Dieting – when it’s all inside your head

With all these toned athletes on display, I’m sure many people are resolving – yet again – to lose a few extra pounds. I began to pile mine on after having two children, followed by a period of ill-health and three operations, and before I knew it I was a size 20 bordering on 22. Not good, particularly in view of my age (53) and family history of diabetes.

Macaroni cheese with leek & bacon (Photo credit: Great British Chefs)

I tried Diet Chef and it certainly delivered, for two weeks, but I felt uncomfortable about living on a diet of 80% processed food, no matter how impeccable its credentials, and it really is true that within a few days everything tastes the same. I could never face the ritual weekly humiliation of Weight Watchers, though others swear by it. My downfall was always the chocolate-dominated snacking of the late afternoons.

I was mostly pretty good about exercise, but the main purpose it served was making me feel marginally less guilty about having a BMI of 31. Something had to change, but what seemed to be holding me back wasn’t so much greed as fear.

I mention this because my own belief is that there’s no miracle cure for weight issues, but clearly there are an awful lot of miserable overweight people out there who would give anything to eat more healthily and stick to it. Like depression, which it often accompanies or resembles, in many cases of obesity an appeal to willpower is not enough.

For me, the key has been figuring out why I overeat. I think (fingers crossed) I’ve managed to do this without the help of a counsellor, though that might be worthwhile for  some people. The breakthrough came when I realised how anxious I was about food – getting enough, getting it right, eating as perfectly as possible. Every meal had to be Heston Blumenthal as far as quality went, and River Cottage-standard ethical. Now, I’m not saying these ideals aren’t good – perhaps the second rather more than the first. I’ve got very strong views about food, where it should come from, how it should be cooked and served. But that didn’t stop me breaking out into regular fish-and-chip and sticky-toffee-pudding binges.

One weekend we stayed in a very posh guest house in Sussex – the kind of place where people go to stay when they do Glyndebourne, darling. I was in heaven – for me it was the epitome of the South of England good life. I came down to breakfast and was met with a breathtaking array of fruit, yoghurts, artisan breads – you name it, they had it, all exquisitely served.

I doubled up with IBS, left my smoked salmon and scrambled eggs half-finished and spent the next half-hour in the bathroom.

It didn’t stop there. We were going to a family picnic, as we do once a year. On the way, since my daughter had never visited the Royal Pavilion, we decided to stop off in Brighton. I knew this would be a wonderful place to stock up on everything gourmet and organic, so I declined the tourist option and headed for the Lanes. The next thing I knew, I was suffering from a full-blown panic attack, and all I cared about was finding coffee and somewhere with a loo.

Eventually I pulled myself together and we ended up having a lovely time, as usual. But I felt it was time to address what seemed to be a growing problem – that I could never find food perfect enough to satisfy my ludicrous standards. My husband pointed out to me that everywhere we’d stopped that weekend, including IKEA on the way down, I’d loaded up with unnecessary delicacies, terrified of being caught out without an impressive picnic basket.

I simply had to lighten up about food. Why had I got this way? We talked about my childhood, and how at the age of eleven we left a predictable, secure family set-up behind and, having never been allowed anywhere near a kitchen before in case I cut or burned myself, I suddenly had to care for a physically and mentally ill mother in my own. I can vividly remember her collapsing and going up to bed, literally in the middle of cooking the evening meal. It’s a painful memory, and I think it’s filtered through into my adult life and made me anxious about eating ever since.

Like many people in the 1970s, we existed on Vesta ready meals and Birds Eye frozen food – the closest we generally came to home cooking was a huge stodgy bowl of Macaroni Cheese unleavened by any healthy vegetable. And underneath the farmers’ market shopper with her fruit trees and veggie beds, that scared little girl is still much aware of getting it wrong.

Anyway, I’m going on a bit, and it’s early days yet, but once I realised why I was so obsessed about food, and the precise nature of that obsession, it seemed to straighten me out a bit. I realised how much I’d been clinging to chocolate, home made bread and vast mountains of pasta as a security blanket. When I actually took a deep breath and made the changes that were necessary, binning the chocolate biscuits and avoiding the carbs in the evening, I was amazed how quickly I began to feel better, and I’ve already lost two kilos. All without recourse to any official diet plan or low-fat goodies.

I’ve also started running. Only 2k so far, and a good bit of that is fast walking, but at least I’m getting out there.

The diet industry is huge, and it would have you believe that every product they come up with is some kind of magic bullet for what is, in effect, a complex problem reinforced by some extremely dysfunctional social attitudes. But before you shell out for another miracle cure, it might be worth asking yourself whether the answer is inside your head. It can’t do any harm, and it might save you a lot of guilt and money.

