sábado, 26 de enero de 2013

Fat, Glorious Fat


Slim bank account, fat waist. Welcome January!

I blame the supermarkets. As soon as the tinsel-dressed panettone was on display in late October, I went at it. Just a little taste, I said to myself.

So I sampled my way through November and then, well, December was almost kind of Christmas anyway.

I proudly resisted chocolate until Christmas Eve when I ate half a crate load of Ferrero Rocher - and that was after seafood, cold meats, duck, potato gratin and varied desserts.

More and more food - made principally out of sugar, cream and lard - kept finding its way to our kitchen cupboards and into our stomachs: gifts from friends, corporate presents of cakes and sweets my husband brought home... never mind the stuff we bought in. We were gifted a two ton Christmas log made with marzipan, which my husband and I don’t even really like. That went in under five days.
Then it was NYE 2012, time to celebrate! At this point we were sweating slightly when we squeezed into our party gear and ate the canned Christmas goodies for dinner - smoked salmon, pate and various cheeses, a couple of limp lettuce leaves on the side for show. We went out, and since the baby was staying with his grandparents, spent the following day on the sofa watching telly and, yep, you guessed it, stuffing our faces.

Come 3rd January I suddenly couldn’t sit down comfortably in my skinny jeans - the ones I’d been so proud to squirm into after my post natal diet. When you lounge around in pyjamas with an elasticated waistband, you don’t notice the spreading Michelin.

Oh well. Christmas is once a year and they say it’s what you eat between January 1st and 23rd of December that counts. So this week on a mission to put an end to the ugly chocolate binges, I bought a bag of sunflower seeds to nibble on. Like a pair of fat, greedy canaries my husband and I crunched our way through two bags whilst watching Breaking Bad. Today we bought a third.

And dammit, I still know there is a giant Toblerone in the pantry.