Diet plateau

I had the most amazing mayonnaise the other day.

We were staying the weekend with friends, and they'd pushed the boat out on Saturday night, so alongside the cod with a chorizo crust was this fabulous mayonnaise. I couldn't work out if it had truffle oil in it. I'd saved up all my weightwatchers points, so could enjoy everything on offer. It was so good, I almost wept while chomping. 

Friends, it was ordinary, full-fat Hellman's.

The thing about being on a diet for a very long time is you forget how delicious ordinary things are, because you're busy eating bread like cardboard, or drowning out everything with loads of vegetables to fill you up.

Yes yes, I know, there are preachy people out there who say they can't abide low-fat food, and you should just have 'a little' of everything. Trouble is, I need to put a lot of things in my gob throughout the course of a day. If you work in an office, it's genuinely possible to get side-tracked from eating because of back-to-back meetings or some crisis, or to get shamed into eating lentils in tupperware because everyone else is so thin.

If you work from home, or just run around after small children wiping various substances off surfaces, not only are you physically knackered, but you're presented with temptation every half an hour. Because the kitchen is your nerve centre, and the willpower that it takes not to eat the rejected skin off your toddler's baked potato is beyond most adult humans.

True, weightwatchers allows you to have the odd splurge, so you don't forget what burgers taste like, or send yourself over the edge by craving something that's verboten. (It's the psychological torture that's the hardest - the minute I considered trying a different diet I felt hungry and panicked all the time, and unsatisfied by the usual staples that see me through the points system.)

But once you've found a few little tricks - Philadelphia Light, mini Tangle Twisters, Cathedral cheddar - you get quite boastful about how you feel like you're eating almost normally, but you've reduced your calorie intake. Once you've made a thai curry with reduced fat coconut milk, and had those zero noodles instead of rice with it, you've had most of the flavour, it's taken quite a long time to chew, and you've become smug diet woman.

But then you taste the old original Hellman's, and you realise you've been kidding yourself. Life for fat people is totally, viciously, unfair.

Not least, in my case, because I've recently had a plateau. I've been doing weightwatchers again since May. I did it before my wedding (though I started it before Jon proposed, so it wasn't a bridezilla thing, more a fed up with being fat thing) and again after my first baby, and it worked both times. It took a long time, but it came off slowly. About a pound a week, sometimes two. In theory, losing it steadily means it should stay off, though I wouldn't know that because of my tendency to get pregnant within weeks of hitting my goal weight.

But for most of last month, I lost nothing. Occasionally I even put a bit on. And I was hardly cheating at all. Over a period of five weeks, my net result was a loss of 0.8lb. That is very disheartening when you're on a diet, especially the sort that makes you feel like you're on a diet all the time too.

But it's the only method that I can face. Not eating two days a week seems impossible, and I live in fear of giving up certain food groups, because once I start eating them again surely it'll just come back on?

Anyway, in the scheme of things, this is not an important thing to worry about. I only find the time and emotional headspace to really mind about being overweight when everything else is okay. So really, I should be grateful that what the scales say on a Wednesday morning is such a big deal at the moment.

We all worry. Especially about our children. And some of us have more to concern us than others. There is a first-time mum in Felix's swimming class at the moment, and her daughter is about a month younger than him (seven months). I know you're allowed to be neurotic when it's your first one, but each week she says something ridiculous. Like - "If the water goes in her ears, will it come out again?"

I mean, what answer was she expecting?! I was sorely tempted to say "No, she'll gradually fill up, then sink down to the bottom. For the rest of her life she'll have pool water squelching out of every orifice, but isn't it a small price to pay for learning to swim."

Which is very mean of me to blog about. But I have friends who've had serious health scares with their babies, and are now destined to watch them like hawks for years to come, scrutinising every move to see if they're developing normally. What they'd give to be able to take their little ones swimming, or at least know that they'll be able to at some point in the future.

So although weightwatchers is a pain, I'm grateful I can focus on watching my weight, rather than watching a child of mine suffer.