The 10 (weight loss) commandments

According to James, there are 10 commandments you should bear in mind when trying to lose weight. In no particular order, these are:

1. Forget the idea that crunches will get rid of your belly fat

You can't pick and choose areas where you'd like to burn fat. In order to burn fat, you need to create a workout that includes both cardiovascular and strength training elements. This will decrease your overall body fat content.

2. Forget the idea that stretching before exercise is crucial

Some studies have suggested that stretching actually increases muscles' susceptibility to injury. They claim that by stretching, our muscle fibres are lengthened and destabilised, making them less prepared for the strain placed upon them by exercise. You might want to warm-up and stretch before a run, but if you are lifting weights wait until after the workout to stretch the muscles.

3. You should eat before you exercise

Fuel, which you get from food and fluids, is required to provide the energy for your muscles to work efficiently, even if you are doing an early morning workout. Consider eating a small meal or snack one to three hours prior to exercise. Breakfast on fruit, yoghurt or wholewheat toast.

4. Lifting weights doesn't make you bulk up

Most women's bodies do not produce nearly enough testosterone to become as bulky as a body builders. If you do find yourself getting bigger then you should simply use less weight and up the number of repetitions you do.

5. Fat is not always bad for you

Contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of good fats out there that are essential to promoting good health and aid in disease prevention. These fats occur naturally in foods like avocados, nuts and fish, as opposed to the fats present in manufactured foods. By including small amounts of these foods at mealtimes, you'll feel full longer and therefore eat less overall.

6. Restricting calories is not the best way to lose weight

True, cutting back on calories and moving more will help you to lose weight and maintain the lean muscle mass needed to boost metabolism. However, people usually think they need to take drastic measures to lose weight (for example, by eating fewer than 1,200 calories a day), but this does not usually provide adequate fuel for the body and may slow your metabolism in the long run, leading to a vicious circle of never-ending dieting. Drastic measures rarely equal lasting results. Instead, aim to eliminate 100-300 calories consistently from your daily diet.

7. You can't eat as much as you want, even if the food is 'healthy'

A calorie, is a calorie. Although porridge is healthy, if you have two large bowlfuls of the stuff every day, the calories add up. You must be aware of portion sizes because you need to limit your caloric intake in order to lose weight. However, understanding how to balance your calorie intake throughout the day can help you avoid feelings of deprivation, hunger and despair.

8. Exercise doesn't turn fat into muscle

Fat and muscle tissue are composed of two entirely different types of cells. While you can lose one and replace it with another, the two never convert into different forms. Fat will never turn into muscle.

9. Eating late at night won't make you gain weight

There are no magic hours. We associate late night eating with weight gain because we usually consume more calories at night, and we tend to do this because we often deprive our bodies of adequate calories the first half of the day. Start the day with breakfast and eat every 3-4 hours. Keep lunch the same size as dinner, and you will be less likely to over-indulge at night. If you do this, you can enjoy a small late-night snack without the fear of it sticking to your middle.

10. You don't have to sweat to be exercising efficiently

Sweating is not necessarily an indicator of exertion – it's your body's way of cooling itself. It is possible to burn a significant number of calories without breaking a sweat: try taking a walk, doing some light weight training or working out in a swimming pool.

Damage limitation

I'm still not getting much change out of about 85 kilos, but then it is review season (as I might have mentioned already). Some magazines pay for your meal, allowing you to dine incognito, but the one I work for prefers to accept complimentary meals from PRs, which means the restaurant knows you're coming.

Now I'd rather eat anonymously when I'm reviewing, of course, but I do truly believe that the people in a kitchen can either cook or they can't – and if they can't they can't disguise the fact when the reviewer pitches up. Sure, it means that I sometimes get fawned over by the waiting staff, but it's very easy to take note of how the other diners in a restaurant are being treated and how happy they look. So, although the situation isn't ideal, I don't feel that my critics morals are being compromised quite as severely as it might appear.

