Sorry, but I can't resist...

For once, my lack of resistance has nothing to do with food. Nope – I'm succumbing to a strange urge to post one of the wedding piccies on this blog. From left to right, Brenda (my mother-in-law), my sister Lisa, my Mark (the one with the big smile on his face), Lisa's Mark, me (with the humungous great bouquet mum insisted on getting for me – it weighs a ton, but it smells delicious) and my mum, Caroline.

Oh – and some more good news. The scales this morning read 89.4 kilos. I'm pretty much back at last week's square one. Obviously yesterday's hike was either down to water retention or my subconscious trying to scare me back onto the diet.

Gloom, doom and disaster – and more than a handful of great meals

I've put on weight. When I stepped on the scales this morning, my weight was back up to 89.8 kilos.

On the other hand, there's a very good reason for that. On Friday, Mark and I got married in a quiet ceremony at the Chelsea Registry Office. Our two mothers were our witnesses, and the entire thing lasted about 20 minutes from a small interview with the registrar to check that our details were correct, to the bit where Mark kissed his new bride. OK, I know I'm going to have to get used to it, but that bit still sounds weird to me (sorry Mark!)

We spent almost as much time getting photographed as we did getting married, and were joined by my sister Lisa and her husband (also, confusingly, called Mark). After the photos were finished, we went for a slap-up meal at the newly Michelin-starred Wild Honey restaurant, http://www.wildhoneyrestaurant.co.uk. Not only was the food delicious, one of the owners, Will Smith, sent over a bottle of Château de Boursault's Champagne on the house, which impressed my mum no end.

This wasn't a weekend for sticking to the diet, I decided, and tucked into a starter of smoked eel served with sweet-sour slices of turnip, then had wild duck with spaetzle (a kind of Austrian gnocchi) and pomegranate. Then I added the coup de grace with a pudding of chocolate soup (a bit like a molten chocolate mousse) and nougat ice-cream (I have to admit, that, being unused to the sugar rush, I did feel a tad sick on the way home, but not sick enough to really regret tucking in with such relish).

We had some lovely wines, too – one of Wild Honey's strength is that most of its wines are served in 250ml carafes as well as by the bottle. I particularly enjoyed a Blauer Zweigelt from Austrian producer Anton Bauer (which smelled of flowers and currants) and a eucalyptus-scented Pinot Noir (the same grape used to make red wine in Burgundy) from Shadowfax in Victoria.

Mark's mum was staying with us that night, and we didn't do much. In fact, I joked to Mark that we must be the only couple to spend their first night of married life beached on the couch in the living room while watching a movie we'd recorded at Christmas.

The next day, we drove Mark's mum (Brenda) back home to Gloucester, then headed towards the Cotswolds for our one night of honeymoon. We spent this at the Trout Inn, http://www.trout-inn.co.uk/, where we had a pretty little room and another humungous meal. They, too, comped us a glass of Champagne (Perrier-Jouët NV) when they found out we'd just got married, to which we added a bottle of Descendientes de Palacio's Petalos del Bierzo, a rich, velvety red wine with lots of earthy, peppery spice and dark fruit, between us. I've obviously lost my head for wine (not that I've ever been much good at drinking in quantity) and found myself getting all giggly after the first glass or two, but I still managed to find enough strength to wolf down some crab and vichysoisse, then a plate of fillet steak, horseradish mash and wild mushrooms. Oh, and did I mention the rosemary-scented creme brulee?

We did have a lovely long walk the next morning, through frost-covered fields that ran alongside the Thames towpath. Laszlo romped ahead of us, looping his way through the long grass and then back towards us, his whiskers all covered in frost (and his legs covered in burrs, as we later discovered). Even though the temperature was hovering around freezing point, the icy landscape was breathtakingly beautiful and the sun shone weakly in a bright blue sky. All in all, it was a glad-to-be-alive moment.

So, despite the walk, it's no wonder I've put on a bit of weight over the past week. With any luck, it'll come off just as quickly as it went on. I'll keep you posted.

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...

Weigh in number six

There was a moment, a week or two ago, where I thought I was getting a bit stuck on a plateau. I only record my weight on this blog once a week, but I often step on the scales every couple of days to make sure I'm heading in the right direction.

For a few days there, it looked like I was hovering. My weight went down 400 grammes, then up 300 grammes, then back down again. I felt it was touch and go as to whether or not I'd record any loss at all next week (although I ended up 600 grammes down on the previous week).

All of a sudden, though, I've shifted another 800 grammes since last week, and am down to 89.5 kilos, bringing me at under 90 kilos for the first time in – oooh, let's just say a long time and leave it at that.

Jen, Coz, Leo and some wonderful wines

Mark and I spent Sunday with our friends Coz and Jen, and their new baby, Leo. We hadn't met Leo before – he was born less than a month ago – so I took a bottle of Champagne with us to celebrate.

It was 'just' basic Bolly – one of my favourite of the big brand non-vintage Champagnes. I like its richness – I've never been a big fan of over-priced battery acid, which (to my mind) some Champagnes seem to taste like. I'd decided in advance to allow myself to have a glass (maybe even a glass and a half) of wine. After all, we were celebrating and even though I'm on a diet, there are certain occasions (like celebrating the birth of a baby) when it would just be wrong to stick to the rules too closely (the knack lies in recognising these occasions while not making excuses to indulge too often on some spurious pretext).