I’ll let you know how I get on. It’s early days yet.

Don’t Let the Daily Mail’s racism taint our Olympic vision

It seems that every time British tabloid journalism apparently hits rock bottom, it manages to plumb new depths. In the general euphoria surrounding Danny Boyle’s wonderful, and highly idiosyncratic, evocation of British identity in the Olympics opening ceremony, there were bound to be a few dissenting voices. He almost certainly expected them. You can’t please everyone, and he included some very provocative things – a lesbian kiss on TV, the arrival of the Windrush, a massively high-profile tribute to the NHS. What is surprising is that most people, even on the Right, responded positively to it.

Comment is free, but sometimes it really does cross a line and it becomes necessary to take a stand and point out that being a columnist doesn’t give you the right to say absolutely anything. When I read Rick Dewsbury’s hate-filled piece yesterday, I felt sick to my stomach. For many reasons, the first being his cynical exploitation of a recent tragic screw-up, and his assumption that he’d a perfect right to assume what the family of the unfortunate victim would have been thinking as they watched the show. Sadly, though, that’s part and parcel of the way the Daily Mail operates, and in a sense it’s what you have to expect if you get mixed up in publicity without Max Hastings to cover your back.

However, the bit that really got me was this:

But it was the absurdly unrealistic scene – and indeed one that would spring from the kind of nonsensical targets and equality quotas we see in the NHS – showing a mixed-race middle-class family in a detached new-build suburban home, which was most symptomatic of the politically correct agenda in modern Britain.

This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but such set-ups are simply not the ‘norm’ in any part of the country. So why was it portrayed like this and given such prominence?

Okay, where do we start? Well, to begin with, it’s utter rubbish. I work in a school and it’s packed with mixed-race families who seem to be getting on just fine. They are not “set-ups.” They are people who love each other, who quite rightly see beyond the colour of someone’s skin, and who are raising children who are as British as Winston Churchill (and a lot more open-minded).

One is left with the unpalatable truth – whatever anodyne remarks he goes on to make about peace and harmony (which are almost certainly spliced in by a sub aware of the likely fallout – I for one don’t remember them being there last night, before the comments were closed and the piece pulled for a while), basically he has a problem with black people being middle-class and living in nice houses.

And someone like that has no right to be writing for an influential national newspaper. You don’t have to be one of the “social network’s Guardianista brigade” (another of Dewsbury’s delightful phrases) to think that. Where has Dewsbury been for the last few years? Hasn’t he noticed that Tories also tweet?

I think we Brits can rightly be proud of the show put on in our name on Friday night. But if we tolerate this kind of open, unapologetic racism we should hang our heads in shame. Yes, we know how to laugh at ourselves, and it was totally in our national character that Friday’s jokes included the gentle poking of Royal authority and Mr Bean subverting the entire Olympic ideal. But this kind of thing isn’t funny at all.

So please, get out there. Quote this repulsive stuff, blog it, tweet it, shout it, and support bloggers like John J Williamson who are taking it to the Press Complaints Commission and maybe beyond. This is our “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more moment.”

Then sit back and enjoy the sport, if that’s your thing. Let’s show that the real Britain is closer to Danny Boyle’s vision than the Daily Mail’s.

Update:
Since posting this I’ve come across this brilliant article, which not only analyses the piece better than I ever could but quotes from (and links from) the original, and even more offensive, version:

The Daily Mail and How an NHS Death Means Racism is Fine

Also (as of Sunday evening) the article has been removed completely from the Daily Mail website.

Related articles

• Letters: The Mail and race (guardian.co.uk)

North vs South – two nations?

She said kiss me or would you rather
Live in a land where the soap won’t lather?

Billy Bragg “The Only One” (from Workers’ Playtime)

You know you drive me up the wall
I need to see your face that’s all
You little sod, I love your eyes
Be everything to me tonight

Guy Garvie (Elbow) “Station Approach”

Glossary: Billy Bragg is an Essex Boy through and through. His reference to soap concerns the difference in the domestic water supply between the north of England and the South East, which geologically is on chalk deposits. This results in lime-rich water, poor detergent performance and coating of scum in the bathwater.

Guy Garvie is 100% Mancunion and proud of it. “Station Approach” refers to the road leading down from Piccadilly, Manchester’s main train station, into the city centre (and more generally, the sense of coming home to a community where you belong).  My son always puts it on as we leave the motorway and arrive back home after he’s been away at college.

Traffic on the M25

Bill Oddie follows the way of Ecky Thump in “The Goodies” (BBC TV)

A few months ago, several thousand BBC employees had to emigrate from the South East of England to the North, when the BBC moved its main centre of operations up to the Media City Centre in Salford, near Manchester.

