Losing it

I’ve spent most of my life trying to lose weight and there’s absolutely nothing I don’t know about calories, ketones or cottage cheese.

I have consumed gallons of glutinous milk-shakes, swallowed fistfuls of fibrous pills and detoxed myself dizzy. I’ve even joined slimming clubs in the hope of humiliating myself into submission.

But nothing ever worked for long and it was all so boring and expensive…especially the slimming clubs.

French slimming clubs are no different from English ones. You pay to get weighed once a week by a celery-stick thin woman who clucks as she notes down your weight loss (or gain, in my case) while you stand there shivering with indignation and cold because it’s the middle of February and you’re wearing a chiffon sundress and no shoes. It’s worth a try but it fools nobody.

And while food is indeed an interesting subject, there’s a limit to the amount of enthusiasm I can drum up for endless discussions of fat-free fairy cakes, frozen yoghourt and Naughty Doughnuts. So I left the local slimming club before they threw me out.

However, I have finally discovered the secret to easy weight loss.

It started with nuts: peanuts, cashew nuts, hazelnuts…anything with a shell. I found myself writhing in agony at the mere whiff of a walnut.

As someone who can finish a jar of organic peanut butter at one sitting, this discovery came as a shock verging on the anaphylactic.

And once my doctor had ensured, through a series of scans and examinations of various bodily fluids, that my intestines had not taken up macramé and my womb was not about to drop out, she came to the conclusion that I was suffering from food intolerance.

Gill Baconnier intolerant to food? That is one oxymoron of a diagnosis.

And it didn’t stop there.

I suddenly became intolerant to gluten, too, which seems pop up in the strangest of places: vinaigrette, chocolate, crisps, beer…in fact, I’m having trouble finding anything to eat at all.

The Health Food shop is no help. Their sad little stock of gluten-free products consists of urine-coloured pasta, bread the texture of damp sand and biscuits that are so expensive they should be chained to the shelf.

I could, of course, get an allowance from the Social Security to enable me to buy these ersatz products masquerading as food, but I haven’t got the courage to fill in all the forms. I suppose I’ll just have to do without.

And that’s the secret. Do without. I’ve lost ten kilos so far so it works well.

But what I wouldn’t give for a Naughty Doughnut…