This Thing I'm Doing

Thanks for the comments and kind words! I’m going to do my best, but Cannes is unlike just about any travel for work I – and probably most people – have ever had. It’s 20-22 hours a day, large chunks of it wearing heels (unless you’re lucky enough to be on a yacht, where slippers are mandatory) and an evening gown that doesn’t hide enough (it’s 95 degrees in the south of France). I’ll stand around parties trying to get up the nerve to ask celebrities totally nosy questions I might pause to ask my friends (I know it’s my job, but I am ridiculously ill-suited to it. Could I be becoming British? Discuss.)

But thanks to your comments, I’m feeling more positive about it. Thursday I got sent a dozen posh cupcakes – not by Friend Bearing Chocolate, for the record – and walked around the office distributing them. There would have been a time when I would have scarfed three or five of them, thinking: Oh, I’m going to screw up in Cannes so I might as well screw up now. I’d try (probably unsuccessfully) to get back on track before Cannes, and would arrive already feeling fat and a failure. But Thursday I thought: OK, I’ve got dinners out tonight, Friday and Saturday, and close-fitting Cannes dresses putting the fear in me, so decided to skip them.

The other thing – besides your comments – that has helped steel me for next week: Fitting into not one, not two, but three UK size 14 (US 10) dresses Thursday. And in two separate shops, too.

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So what is This Thing I’m Doing, you ask? It’s a UK diet called Slimming World, which I do online here, because I can’t bear the thought of a group meeting a la Weight Watchers.

It’s a diet I never thought I’d do. As I’ve said before, when I read the Slimming World magazine, I don’t see myself in any of the success stories (besides the starting out fat part, of course). For starters, I’ve never once seen a success story from London. Many of them have had children at age 19 or 20. Two in the past two months have been maids. The success stories have cheesy titles like “I feel a million dollars -- but enjoying life like this is priceless” and “[Name here] has a lot to smile about since losing 12st” (and I’ve read the magazine long enough to see headlines like that last one re-used.) The clothes in the photo shoots are of cheap, shiny material, and they’re – in a word – trashy, even if you don’t have an extra ounce of fat on you. And chocolate and cakes and wine and other things like that are called “Syns.” Ugh.

And yet.

And yet, the diet works.

There are a lot of variations I haven’t bothered to learn because I like to keep things pretty simple, but at heart the diet is this: Eat as much healthy food as you want. There are no limits on fruits (not even bananas) or vegetables or eggs (yes, whole eggs, not egg whites) or lowfat yogurt. Each day, you choose whether you’re having a Green (translation: carb) or Original (meat) day, and you can – as I do – choose Green day after day if you love your pasta. According to the rules you can eat pasta or rice until you’re full on Green, and as much meat as you want on Original. I’m OK with the “unlimited” with meat, but with pasta when I’m at home I measure it – I don’t trust myself with carbs. (If I’m still hungry, I fill up on fruit. And with fruit, I really do eat as much as I want – sometimes nine or 10 servings a day.)

Each day, there are also Healthy Extras (if you’re having a Green day, it’s servings of meat or cheese; on Original it’s servings of pasta or rice), and the aforementioned Syns. Though they recommend about 10 Syns a day, I never actually calculate mine. One of the things I always hated about Weight Watchers was the constant calculating and figuring with what I could do with my last remaining point or two, so with Syns there are plenty of days where I don’t use any, and on the other days, if I want to have three glasses of wine or lemon tart, I figure I am justified. For the past six months, at least, it’s worked, because not counting for me means not that they don’t count, but that I’m not obsessing.

For me, it has been ridiculously simple. I eat a lot of oatmeal and pasta with vegetables and sushi and baked potatoes topped with cottage cheese. If I’m hungry, I eat more fruit (and sometimes eggs – I eat a lot of eggs). You can make the diet a whole lot more interesting – there are loads of recipes in the magazine, and the few I’ve tried have been rather delicious – but I am both lazy and busy.

Must run to last body pump class pre Cannes – my arms need all the help they can get! I’d like to say I’ll post from the Croisette, but with both A Mighty Heart and Oceans Thirteen premiering in my week, it’s going to be a crazy one.