The main downside, as far as I'm concerned this year, is that if a restaurant knows you're coming some of them tend to throw their best possible dishes at you – sometimes several courses of their best dishes – often with great wines to match. Under the circumstances, it's very difficult to turn anything down. I'm trying my best not to finish everything on my plate, but several recent meals have challenged me in that respect – in fact I was hard pushed not to pick the plate up and lick it clean at Lindsay House, Richard Corrigan's Soho restaurant. Another place I've been really enthusiastic about is Nahm, a Michelin-starred Thai restaurant that serves stupendously exciting food and offers an equally exciting wine list. The only downside to the place is the stultifyingly dull décor.

Anyway, I'm getting away from the main issue, which is that I've got to face up to the fact that if I'm eating out three times a week between now and the start of September, the diet isn't going to progress very fast, if at all. There's no point in beating myself up about it – I've just got to accept the reality of the situation and deal with it.

I'm balancing things out by sticking to the diet at home and doing a fair bit of exercise. With James' encouragement, I made it all the way round Clapham Common the other day – albeit by running for 10 minutes, then walking for five before picking the pace up again. It took 35 minutes in total, I felt like I was going to die – or melt, whichever happened first – but I made it...

The long, dark teatime of the soul

I've always loved this title, which I've nicked from a Douglas Adams book (see left); it seems to capture the feeling of limitless gloom that comes with any internal struggle. I've been doing a fair bit of internal struggling over the past few days. Mark and I went away to Devon for our birthday weekend (conveniently enough, his birthday is on the 5th of July and mine is on the 6th) and I don't know whether I was suffering from birthday-itis (it's my birthday and I'll darn well celebrate any way I want to, even if it means coming off the diet); having reached the fuck-it zone (the weight's not coming off, so what the hell) or a bout of self-sabotage (you've lost 10 kilos, you're doing just fine, why struggle any more), but I tucked into ice-creams, a delicious apple and raisin cake, plaice in a buttery sauce, pork with crackling... You get the picture.

Having lost control of myself, though, I found myself waking up in the middle of the night and fretting about it. I am committed to losing the weight – even though it's tough going at the moment – apart from anything else, I don't want to lose face in such a public way, but my progress is slow at the moment. Has been for a while.

So I've returned to London fully committed to the notion of getting to grips with my inner demons. My diet has been at its most successful early in the year, partly because the diet shocked my system into losing weight and partly because I was in control of what I ate and when I ate it in a way that I'm not during restaurant review season. Given that it's going to be hard to stick to a diet (I can try, but I have to compensate for potential slip-ups) until September, and that I've decided that my goal is to lose 4.5 kilos to take me down to 80 kilos by the time of my post-wedding party on September the 6th, ramping up the exercise seems to be the logical way to go.

I had a word with James about it, and we've decided that my initial tactic (to go for two runs a day) isn't a realistic proposition. He thinks I'll just become bored very quickly and that it will prove to be a retrograde step. Instead, I'm going to up the intensity of what I'm doing when I work out by myself. James set me a running challenge (at least once round the outside of the park, then interval training for a second lap), which I'm already on to. He's also going to provide me with a skipping rope (it seemed so easy when I was a kid, but at the age of 44 it doesn't seem quite so much fun any more) and a couple of kettle bells. I'd never heard of kettle bells (right) before, but James explained what they were and said that they produce results pdq. I'm pretty sure that using them is going to feel like torture, but if they get me to where I want to go, I'm up for it.

And now for the bad news...

When I returned from Istanbul, my weight had dipped to 85.7 kilos, and I thought I was back on track. Now, 10 days later, I'm now back up to 86.3 kilos. I could kid myself that it's just a matter of water retention or something, but I have to acknowledge that I'm not being as rigorous with the diet as I was at the start of the year.

I've got plenty of excuses for relaxing my eating patterns: I've had a lot of work dinners, I've had friends round or been over to friends' places for dinner, and I've just started my annual restaurant reviewing rounds (I'm a section editor for one of the main restaurant guides). In other words, temptation's been placed in my path, and I've succumbed. Only slightly, but just enough to ensure that I'm not losing any weight. The time has come to reconsider my priorities, because I'm always going to have to face up to temptation. If I want to lose more weight, I'm going to have to stick a little closer to the rules. Darn.

