If only....

If only I'd known that Your Greatest Guide to Calories, 1990 edition, was now worth £10!

If only I'd kept all my old diet books.

If only I had time to faff around trying to sell old crap on ebay.

I was googling around today for a calorie counter book - I can't believe that after a lifetime of trying to control my weight I actually do not possess one of these! I thought that my old favourite - Greatest Guide to Calories - might still be in publication (although I failed to find one in Tesco yesterday) and when I googled found only "antique" versions of it for sale on ebay and elsewhere. Interestingly the 2006 version is only worth £1.99.

So I'm currently considering the latest versions of calorie books and deciding which one to order. Why? I'll tell that story some other time. I have to laugh when I look at the various guides from years gone by - they started out life as Calorie Counters, then Fat started to become important and they began to include this info, too. Now it's Calories, Fat and Carbs. Tells a good story of diet history. Today's version is, by the way, called the Calories, Carb and Fat Bible. I have to laugh at the Bible bit.... dieting is the new religion??? Well maybe not so new, I guess...

I'm a walking case story of diet history. It all started back in the 70's when I left school. My first day at work, the department Manager, Tony Greenhalgh, took me to one side for a chat. Amongst the general "welcome to Royal Insurance" blurble, he mentioned that I was a nice slim young girl and that I'd probably been involved in sports at school. He was right, I'd played netball for the school and generally didn't mind getting stuck in to all the PE sessions we did. Hockey being my least favourite (a winter sport) and Netball and Athletics being the ones I really liked. He commented that making the transition from active schoolgirl to sitting at a desk all day was quite a big one and he recommended that I join a sports group at work. We had a staff sports facility (and bar) and in his opinion, it would be good to get involved in things like that. Otherwise, I might start to put weight on. He'd seen it happen before. I remember mentally rolling my eyes at this - Tony Greenhalgh was a big fat, ever so slightly sleazy looking guy in his 40's. What would he know about it?

So, I dismissed his advice and the nearest I ever got to the staff sports hall in the 15 years I worked at Royal was the bar. Now that I did like!

Slowly but surely I started to gain weight. By the time that I was 18 I was starting to feel fat, although I'm sure I wasn't really. So I looked at the diets in the Vogue Body & Beauty Book (also on sale from ebay for about a fiver) and the Cosmopolitan Health and Beauty Guide. I'd orginally bought these books because I was interested in make up and hair and skincare and stuff, but they had very interesting diet sections.

My diet of choice was the Helena Rubinstein "crash off 10lbs in one week" diet. Originally devised by Madame Rubinstein in 1938. The menu was more or less similar each day and was:
Breakfast - half a grapefruit and black coffee
Lunch - 1 egg, 1 slice melba toast, 1 orange
Dinner - grilled steak, lettuce, tomato, half a grapefruit

Occasionally, dinner would be eggs instead of steak.

I still have my copy of the book - pencilled in next to the daily menus, you can see my scribbles where I've "cheated". Stick of chewing gum, mushrooms and onion with the steak, ryvita instead of melba toast (which was quite a hard to find exotic food stuff back in those days in the UK!). Oh and I also had some Fresca (diet drinks had launched in the mid-70's) and a splodge of salad cream one day.

I can't remember the results I got after that week, but I can remember how bloody hungry I was all the time and how I got sick of steak. And it was the beginning of my descent into diet hell and a lifelong battle with my weight. How wise Tony Greenhalgh turned out to be - I should have just joined that staff sports club instead.

If only......

Another year over, a new one just begun.....

Quick update on Christmas. Well, we had a nice time. Nice as in nice, not as in boring.


My roast beef Christmas lunch went very well. At the very last minute I found a meat thermometer for sale in Sainsburys so was feeling pretty confident of success with my first ever attempt at roasting a joint of meat. However, in retrospect, I feel that what I should have purchased is an oven thermometer! That damn oven of mine is SO hot! At about 45 minutes before the recommended cooking time for "medium" beef, I stuck the thermometer in to see how it was doing. "That looks done" Roy announced as he passed through the kitchen for another bottle of wine. I shushed him and told him to wait to see what the thermometer said. I was quite alarmed to see the temperature reading going up and up and up.... yes, it was done. Well done - not medium. Luckily I was able to whip it out of the oven then, while it was done but perfectly moist and not over cooked. I'll know better next time. Before and after pics are here...







Spuds with semolina? Yeah they were good. But I think they'd have been good in any case - no real need for the semolina, I don't think. That said, given that I have a huge tub of semolina (Had to buy a 3kg bag last summer just to get one tablespoon out for a crabcake recipe!) then I might as well find ways of using it up.....


New Years Eve was ok. We stayed in, ate party food and drank lots of fizz at Gary and Renee's place. Emma and Jan were there too. Roy and I left shortly after 1am - we phoned a cab thinking it would be ages before it turned up and it arrived within 10 minutes!


So here I am sitting here pondering the year ahead and feeling quite overwhelmed at the things I need to do (or want to do) and haven't yet started on. Which, of course, is the perfect excuse to procrastinate on them and not get on with it.


We're going out somewhere tomorrow. Don't know where. But just out.