The word “emigrate” isn’t used lightly. Strange as it may seem in so small a country, there are deep-seated and profound cultural differences between the south and the north of England. Arguably, the cultural fault lines are as deep as those separating Scotland, Wales and England, and the first two of those have good claims to being independent nations. Some of the main prejudices are that Southerners are arrogant, effete and insular, always assuming that people will visit them rather than venturing out of their own London-dominated enclave. Conversely, Northeners are accused of being ignorant, nosey, vulgar and mired in a culinary wasteland dominated by fish and chips, mushy peas and tomato ketchup.

Southerners are unfriendly, sometimes to the point of not knowing their own neighbours. Northeners are forever on the doorstep wanting to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar. Southerners are sophisticated, familiar with international cuisine and dismayed by the thought of eating salad cream rather than mayonnaise. Northeners haven’t even heard of cappuccino.

Of course, these are all laughable generalisations. But they persist. When the BBC relocated, there were rumours and jokes in Private Eye about trains to Euston being packed with exiles on Friday evenings. I’ve a foot in both camps. Though my Lancashire ancestry goes back several generations – I’m from Blackpool, for God’s sake, and you don’t get more vulgarly Northern than that – I married a North Londoner, and my parents spent their happiest years in the Home Counties. My nearest living relatives ended up in Billericay, Essex and Woking, Surrey respectively.

I actually prefer the South. We hope to retire there. It’s hard to imagine a bunch of people less snooty and stand-offish than my husband’s large, close-knit extended family. We gather at Littlehampton for a beach picnic once a year without fail, and there are usually four generations present. I don’t particularly like the idea of community on your doorstep, though I still think fondly of the Lancashire neighbour whose kindness sustained me when my mother died (She didn’t just draw her own curtains when the funeral procession passed, she went round knocking on doors to make sure all the neighbours did likewise). I can assure anyone with doubts on the matter that cappuccino and balsamic vinegar are well-known North of Potters’ Bar, but I do think that there tend to be more good-quality, reasonably priced restaurant chains in the South East (Bill’s of Lewes, for example, and the wonderful Cook range selling very nice, admittedly posh frozen meals – we only have them up here in Formby and Harrogate).  And I can remember my husband’s Auntie Peg remarking, in our holiday accommodation, “They’re posh here, they buy their Weetabix from Waitrose.”

So, where do the prejudices come from? And is there any truth in them? In the case of so-called stand-offish-ness, I think there is, but note the “so-called.” In my personal experiences, people from the South are not unfriendly, but they could be called reserved. They won’t barge in unless they’re reasonably sure you want to know them better. A lot of it, I suspect, is due to sheer density of population. The fact there economic activity tends to concentrate people in the South East of England makes houses smaller, commutes longer, roads and public transport alike more congested. All this makes people value what privacy they do have. What hits me every time I travel through Southern suburbia is how many new homes are being built (though still nowhere near enough) and how cramped they are. This affects people in all kinds of ways. Your working day is longer. If you’re lucky enough to get a seat on the train, and most aren’t, you’ll learn to tune out distractions and maximise your reading time. And you may well resort to audiobooks on the Tube.

None of these social pressures are unknown in the North of England. In fact, upwardly mobile suburbs like Didsbury in South Manchester generally replicate them. But I think they are less ubiquitous and less intense. And I also think this affects the way travel is perceived. I can remember, when I was growing up in a small Lancashire town, thinking that Burgess Hill and Haywards Heath must be very exotic places. Now I know how crushingly ordinary much of South East commuterland actually is. I also used to make the mistake of thinking that everywhere down there was pretty close together, and having no concept of the vast North vs South of the river divide in the minds of not only Londoners, but people who live in the South East of England generally. But once you’ve queued to go through the Dartford Tunnel after a long day, you begin to understand why to someone in Surrey or Sussex, the North of France seems more accessible than Manchester. We Mancunians say it’s only two hours on the train. And it is, to Euston. But it’s the trekking around after that you need to worry about.

I didn’t realise, fully, how tiring driving in the South East really was until we spent a day visiting my husband’s family in Enfield, then dropping off our son at college in Colchester and, finally, driving to his parents’ old bungalow near Littlehampton. The experienced left me utterly drained. I would probably have found a trip between Kendal, Ilkley and Harrogate a lot easier.

I suppose the moral of this tale, if there is one, is that you don’t really understand anybody until you’ve tried walking in their shoes, so to speak. Of course, none of that will stop me making jokes to my DH’s cousins about hitching up the husky dogs to come and see us, and it won’t stop DH himself saying, “You can take the girl out of Blackpool, but you can’t take Blackpool out of the girl.” Particularly when he spots me reaching for the salad cream.

