‘Thanks, Greg. And over to Zoe,’ Elise continues. ‘We really enjoyed your story last week about the troubles you had in Marks & Spencer. Any other anecdotes you’d like to share? Maybe about any diets you’ve tried so far?’ The look of desperation and pleading in Elise’s eyes is unmistakable. If I don’t provide her with some sort of worthwhile conversation, this entire segment will only be remembered for its use of bad language and boring responses from a bunch of uncomfortable fat people.
I know what Elise is after.
She wants me to talk about the cabbage soup diet.
For the past week I’ve been giving it a go, and made the stupid mistake of telling her about it on the phone.
I’ve been backed into a corner. I can either leave my friend swinging in the wind, or once again regale the world with a tale of my weight loss misfortune.
Sigh.
Sometimes being nice to your friends is a real pain in the arse.
The version of the story I’m about to tell the Stream FM listeners will be short and simple, and will leave out a majority of the gory details. But for the sake of accuracy—and because I have to fill the rest of this diary entry with something—I’m now going to recount the horror of my experience with the cabbage soup diet here in its entirety.
Now in my defence, I’ve never been one for going on a diet. I’ve simply never felt the need until the last few years. I’ve done little to no research into what kinds of diets exist—and whether they actually do you any good or not.
So hopefully I can be forgiven for thinking that the cabbage soup diet sounded like a good idea.
I’d Googled ‘lose weight fast’ and it came up as one of the first suggestions.
It sounded absolutely marvellous on paper—and extremely easy to plan for. Simply eat as much cabbage soup as you like, alongside a variety of other healthy meals, and drink only water and unsweetened fruit juice.
All I’d have to do is follow the regime of eating cabbage soup and other healthy food for a week, and ten pounds would come off my weight!
Ten frickin’ pounds, people!
‘If it’s that easy, we’ll win this competition for sure,’ I said to Greg after having read the details out to him from the computer screen.
‘If it’s that easy, everyone would be doing it,’ he replied cynically.
I ignored him.
If the cabbage soup diet didn’t work, then why were there so many websites on the internet dedicated to it? It must be a good diet . . . otherwise no one would be talking about it, would they?
Would they?
With a hale and hopeful heart I set about on the cabbage soup diet on a Monday morning, looking forward to being three-quarters of a stone lighter by the following Sunday.
Day one is okay.
It’s absolutely fine.
By the time nine o’clock in the evening rolls around I feel like I could eat a chair leg, but other than that, I feel good about myself and the diet.
During the day I’ve had three bowls of cabbage soup, drunk about five litres of pineapple juice, and eaten about twelve of my five a day in fruit. I’ve stuck to the diet plan religiously, and by the time I go to bed I really feel like I’ve accomplished something.
Okay, I need to get up to pee seven times during the night, but it’s all going to be worth it in the end!
Day two allows me more cabbage soup (obviously) as well as all the vegetables I can eat—and some carbs in the form of one jacket potato with a little butter.
I skip breakfast, because the last thing I want to eat at seven in the morning is broccoli and cabbage.
By the time lunch arrives I’m so ravenous that I eat my portion of cabbage soup at work in three nanoseconds flat, washing it down with apple juice and a pint of water.
The jacket potato doesn’t stand a fucking chance at tea time. I manage to make it through a bowl of cabbage soup as well.
I’m starting to dislike cabbage soup a great deal. Only forty-eight hours have past, but it feels I’ve already eaten more of the stuff than the population of war-torn Leningrad.
I only have to pee five times during the night, which I choose to see as a positive thing.
Day three dawns with me blowing the covers off the bed, thanks to the kind of flatulence that really shouldn’t exist outside a badly drawn comic strip.
The buggers don’t tell you this part on the websites, do they? There’s not a mention of how all that cabbage makes you gassier than a hot air balloon.
Today I can eat only cabbage soup, along with fruit and vegetables, excluding potatoes and bananas. Oh joy.
I eat a tin of pineapple chunks for breakfast, half a bowl of cabbage soup for lunch, and a pile of steamed vegetables for dinner.
I hate vegetables.
Limp green little packets of blandness, with all the excitement of an ‘Antiques Roadshow’ marathon.
What I wouldn’t give for some meat.
What I wouldn’t give never to look a cabbage in the face again.
Unfortunately, I have already lost four pounds, so the diet is actually working—which means I’ll have to stick to it.
Day four allows me the pleasure of eating up to eight bananas.
I’ve consumed all of these by the time lunch rolls around.
I’ve also farted so much in the office, it’s a wonder no one’s called the Health & Safety Executive to come down and take readings.
I have fucking cabbage fucking soup for lunch.
By three o’clock I’m feeling decidedly light-headed.
By six o’clock I feel like throwing up as I smell the cabbage soup heating in the microwave.
I force it down my gullet with all the pleasure of eating a bowl of fresh sick.
I fart my way to bed with arms and legs that feel like lead weights, and a tension headache forming across one eye.
How I’ve longed for day five to roll around. It means I get to eat some meat! Ten ounces of beef, along with up to six tomatoes.