'Tis the season to feel guilty

I've long held the suspicion that guilt is a waste of emotion. That doesn't prevent me from feeling weighed down with guilt right now.

To begin with, I've been absolutely rubbish at posting over the past few days. In my defence, I should probably mention the fact that I've been away in France for three days and have had 8,000 words to write this week (split into five different articles rather than one massive piece). But I should have found the time – or even made the time – to log on more regularly.

Part of the reason I haven't, I suspect, has something to do with my other burden of guilt. My weight's not gone down much at all over the past three weeks. I weighed in at about 86.7 kilos when I got back from Bordeaux 10 days ago, then went up to about 87.3 a couple of days later, then lost about 300 grammes by the end of the week, and am now back up to 87.1 kilos. Now I could make all kinds of excuses for this, such as the fact that, due to the exercise I'm laying down muscle rather than fat (it weighs more), but I suspect the truth is that the weight came off so easily in the first few weeks that I got slack. I conned myself into believing that it would come off without too much effort from me, as long as I showed a modicum of self-restraint. I now think I will need to be a bit stricter about what I'm eating and when I'm eating it. In short, I have to go back to the principles I was sticking to religiously early on in the diet. This is going to be a tough recommendation to follow, especially given that it's my mum's 70th birthday dinner tomorrow night and I'm judging a food-and-Champagne-matching competition all day on Tuesday, but if I want to see some results, I'm going to have to put in a bit of effort. Nobody said this was going to be fun.

Bad timing

Poor James. Yesterday morning he found out the hard way that I'm not much of a morning girl. It's not that I'm bad tempered or taciturn in the mornings, and I can certainly crank out an article in the early hours if under pressure of a deadline. But physical activity before about 9am doesn't seem to agree with me.

However, because James' schedule was packed, we were booked in for a session at 8 yesterday morning. I woke up early enough to have my morning muesli at the right time to provide fuel for my muscles (about an hour or so before exercise is the best time to eat complex carb-based breakfasts – if you're short of time fresh fruit will do just before exercising, at a push). But I was sluggish. Even worse, I whined more than a mosquito does on a hot summer's night when you're trying to get some shut eye.

Just how do those high-powered execs manage to work out at 6 in the morning before a big day of meetings?

The importance of doing something completely different

I went to a tasting at the Tower of London today, and a colleague sidled up to me and said: 'You're clearly sticking to your diet – you've lost a lot of weight.'

This was kind of flattering, but then she went on to say that she, too, had been trying to lose weight, but couldn't budge an ounce, despite her four energetic sessions of ballroom dancing each week.

It made me think back to something James told me when I thought I'd hit a bit of a plateau. He said that, for most people, the first few weeks of any kind of diet or change in exercise regime are the most productive in terms of losing weight. After a while, though, your body adapts to whatever it is you're doing: the human metabolism is a very efficient machine. That's when you hit a plateau – and that's when most people give up on their diets.

The solution? Whatever you do, don't cut your calorie intake. Our systems have evolved to think of a drop in food consumption as being a sign of imminent famine. It adapts by learning to be more efficient with the calories it's getting. The proof of this is in the vicious circle many dieters have to deal with, the one that goes: crash diet, results, stop dieting, weight goes back on, leading to another crash diet, and so on for life.

You can tweak your diet, of course, but exercise is key. If your body has become used to exercising at a certain level or your muscles are used to performing certain movements, change the pattern. Two sessions a week with James were working for me. Then they started working less well, and I started adding a couple of sessions of my own, and now I do a bit of jog-walk-jog round my local park with Laszlo twice a week. It certainly seemed to help me bust through the plateau. Maybe my colleague should take up swimming twice a week to replace a couple of her dance sessions...

The love of a good man

Before you all reach for the sick bags, I've got a serious point to make. If you're going to go on a diet for any length of time, you've either got to be single or have the full and wholehearted support of those you live with.