We arrived, wielding our bottle of Champagne, and I'd no sooner handed it over than Coz (who is incredibly generous with his wines) said: 'That'll keep – I was planning on opening a bottle I brought back from Champagne last year,' and popped the cork on a truly delicious bottle of Pierre Gimmonet Oenophile vintage fizz. Gimmonet, for anyone who hasn't heard of him, is a talented producer who makes his own wines in the Champagne region rather than selling his grapes to a big company like Moet, Bollinger or Mumm (which is what most growers do). These 'growers' Champagnes' are increasingly trendy in hard-core wine circles, and I think they're often really good wines sold at (relatively) reasonable prices.

So I sipped delicately at my half flute of Gimmonet, then had a mouthful or two of the Bolly. But I'd been quite cunning. Knowing how persuasive Coz can be when he starts opening interesting bottles of wine (and how I have a professional weakness for tasting them), I'd set myself up as the designated driver for our return journey. This certainly curbed my enthusiasm, and much as I'd have loved to hoe into the Champagnes (or any of the other wines that followed), I knew I couldn't – and so did everyone else.

I'd told Coz and Jen that I was going to cook them lunch – they hadn't had the time or energy to cook properly since Leo was born – and I'd come prepared. Or rather, my quails had been prepared, and all I needed to do was to shove them in the oven. They'd been marinating since the previous evening in a mixture of Ras el Hanout (a blend of Moroccan spices that includes cumin, coriander, cinnamon and rose petals) and some olive oil. I'd stirred about three tablespoons of spice into a couple of tablespoons of oil, then rubbed all that yummy spiciness into eight quail, crammed them into a tupperware container and put them in the fridge overnight. When I got to Coz and Jen's, I put them in a pre-heated oven at about 200C for around 40 minutes, then served them with a simple salad enhanced with a few chopped walnuts.

I happened to mention to Coz that I was thinking of using the recipe for a tasting I'm planning to do at the end of the month: an investigation into which kinds of dishes work best with German Riesling. Inevitably, Coz insisted on opening a bottle of Josmeyer's Les Pierrets Riesling from the 2001 vintage – a wine he'd bought on a trip we all took to Alsace two or three years ago. It was lovely with the quail – but I'm still interested to see how a slightly lighter, slightly sweeter German Riesling will work with the dish.

Dessert was even simpler than the main course: a salad of peeled, sliced blood oranges with some chopped dates, all sprinkled with a teaspoon of rosewater (go easy on the stuff – it's very fragrant). Coz opened another bottle to go with this, a Beaume de Venise from a co-operative in the Rhône. It was just right with the pudding: light, fresh and not too sweet.

Then, to round things off, he brought out another bottle of wine, a Schloss Gobelsberg Gruner Veltliner – just because we happened to be talking about Austria. If you've never tasted Gruner Veltliner before, I urge you to track down a bottle of this marvellous grape – it's one of the most food-friendly white wines in the world, and the hallmark grape of the Austrian vineyards, in the same way that Malbec has come to be associated with Argentina or Shiraz with South Australia.

The Schloss Gobelsberg wine was outstanding – but, as I did with the Riesling and the dessert wine, I did no more than sip at it to taste it. The same can't be said for Mark, who snored loudly all the way home...

The perfect dinner?

In an ideal world, I'd rather not eat complex carbs at dinner (which I eat earlier than I usually would, around 7.30, to ensure I've finished digesting the meal before I go to bed). It can be tough, though, trying to find a recipe that really satisfies my hunger – and my appetite – without including some kind of stodge.

Last Friday, though, I made a great meal that hit the spot for me – and got a 'Wooh, yeah, baby' from Mark. It adds fuel to the theory that a bite of spice in a dish really helps to keep those hunger pangs at bay.

The recipe that follows should give you some idea of how to recreate the dish – but don't take my version as gospel. Like any salad, this Thai beef salad is open to artistic reinterpretation, as long as you keep the general principles in mind.

Thai beef salad for two

Baby spinach leaves – as many as you want
1/2 red onion, sliced thinly
1 small red or green chilli, chopped
1 medium carrot, grated coarsely
1/2 green (unripe) mango, peeled and cut into thin strips (if you can't find green mangoes, you can either use a green apple, which has a some of that sweet-sour thang going for it, or use a ripe mango, although the salad will be slightly different in character)
10-12 cherry tomatoes, halved
1-2 tbsp peanut or vegetable oil
a good handful of cashew nuts
300g steak (I used rump steak, but you can use sirloin or fillet if you want)
fresh coriander leaves, chopped (use as much or as little as you want)
fresh mint leaves, chopped (use as much or as little as you want)

Dressing:
4 tbsp nam pla (Thai fish sauce)
1 tbsp sesame oil
juice of 2 limes

Put the spinach leaves into a large bowl. Top with sliced onions, then sprinkle with the chopped chilli. Scatter the grated carrot and the green mango over the spinach, then throw in the tomato halves.

Heat a dash of peanut or vegetable oil in a frying pan and toast the cashews until golden (I find if I don't use the oil, the cashews seem to burn rather easily). Once toasted, chop coarsely and put aside.

Heat another tablespoon of oil in a frying pan (or smear over a griddle) and fry the steak. You can cook the steak as you like it, but I always think rare works best for this kind of salad). When it's cooked, take it off the heat, season, then slice. Place the slices on top of the salad, then scatter the nuts and herbs on top.

Mix the dressing ingredients together and taste for balance. You may find you need a bit more lime, a bit more nam pla or even a touch more oil.

Dress the salad and serve.

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).