Do you know how big a ten-ounce portion of beef is?
Not bloody much.
Not when you’ve had no meat for a week.
Still, I spend the entire day fantasising over the burger I’m allowed to eat for tea. And I’m going to fry the bastard thing as well. I don’t care what anyone says.
The cabbage soup I have for lunch is so laced with cayenne pepper to give it some flavour (any flavour) that it makes my mouth burn for an hour afterwards.
The people at work now have to make a decision. Do they avoid my backside to keep away from the constant stream of flatulence erupting from it? Or do they avoid my frontside to dodge the nuclear bad breath emanating from my mouth?
The aroma of frying beef that evening is the best thing I’ve ever smelled in the world, ever. I eat the burger as slowly as possible, luxuriating in every bite, along with the six fried tomatoes I’ve put with it.
By the time I go to bed I’ve actually stopped farting, and I drop off with a smile on my face knowing that there’s only two days of this hell left.
I’ve also dropped eight pounds!
Day six is Saturday and I don’t have to go to work. This is just as well as I’m barely able to stand upright for most of the day. I feel weaker than a day-old kitten, and spend the entire morning sitting on the couch staring at the ceiling, lost in a daydream where I’m mercilessly torturing a cabbage farmer. His imaginary screams for mercy give me no end of pleasure.
I still have to eat his produce at lunchtime though.
I can’t begin to describe my loathing for cabbage at this point. It’s a stupid green plant that tastes of vomit, looks like a diseased brain, and smells like a sewage works. It doesn’t matter what seasoning you put with it to make it taste better, it’s still a bland, pointless vegetable that leaves you feeling dreadful.
In the
afternoon I attempt to go out for a walk with Greg in the nearby woods. This goes relatively well until we reach a gentle incline. I barely make it halfway up before having to stop and go back to the car for a rest.
I feel like an eighty-five-year-old woman. I may have lost nine pounds at this point, but I’ve also aged fifty years—a rather extreme trade-off that I’m not happy with in the slightest.
Still, only one more day to go of this nightmare and then I can have Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Day seven, and I force Greg out of bed by creating a Dutch oven in the bedroom the likes of which no human being should ever be made to suffer. My poor bottom has been forced to endure so much activity this week I’m amazed it hasn’t dropped off due to exhaustion.
Today I’m allowed eat some brown rice with my cabbage. Oh whoop-de-do.
Nobody likes brown rice. It’s only ever eaten by people on diets and hippies who are too stoned to know any better.
Today I try sugar on top of the cabbage soup because, frankly, why the fuck not? Unbelievably, it doesn’t taste any worse than usual. It’s evident that my taste buds have shut down. To test this, I chew on a piece of kitchen roll. It tastes of cabbage soup.
My brain is so starved of proper nutrients that I forget my husband’s name for two whole minutes. I’m convinced his name is Grant until he manages to convince me otherwise, using simple hand gestures and a flip chart.
At seven o’clock, after my last bowl of cabbage soup (of which I manage two spoonfuls) I fart my way up the stairs and weigh myself.
I have indeed lost ten pounds.
Sadly, I’ve also lost the feeling in my toes, the ability to taste food, my long-term memory, and all hope of seeing the sun again.
By Monday morning I’ve come to the stunning conclusion that the cabbage soup diet is a load of horseshit.
Most of my weight loss appears to have been in water, as I pile three pounds back on by the end of the day—which should be impossible, unless you eat the entire cream cake selection in your nearest branch of Asda.
So to sum up, if you want to give your colon a workout, enjoy feeling dizzy, and want to develop a pathological hatred of vegetables belonging to the Brassica family, then go right ahead and try the cabbage soup diet. If, on the other hand, you want to actually lose some bloody weight, try something different.
I give a highly truncated account of my week-long experiment to Elise and the radio listeners.
‘Well, that does sound like something I’d have to think long and hard about having a go at! It might not be a diet for everyone!’ Will says in that noncommittal, politically correct way that commercial radio DJs always adopt about any subject, for fear of offending the wrong person and harming advertising revenues.
‘No it doesn’t!’ Elise agrees politely, in an equally irritating and bland manner. I’ve heard the girl call at least two people wankers so far this week in private, but you wouldn’t think that anything so negative could possibly come from the mouth of that sweet, attractive blonde sitting across the way from me, her headphones cocked adorably to one side.
It’s enough to make you sick.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to say about the effects of being a larger lady Zoe?’ Elise then asks me.
Hang on. I’ve done my bit. Why don’t you ask somebody else this?
What angle is she going for here?
‘How do you mean?’ I respond, suspicious.
‘Well, being large must have quite a negative impact on your life, yes?’
‘How do you figure?’
‘As a woman, I mean?’
Oh, you little bitch.
Now I know what she’s getting at.
Tears of embarrassment and rage prick my eyes as I realise what game my supposed best friend is playing. I’ve been manipulated into joining this competition, just so she always has someone to come to on air for the juicy material.
And this is the juiciest.
Greg and I have been trying for a baby on and off for years now, with no success.