Now, the idea of gastronomic restraint doesn't come naturally to either Mark (with Laszlo in our kitchen last weekend, above) or myself. In fact, over the three years we've been together, I've put on around 10 kilos. I can probably put some of that gain down to work – but I reckon the fact that we love eating together has something to do with it too. A good weekend for both of us would involve a trip to Borough Market, where we buy loads of fresh fish, delicious ravioli, armfuls of seasonal fruit and veg, Italian cheeses (specially this aged Pecorino that Mark enjoys so much that I'm almost jealous of the cheese). For dinner we might enjoy a big steak with a baked potato, and there's often a dim sum lunch somewhere on the way to a film and a bottle of wine between us most evenings. Although we don't eat out in restaurants all that often, when we do we rarely restrain ourselves. And, when we moved in together just over a year ago, I took up cooking a big dinner for the two of us just so that I would get to hear how much Mark had enjoyed it.

I loved that bit of our lives – unrestrained, greedy and full of the pleasures of great food. But these days I can't give in to the luxury of rampant gourmetism. I'm not saying that the food I'm cooking and eating at the moment is boring – I'm trying my hardest to make sure it isn't. But I do know that Mark misses certain aspects of the way we used to eat. However, because he loves me, because he wants a slimmer, healthier me (and, to be frank, because he could stand to lose the odd pound or two himself), he's prepared to stick with my dietary game plan.

I sometimes give Mark larger portions of whatever we're eating than I take myself and I occasionally add a dollop of something indulgent to his plate, but by and large, he's eating what I'm eating. And he's trying really hard to be as encouraging and supportive as he can be – without looking like he's trying (if you know what I mean). How lucky can a dieting girl get?

Stating the bleeding obvious

At risk of stating what should have already occured to anyone with an ounce of logic, never ever go food shopping when you're hungry and tired.

I didn't have much of a lunch today because all I had in the fridge was some hummous, which I ate with a slice of untoasted wholemeal pitta bread. I was on my way out the door to a tasting, and was running late, so had no time to prepare anything more satisfying and nutritious (although hummous and wholemeal pitta makes a good snack – it keeps you full for a fair while and has lots of fibre).

So – another big tasting. Bibendum, one of the UK's biggest wine merchants, holds an annual tasting – and it's vast. They'd hired out part of the Royal Academy complex off Piccadilly. There must have been several hundred wine producers there – all of them with at least a couple of wines each. Of course I didn't taste everything there. In fact I spent most of the time doing interviews with wine buyers and sommeliers – I'm behind schedule on a couple of deadlines, both of which I need to meet before I head off to Italy early on Friday.

By the time I left, I was feeling tired and emotional, and for once I'm not using those words to mean that I was drunk. But I also knew there was nothing in the house for dinner. So I stopped into an M&S to grab something to cook tonight. But because I was so tired and because I hadn't eaten well, my blood sugar had dipped, and all I wanted to do was to grab one of the delicious-looking pastries. Either that or slump down in a corner and cry.

You'll be glad to know I didn't do either. Mark and I ate tuna with a soy and citrus sauce, egg noodles and stir-fried veg for dinner. And very lovely it was too.

Just say no

When I was small, my mum taught me that I should always finish what was on my plate – although I never quite figured out the relationship between my leftovers and the starving children in India, Cambodia or Biafra (or the various other causes célébres of the day). What was true of meals at home was doubly so of special occasion meals, such as those eaten at friends' houses or at restaurants.

Fast forward 30 years or so and the result of this indoctrination is an adult who eats out a lot and still finishes everything on her plate, even if it's the second five-course meal of the day. The consequences have been inevitable.

I'm lucky enough to have a great job that allows me to travel a lot. Furthermore, once I reach my destination, my hosts fall over themselves to show me a good time. I get taken out to great restaurants or get treated to meals en famille with great frequency. Fantastic bottles of wine are unearthed from their resting place in the cellars, the table groans with all kinds of prestige foods and meals last a minimum of two hours, if not well into the night.

I'm certainly not complaining (although by the time I get home after most trips I crave fresh vegetables and simple dishes – prestige meals don't tend to run to greens and fruit in most cases), but it's very difficult to say no if your hosts are putting on such a show of generosity. And, if everything's laid on (rather than ordering from a restaurant menu), it's difficult to ensure that appropriate food is easy to come by.

