I have caught the common cold this week, giving Mum leverage to poke at my diet.
“If only you could eat chicken soup, then you wouldn’t be sick,” she said on the phone. I reassured her that I was fine because I had my potatoes, lemons, and carrot soup. “Oh Mary,” she said with a sigh.
I know the tone well, it comes out whenever she forgets that my behaviour has come directly from her, like over-accommodating strangers or being too extra when hosting parties …. and then there is dieting.
Like a lot my millennial chums, I witnessed my mum doing this thing called dieting, which meant that she couldn’t eat the same things as me.
Let’s begin with the Special K diet. A woman in a red swimming costume told the nation they could drop a jean size in two weeks if they’d replace two meals a day with a bowl of Special K. It was an awfully confusing time for the children.
“Why are you eating breakfast at night time Mummy?” I would ask.
“Because Mummy feels like cereal darling.”
“Don’t you want cheesy shepherd’s pie?”
Mum would shake her head miserably, and take another mouthful of her overpriced cornflakes.
In the early 2000s, I learnt that al-Qaeda and carbohydrates were evil. At first, I thought carbs meant the nice stuff, like squishy soft white bread, but according to Dr Atkin (an invisible doctor whose name appeared everywhere), bananas and carrots were baddies too. To make matters more complicated, buttery scrambled eggs and greasy bacon, the things that my dad had been nagged about eating in the past, were now goodies. Right.
Soon, calories and ‘fat-free’ became the thing, and yoghurts began to invade the fridge. They were not the fun yoghurts but dull müller pots that had Fat Free and Light written across them. They had also taken over the TV with adverts of horny models eating spoonfuls of it and screaming out in public places, “99 calories?!” in the same tone that someone may be shouting, “he’s dead!?”
It wasn’t just the adverts that were obsessed with diet, but the programmes as well. I saw countless obese people being weighed by some superior skinny presenter, who went on to disgrace them further by standing them next to a tube that was filled with all the food they had consumed in one week.
The obese person was summoned to a 4-week diet, and we were presented with the result via another weigh-in. They would then be forced to dance to celebrate their 10lbs loss. ‘Being a grown-up seems hard’, I would think to myself as I would eat another spoonful of my Ben and Jerry’s caramel chew-chew.
It took a whole new level when celebrities were getting in on the act with fitness videos and diet books. Carol Vorderman, who used to reveal letters on Countdown, had briefly turned my mum into a seed-pecking bird for a period of time with her ‘Detox for Life’ book. And don’t get me started on Gillian Mckeith…
I began to understand Mum’s ways more when a Jack Wills handbook came through the door. It had pages of models wearing tiny, checked bed shorts in log cabins, laughing and smiling with the hot, topless men. I wanted to be them. So I bought my own pair of checked shorts, but they didn’t quite look the same on me… and I feared the caramel chew-chew was to blame. And then, just as I was noticing this about myself, boys came along to confirm it.
“You have McDonalds arms,” my delightful 16-year-old boyfriend told me in the park one day.
And so it went, no more caramel chew-chew. I cut out the carbs (even the carrots). I read that Kate Middleton was doing the Dukan diet, so I did the Dukan diet. I drank Skinny Bitches* on my Friday night. I made broccoli soup and pretended to enjoy it. I drank green smoothies and pretended to enjoy them. I spent hours inputting approximate calories into an app. I also fasted once, only for a day, but then I lost my temper with a partner over something tiny and forgettable, so I diagnosed myself with an allergy to fasting.
And now all is at peace (kind of). I’m on the plant-based train and have been since 2018. Mum will roll her eyes at my nut roast at Christmas and will tease me about not being able to eat chicken soup when I’m sick…but all I do is utter the name ‘Carol Vorderman’, and she backs down.
I’m not sure what my future kids will say to me, but I’m very much looking forward to showing them how to turn a cauliflower into a chicken wing….
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