Battling Depression

I have of late,—but wherefore I know not,—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

Hamlet, Act I, Scene  II

In magazines, they always talk about celebrities “battling depression.”  It sounds reasonable, but if you’ve had depression yourself you’ll know that it’s a concept that could only come from outside personal experience of it, because when you’re depressed you can’t summon up the energy to battle anything. The best you can hope for is to fool yourself that you’ve beaten it, until it sneaks up on you (usually sometime after lunch in my experience) and you realise it’s been snapping at your heels all day.

 

Depression’s such a strange affliction. It’s probably caused in many cases by overthinking and over-worrying, but if you’re prone to those habits it’s not generally easy to stop. A couple of decades ago, my spells of depression consumed and paralysed me, to the point of having panic attacks in the street, but now we seem to have reached a modus vivendi. I’m on a maintenance dose of Fluoxetine, which makes me feel inadequate as a  human being – I know that’s irrational, diabetics don’t (I assume) feel that way about needing daily insulin, so what’s the difference? It’s just a chemical imbalance in the brain. Some reputable people claim that it’s all part of a dark, pharmacological plot to make creative people into conforming zombies. Well, I’ve been reading James Joyce’s biography and, though he gave the world some amazing books, it doesn’t sound like a very happy life. Creating stuff was often agonizing for him and not much fun for his family either. He self-medicated by means of alcoholic binges. I’d rather be on pills than live like that.

I spent much of the last year trying to get off them and succeeded to some extent. I’m now on 50% of the dose I was on twelve months ago. On the whole I feel better for it – more alert, more intellectually engaged (although, having said that, I managed to finish an MA course on the higher dose). But once I dipped below 20mg a day, things began unravelling. I forgot people’s names, I could never find things, I slept badly and every job, particularly cooking, for some strange reason, became a mountain I just couldn’t climb.

It’s more complicated than simply feeling miserable. I think Hamlet put it best, “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem all the uses of this world.” In one compartment of my mind I know my life is good, and I’m truly grateful for it. Interesting job, nice kids doing well, good marriage, kind friends and enough money to buy everything I need and a few things I just want. All that adds up to happiness, and the fact that I can be intellectually aware of this and yet feel utterly hopeless is proof that there is, literally, something wrong with me.

It’s very diurnal. Mornings are mostly okay. Then a little black cloud appears on the horizon and gradually gets bigger until it blots out concentration, focus, enjoyment and the ability to hold a logical conversation. My nearest and dearest tell me I become ridiculously sensitive, over-reacting to perceived slights and criticisms, and I’m sure that is indeed the case. By mid-afternoon all I want to do is guzzle chocolate and go to bed, preferably at the same time. I feel like phoning my husband and tearfully begging him to come home early just to cook the tea. It rarely gets quite that bad, though

I “battle it”. Of course I do. But the battling has to be done when you’re still relatively well. Once it strikes, it’s probably too late. I know what I need to keep well – regular workouts, sunshine, healthy diet and at least nine hours’ sleep a night. I know what I shouldn’t do – the Internet any time after nine in the evening is invariably a mistake. And chocolate never helps as much as you think it will. Nor does retail therapy. It just means that when the credit card bill arrives, you’ll have even less respect for yourself than you had before and you’ll probably have no clear recollection of what you bought or why it seemed so essential at the time.

Strategies – I expect everyone has them. One of mine is to put every book I fancy I cannot live without onto my Amazon wish list, and if I get to payday without financial meltdown I can have up to two items. It’s surprising how often you look at what you nearly bought on impulse a couple of weeks ago and find your lack of sustained interest in it quite remarkable. But I wish I was as disciplined about stopping myself from going out at four in the afternoon for a cappuccino and a slab of Café Nero truffle cheesecake.

I’m not expecting my depression to go away any time soon. It just becomes less debilitating – partly because of circumstances (teenage and young adult children rather than toddlers) and I get better at controlling it. If I need to stay on pills for the rest of my days, I’m just glad those pills are easily available to me. I would like to feel completely morally neutral about them and have no sense of inadequacy whatsoever, not to reproach myself and struggle to deny the truth about myself. Depression is always a balancing act between challenging yourself to do what you are able to manage and recognising when to let the waves break over you, rest and just go with it for a while. Nobody’s ever quite figured that one out, as far as I know.

Nevertheless, I keep trying. I owe it to myself and my family not to give in. And to love myself, enough but not too much. My life is good, far better than many people’s these days. Just as when it’s cloudy you know the sun is still up there shining away, I recognise that as the fundamental truth, even when my silly old brain is telling me the opposite.