I knew well before I got on the plane that last week's trip to the Minervois and St Chinian in southern France would be a test of my resolve. Sure enough, shortly after landing, we were whisked straight to a wine tasting at Homps, once an important loading point for barges travelling along the Canal du Midi. In addition to the wines we were to taste, a table had been set with platefuls of local salamis, olives, cheeses, breads and pastries. Have I mentioned how hungry you can get when you're tasting wine?

Over the course of the next couple of days, we went from one eating opportunity to another, including several lavish meals. But I've learned one vital lesson. Contrary to what I'd been taught to believe, the sky doesn't land on your head if you leave some of the food on your plate. You can ask for the steak to come without the cream and mushroom sauce. And you absolutely must say no to white bread, dessert and other foods laden with simple carbohydrates (see above for the dessert that got away, a parfait flavoured with Muscat de St Jean de Minervois, a dessert wine – sob).

I managed it all last week and, while I regretted saying no to some of the dishes I would have enjoyed, I consoled myself with the fact that I wouldn't have enjoyed them half as much as I'd have regretted eating them by the next day.

Breakfast

A mate of mine lost loads of weight last year, and when I asked her what her secret was, she recited the old saw about eating breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.

The cliché may well have made me want to roll my eyes to the ceiling. In fact, that's probably what I did (a poker face has never been my forte). But, reluctant as I am to admit it, she's got a point. A good breakfast is absolutely vital if you're dieting. The question is, what kind of thing should I be eating every morning? I need something to give me enough of a boost to my metabolism to see me through the next few hours – without weighing me down and making me feel queasy.

I'll 'fess up now. Breakfast has never really been my thang (apart from the cornbread, bacon and maple syrup I used to serve up on morning afters, back in my single days – never failed to impress, I'm proud to say). I'd rather have the extra 20 minutes in bed, to be quite honest, so most mornings, I start the day with a strong cup of coffee, then find myself grabbing something delicious and totally inappropriate on the way to a tasting or a meeting. Something like a muffin or a croissant. Mmmmm, muffins... At the weekend or on holiday, I've been known to be partial to a kipper or a full English, if I've got time. Sadly, all these options are now out of the question. (My greedy subconscious actually sparked a dream about bacon and sausages last night. How totally tragic is that?)

But there are plenty of options open to me. To start with there's scrambled (or poached or boiled) eggs, served with a slice of toast (toast is just fine – as long as it's wholegrain or multigrain. White is off the menu, and I'd strongly recommend buying a quality loaf rather than a pre-sliced job as the latter are loaded with sugar). If you're going to scramble your eggs, just whisk them gently with some salt and pepper – not milk or cream – then fry them with the merest skerrick of butter.

Most days, though, I've been enjoying a home-made muesli (the commercial ones are too full of sugar, not to mention dried fruit – not a good idea). It's simplicity itself to make, and once you've prepared the basic cereal it'll last for days – you only need a double handful each morning. You can douse your muesli with semi-skimmed milk, of course, but I'm particularly enjoying mine mixed in with a couple of tablespoons of 0% fat Greek yoghurt – and sometimes I add a bit of sliced fresh fruit.

Enough muesli for 10 days or so

200g rolled oats
200g rye flakes
40g sesame seeds
60g almonds, roughly chopped
60g hazelnuts, roughly chopped
200g sugar-free fruit spread
100g All Bran

Preheat the oven to 200C/gas mark6.

Mix the oats, rye flakes, sesame seeds and nuts in a bowl.

Stir 100ml of boiling water into the fruit spread, then mix it thoroughly with the cereals and nuts.

Spread the mixture evenly out over two roasting tins, then place in oven for 10 minutes. Remove from oven, stir again, then place in oven for a further 10 minutes. Remove from oven and, if the cereal is evenly toasted, allow to cool. If not, stir once again, and leave in the oven for another 10 minutes.

Once the cereal is cool, stir in the bran flakes, then store in an airtight container.

