories, hunting for the fat content on the backs of crisp packets and watching my bungee-belly bounce back and forward from six pack to party seven I've come to the conclusion that disciplined light eating for the rest of my stay on this spinning blue thing in the cosmos is the only way to stop me from looking like a doughnut. It's hard, and you can never let up but it works. Have some of what you want, but not all of what you want, train every other day and you'll keep the fat-monster at bay.

I live in hope that the hear-after might be a paradoxical universe where Mars bars and crisp sandwiches are the vital sustenance of life. In the meantime I'm going to heed my mum's advice- offered to me when I hit a hefty sixteen stone and had to take out a second postcode on my arse - 'walk past that chip shop Geoffrey'.