Join me on the 12×75 diet!

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Join me on the 12×75 diet!

 

Diets really bore me and I love food, so sweating it out at the gym is really the only option I have for fending off obesity.  But every now and then a new diet craze comes along that I want to try – Atkins, South Beach, Zone, Dukan.  But diets are boring, and always have ludicrous principals like ‘avoid alcohol forever’ that don’t seem to suit my lifestyle very well, so I always end up back in the gym, sweating it out as before.

What I’d love is a diet that incorporated wine into it properly, not the slightly wetter alternative presented by magazines that claim on the cover that you can ‘lose 7lbs in a fortnight on the chocolate and wine diet’ but in fact advise you that although you can have chocolate and wine, it is as a treat on day 7 and you can only have one square of chocolate and you can ‘make your 125ml glass of white go further by adding sparkling mineral water’.  NO.  This is not a chocolate and wine diet!  So why lie about it?!

A professor by the name of Roger Corder came up with the Wine Diet – based on research to determine the best eating habits for all-round good health, as well as ‘harnessing the power of red wine’ to gain protection for your blood vessels or something like that.  I had a glance at it.  It still wasn’t really what I was looking for – which was permission to drink and eat whatever I want and still lose weight.

Now I am no stranger to coming up with my own diets – at university a friend and I spent a week on the two dimensional food diet – the criteria is that you can only eat food that you can slide under a door in its natural state, under the principal that there is no possible way that food that is flat can make your stomach any bigger by its very (flat) nature.  But after a few days of eating Kraft cheese slices and picking the carpet fluff off pitta breads, we decided to call it a day and just have some chips.   I didn’t let that experience put me off though, so this week I have been doing the 12×75 diet.  It is a balanced* plan for busy professionals that allows them to drink and eat what they want and lose weight**.  Here’s how I got on…

Day 1. 

In anticipation of the wine I was intending to drink later in the day, I got up early and went for a little run down by the canal.  I have a friend who is thin and she never eats any bread, so I decided to take all the bread in the house on my jog and feed it to the ducks.  When I got back, my husband was anxiously looking for something to have for breakfast.  In the absence of anything else to have for breakfast, and knowing my husband would put two and two together, I solved the problem by just dashing off to work early and hungry.

Lunchtime requires either a short walk to the really bad sandwich shop that is just round the corner, or a long walk to the good one that is much further away.  Then I remembered that I wasn’t eating bread, so instead I made do with products I could find in the communal kitchen at work that I could claim as my own.  This included a cup-a-soup, half a jar of capers, and some questionable ham.  I was pretty hungry all afternoon but managed to keep busy and just ignore it.  On the way home from work, I stopped at the Co Op to get lots of healthy ingredients for the meal that would accompany my wine.  I bought salad and vegetables to roast and pork since it is relatively lean.    When I got home I had a quick change and a 2 minute run to the gym, where I managed to catch a spinning class.

Later that evening  I roasted the vegetables and prepared a lovely salad.  I cooked the pork in a jar of something tomato-based that was in the fridge, and uncorked the first bottle of (red) wine since Professor Corder says it is good for you.  I slung some in the sauce as well in the hope that it would release extra red wine goodness.

Slurping the rest of the wine after dinner, it occurred to me I hadn’t actually done anything different on day 1 except anger my husband by giving a just-purchased loaf of bread to the ducks and then lying about it.  If I’m honest, the crap lunch I had is the same one I always have when it is raining outside and I can’t be bothered want to walk to the good sandwich shop.  Who would have thought it?  I was already on the 12×75 diet, I just didn’t know it!

Had I lost any weight?  I don’t know – it had only been 24 hours and I had forgotten to weigh myself in the first instance anyway.  Did I feel better?  Definitely, I had drunk a fair bit of wine.  What would tomorrow bring?  Well, I felt positive and motivated – maybe for once I had finally found a diet I could actually stick to.  And it was much easier than I thought.

*it is not even remotely balanced.  Don’t be stupid.

**any weight lost on this diet is entirely coincidental, or could be down to dehydration from over-indulging on wine.  Please don’t go on this diet.  If you do, you are a terrible buffoon who is taking this blog much too seriously….