Last Sunday I decided I'd had enough muesli, delicious as it is, so Mark and I opted for corn fritters, served with ham, crème fraiche and tomatoes. These little fritters are a really nice way of starting the day, especially when you serve them with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. The batter mix is enough to make three fairly substantial fritters – Mark had two and I had one.

This is a good general principle: if you're dieting, but your partner isn't, there's nothing to stop them from having an extra helping of whatever you're eating. There are also ways in which you can add simple 'extras' to a dish for your non-dieting partner – I'll flag these up when and where it's appropriate.
Corn fritters with ham, crème fraiche and tomatoes – makes three

50g polenta
50g plain flour
1 egg (preferably free range or organic)
1 tbsp olive oil, then a scant tbsp for frying
100-125ml semi-skimmed milk
70g canned sweetcorn, drained
1 tsp carraway seeds
3 tbsp crème fraiche
6 slices of parma ham or speck, cut into strips
6 cherry tomatoes, halved
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Pour the polenta and flour into a bowl, then whisk in the egg and 1 tbsp olive oil. Whisk in the milk bit by bit until you end up with a thick, sticky batter. Season well (the fritters can be bland otherwise), then stir in the sweetcorn kernels and carraway seeds.

Heat the remaining olive oil in a non-stick frying pan, then pour in a third of the batter. Flatten it out with the back of a wooden spoon and fry until brown. Flip the fritter over and fry on the other side until brown.

Place on a plate and top with crème fraiche, ham and tomato halves.

Real life starts to intervene

It was easy eating little and often in the aftermath of the New Year's festivities. I was based at home, with only Laszlo and my computer for company, but this week has seen the start of the tasting season.

There are two main tasting seasons in each year of a wine writer's life: Winter/Spring, which runs from the second week of January pretty much up until the London Wine and Spirits Fair, which is in mid-May. Then you get a breather for the summer holidays and by early September, the whole circus kicks off again, grinding to a halt earlyish in December.

Now as work goes, tasting wine isn't a bad way to spend your day, but contrary to the opinion of those of my friends who don't work in the wine trade, it really is work. This week, for instance, has seen most of the big wine merchants hold their Burgundy 2006 En Primeur tastings (all the En Primeur bit means is that it's the first chance anyone has had to taste and buy the wines from the 2006 vintage). There have been over a dozen tastings in London, each of which has featured at least 80 wines, both reds and whites.

By the end of today I will have been to about eight of these tastings over the course of four days, and will have tasted around 50 wines at each in order to write up some recommendations for www.wine-pages.com, a specialist wine website for which I write on a semi-regular basis. And wine tasting makes you hungry. Starving, in fact.

In the normal course of events, this wouldn't be a problem – I'd grab my lunch at whichever tasting I happen to be at round about lunchtime and that would be that. (Most of them generously provide sandwiches, at the very least, and sometimes a full three-course buffet, in the understanding that an army of wine tasters marches on its stomach.)

At the moment, though, I can't just chow down on a sarnie – the combination of mayo, white bread, rich fillings and an inappropriate balance of protein and complex carbs would scupper me. Nor can I count on being able to find a mid-morning or afternoon snack to keep my blood sugar levels from dipping dangerously low.

My solution is to take a bit more time about things so that I can stop somewhere and buy myself a lunchtime salad – I even went to a kaiten sushi place on Tuesday and had some salmon and tuna sashimi and a seaweed and cucumber salad. Alternatively, I pack a small tub of something nutritious and a plastic fork and find a convenient corner to sit and grab my lunch. I also take a couple of pieces of fruit or a small bag of raw, unsalted nuts along with me to fill the snack gap.

So far so good, but it's all taking a bit more planning and preparation than I'd otherwise have to put into my food. Other than that, the diet seems to be going quite well. I'm not feeling atrociously hungry in between meals, thanks to the snacks – although I have been peckish on the odd occasion. And I'm finding that the smaller portions that I'm eating seem to be satisfying enough – in fact I'm quite enjoying the fact that I get up from the table without feeling like I've stuffed myself. The question is – is it having any impact on my waistline or am I going to have to take more extreme steps? My weekly weigh-in isn't for another few days yet, so I can't really answer that yet.

