An interesting conversation

I had an appointment with Tina, my hairdresser, today. Now Tina's a top chick - forthright, friendly and colours her bobbed hair a traffic-stopping shade of red. Like me, she's on the curvy side. Or rather, she has been every time I've been for a haircut in the past couple of years, and she's always been on some kind of diet or other ('It was the Atkins last year,' she said. 'I followed it for months, only lost three-quarters of a stone, and put it all back on again within a fortnight of starting to eat normally.')

This time, though, she'd lost weight. I noticed this and congratulated her, and she told me she's been on a diet since last October. During the course of the past four months, she said, she's lost almost two stone in weight.

'Wow,' I said, 'that's great.' Although secretly, I have to admit, I was thinking: 'Wow, it's taken you four months to lose just over twice the weight I've lost in five weeks.'

'What kind of diet are you doing?' I asked.

And that's when she told me that she'd been substituting breakfast and lunch with meal replacement shakes. For FOUR months. Now, she doesn't seem to mind – and I don't think she's much of a foodie, so maybe she doesn't. But four whole months with nothing but a small cup of liquid gunk to keep you going until dinner doesn't bear thinking about, as far as I'm concerned.

So, I'm eating more, I'm enjoying my food and I'm losing weight faster than Tina. In my book that's a positive result. So even though I've been jonesing for 'normal' food a bit this week, I'm feeling a whole lot better about what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it.

One of my next postings may well contain some theory about why I think I'm seeing such positive results with such little effort (well, little effort relative to the idea of replacing my meals with ersatz calorie-counted shakes).