In the natural course of a relationship like ours, a baby should have appeared on the scene a long time ago. That’s how it works, isn’t it? You meet someone, you fall in love, you get married, you buy a house, you have a baby.
Greg and I have successfully negotiated the first four, but the bouncing bundle of joy has eluded us. I’d like to say it’s something I don’t worry about constantly, but I’d be lying through my teeth.
Whenever I think about our lack of children I flash back to a conversation we had in the early years of our relationship. Greg had taken me to Thorpe Park as a birthday treat. I would have preferred a day in a spa, but he’d already booked the trip to the theme park before I had a chance to argue, so I had to go along with it.
It actually turned out to be a lot of fun. We’d only been together for a year and we were still in the kind of happy, honeymoon period that usually doesn’t end until one of you farts audibly in front of the other. In those salad days, it didn’t matter where we were; it just mattered that we were together. Even if this did mean following my boyfriend onto a series of increasingly horrific roller coasters that did my stomach and my hairdo no good at all.
Speaking of stomachs, neither of us had one, so we had no problems getting into the seats on the hair-raising rides dotted across the park.
Towards the end of the day we sat down on a conveniently located bench in order to rest our weary legs. The bench was right by one of the concession stands, which was surrounded by a horde of buzzing children intent on getting as many sweets out of their parents as possible.
Greg wrinkled his nose and pointed over to them. ‘Urgh. Can you imagine having to trawl around this place with one of those biting at your ankles all day?’ he said.
‘What? A kid, you mean?’
‘Yeah.’
I looked across at one boy of about three, holding up a bright green lolly to his mother with a beatific grin on his face. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think it would be kind of fun.’
Greg looked a bit surprised. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Why not? Kids are great. Especially cute ones like that boy with the lolly.’
Then it hits me . . .
Greg and I have never had ‘that’ talk. The one about having kids. Unbelievably, after a year, it’s never come up before. We’d talked about ex-partners, hopes for the future in our jobs, what kind of house we want to live in, and where we want to go on holiday—but had never broached the topic of children.
‘Um, do you want to have kids one day?’ Greg asks tentatively.
My heart rate rockets. This is one of those conversations that can make or break a fledgling relationship. If Greg is dead set against children we could have a major problem. ‘Yeah,’ I tell him quietly. ‘I would like them one day. You?’
He scratches his nose and looks away from me, towards where the little boy is now crying due to the fact he’s dropped the luminous lolly. ‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ he says.
‘Oh.’ I pick at a thread coming out of the seam of my jeans.
Greg turns back to me. ‘But you know what? If I ever did, I’d want them with you.’
‘Would you?’
‘Yeah. I reckon our kids would be gorgeous.’
Just like his smile.
‘And smart!’ I point out. ‘They’d be really clever.’
He grins. ‘And if it was a boy . . . he’d be hung like a donkey.’
‘Of course!’ I laugh and throw my arms around him.
Greg kisses me with a passion that makes me wish we were already on our way home. At that moment I feel a swell of contentment that warms my soul. I love this man more than words can say, and one day (when I’m past the age of thirty, obviously) I will happily bear his child.
At least that was the plan . . .
T
hen life got in the way. As did about a million calories.
By the time we started trying to get pregnant—several years after our theme park chat—I was overweight, unhealthy, and highly unlikely to conceive.
No-one ever, ever plans to get fat.
I am constantly irritated by people who think that fat folk are just lazy slobs who have let themselves get into the state they’re in via their own shortcomings.
It isn’t like one second you’re thin . . . and then you’re fat. It happens over months and years.
It happens because life gets in the way. Because at some point, unless you’re blessed with a bank balance that ends in a lot of zeros, you stop looking at yourself in the mirror because you’re too damn busy looking at the bills.
If you don’t get fat, then maybe you smoke too much, or drink too much, or hit your kids, or gamble—or any one of a thousand other bad habits that human beings fall into when they’re stressed to high heaven—thanks to the vagaries of day-to-day existence.
I’m not trying to make excuses for the fact I put on over five stone between the ages of eighteen and thirty-seven. All I’m trying to say is that I didn’t know it was happening until it was too late. When I did eventually realise I didn’t have the time or energy to do anything about it. There never was a baby past the age of thirty. Never was a small child to cart around the sweet shops of Thorpe Park on a sunny afternoon.
Instead all the sweets went in my mouth.
And now I’m thirty-seven and the likelihood I’ll ever have a baby is fast diminishing. It would be even if I wasn’t grossly overweight.
And who have I confided my fears, doubts, and worries about never getting pregnant to?
Elise Bailey.
‘What are you asking me, Elise?’ I say to her in the coldest voice possible.
Her face blanches. She knows what’s going on in my head right now. I can see indecision cross her face.
Does she let me off the hook and lose the strong material? Or does she soldier on and keep pressing me?
‘I’m just wondering if being so large has affected your life as a woman.’ She gulps almost audibly. ‘Some reports indicate it’s harder to get pregnant when you’re overweight. Have you encountered that issue by any chance?’
Fat Chance Page 6