My first challenge

My mum came round for dinner last night. I don't really want to tell her about the diet yet – she'd only make a big fuss about it, and I can't deal with that yet – but dissuading her from bringing a box of chocolates over was, er, difficult. (Christ only knows why I feel comfortable about posting details of my diet on the internet so that, potentially, thousands of people can read all about it but I can't tell my mum. Obviously some deep psychology involved there somewhere...)

Organising a menu that would work for her proved a bit of a challenge, too. The idea was for us to sit down to a dinner that would fulfill my dieting criteria while still appearing to be a 'real' dinner from her perspective. I settled for lamb cutlets, cooked rare on the griddle (no oil used). She and Mark had two cutlets each. I pleaded a lack of appetite and gnawed on a solitary cutlet. We also had one of my fave mashes – chickpea (works beautifully with lamb) – and a ratatouille to accompany the meat. You'll find a recipe for the chickpea mash below (I think the ratatouille may become a bit of a favourite, so I'll publish the recipe at some later date). I even sipped at half a glass of Southern French red, without ever quite finishing the glass – just for effect.

But time, perhaps, to explain the basic rationale of my diet. I'm not a great believer in calorie counting – it's never really worked for me in the past for several reasons, among them the fact that it's easy to get obsessed about what you're putting in your mouth and how much of it you should be eating. And I always end up hungry between meals anyway, further enhancing my obsession with food, all of which makes the diet unsustainable.

I've also tried variations on the Atkins diet, but I've come to the conclusion that eating fats, meat proteins and leafy green vegetables, to the exclusion of starchy carbs and fruit, is not really a great idea, particularly on a sustained basis.

And as for anything quite as dumb as cabbage soup diets, Israeli army diets, replacing meals with diet shakes/soups/cereals... Well, I'd just be setting myself up for a fall.

The diets that seem to make the most sense to me are those based around the concept of the Glycaemic Index (GI) or Glycaemic Load (GL). The reading I've done seems to suggest that following these principles – no simple sugars; eating little and often; balancing proteins, complex carbs, vegetables and fruit; controlling portion size – may well be the best way of balancing your body's glucose levels, thereby controlling feelings of hunger while shedding weight.

In order to make this work for me (given that I'm probably going to be following this diet for at least a year, if not for life) I have to be realistic. Because of my work, temptation is going to rear its ugly head pretty frequently (damn you, temptation), so I'm going to allow myself one meal a week where I can eat or drink what I like (within the bounds of moderation, of course).

And as well as coming up with my own recipes, I'm going to be taking plenty of inspiration from as many interesting foodie diet books I can find. You'll find images of three of my favourites on the left. Of them all, I find Ruth Watson's Fat Girl Slim the most appealing – it's written by someone who clearly loves her food, and the recipes (or at least all the ones I've tried so far) are delicious. Ian Marber's Food Doctor series is a little more earnest, but (I suspect) gets relatively quick results. I'm also intrigued by Antony Worrall Thompson's book, although I'm slightly disappointed by some of the recipes (I suspect the book was largely written by the team of nutritionists who get a mention on the back pages) – but it's worth using as a basis for experimentation.

If and when I find more interesting books, I'll let you know about them.

Chickpea mash for one (just multiply the quantities according to the number of people you're feeding)

1 400g can of chickpeas
1 tbsp 0% fat Greek yoghurt
1/4-1/2 tsp Spanish pimenton (spicy smoked paprika)
juice of 1/4-1/2 lemon
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Drain most of the water out of the chickpeas, but leave a little bit to keep things moist (I used one can's worth of water for four cans of chickpeas the other night). Pour into a saucepan.

Heat over a medium flame, then mash with a spud basher. You want to keep the texture a little chunky, so don't worry if you miss the odd chickpea.

Stir in the yoghurt, the pimenton, the lemon and seasoning. Chickpeas can be fairly bland, so check the flavourings and adjust according to need and taste.

It's easy to burn the chickpea mash if you keep it on a high heat, but it retains the heat fairly well, so if it's ready in advance, just put a lid on the saucepan and reheat gently, if necessary.