Z bites the low-fat bullet, and finds low-salt and low-sugar inside

Yes, well, I'll reiterate that I find it much easier to diet when I do it thoroughly. I can quite understand those people, whose pictures one sees in the popular press, who take dieting too far and become frankly too thin. We can all think of celebs who have done that. It's simpler to eat no fat or no carbohydrate or all vegetables or whatever the diet du jour is, than to eat just a little. And if you have a fat-free diet, you don't miss fat. The more you have, the more you want and it's ever so hard to judge just the right amount, in the shorter term at any rate.

Today, I've not eaten what I've wanted. For breakfast, I had an austere dish of porridge made with water, flavoured with a pinch of salt and some cardamon seeds. Lunch was late as I'd been at a meeting in Norwich, at which I accepted two cups of black coffee and refused the biscuits. For 18 months, I've effortlessly ignored biscuits. But today, the plate of chocolate biscuits beside me (how could my hostess, who is 8 inches taller than me and weighs 2 pounds more, have put them by me?) called to me in siren-sweet tones. I didn't have one. For lunch, I had lettuce, celery, two Ryvitas and two oatcakes. Then I had a bowl of plain yoghurt and some prunes. It didn't satisfy, frankly. When giving the family cakes and biscuits for tea, I ate an apple. I'd brought Squiffany and Pugsley some fruit jelly sweets from Italy and I did accept one. This evening, I found it hard, again, to not eat something tasty and fatty, such as cheese. I had another Ryvita, some raw carrot, more lettuce and cucumber.

Tonight, I'm cooking roast chicken, roast potatoes, carrots and spring cabbage. This will, at least, feel like real food. I think it will take me several days to adjust to a weight-loss diet.

In fact, an apple contains as many calories as a biscuit or two. But that isn't the point. If I have a chocolate biscuit or a small slice of cake, that will reinforce the sugar-and-fat craving that keeps us overweight. Both are addictive - not in a medical sense, like cigarettes or heroin, but in a colloquial rather than a clinical sense, in that they make you crave the next fix. If you eat a packet of crisps every day, you 'need' the salt (another culprit) and fat in those crisps. Frankly, tasty as Ryvita is, you ain't going to crave it. Cheap chocolate, containing enough cacao to raise the spirits and a whole lot of sugar, is almost impossible to eat a little of.

Pah. I'm stronger than chocolate. And I'll be back on the bike tomorrow.