A sticky situation

The conflict between good and evil - it's something that's been part of the human condition for thousands of years. Whether it's religion or just individual conflicts that you're trying to resolve it's there. You can be talking about major world issues or trivial ones, but the principles are the same.

For me this week it was definitely a trivial matter. But when I found myself in a situation it made me think of those cartoons when you are younger. Except instead of having an animated angel on one side and a devil on the other, I had a chicken wing on one shoulder telling me to do the right thing... and a sticky toffee pudding telling me to eat it.

The thing is this at the start of this week one of my nearest and dearest told me I had to really try and not cheat this week. Just to prove to every one I could do it - that it was bad that this blog was just becoming a catalogue of failure. He later told me I was disgusting for sticking my finger in the butter dish whilst we were out at dinner. It was low carb, I was not cheating... he should have been proud. I acknowledge now this was not only disgusting, but also rude. I apologise.

On the other side I had another one of my nearest and dearest telling me to cheat and have sticky toffee pudding. I see now perhaps this was a tactic that I've deployed before. As a dieter if you're going to cheat... try and take someone down with you. It makes you feel far less guilty. So given twenty minutes later we were both tucking into a sticky toffee pudding if that was her plan it had certainly worked!  Note to self - I must try and avoid restaurants that serve sticky toffee pudding; nothing good can come of that desert.

The reason the chicken wing depicted the good in this situation was yet again I was low-carbing this week. Well I wasn't actually. In an effort to re-sell an old idea someone, somewhere decided to invent the new high protein diet. Can you see what they did there? I came across the book in my bookshelf having got it free with a magazine at some point.

Essentially the principles are the same as the low carb diets such as Atkins and Dukan - cut out the stodge. But there are differences to this diet. The free foods (meat, fish etc) are all the same. But... and it's a good but... your allowed one piece of bread a day, and you can eat as many vegetables as you like. A small difference but one that makes this diet pretty easy to stick to. I actually felt quite healthy though and the sticky situation mentioned before was the only time I cheated.

I do wonder whether it scuppers the science of a normal low carb diet though - where you are meant to go into something called ketosis where you get a furry tongue, smell a bit and importantly burn fat not calories. I know these symptoms weren't as severe this week, and maybe that's why I didn't see the dramatic weight loss you can on some of the other diets.

Just one pound down this week - but that bring me just shy of half a stone since I started this dieting adventure. Not amazing, but healthy levels of weight loss I'd say. Plus given I've got maybe another stone, or a stone and a half, to lose I need to pace myself to last the full fifty-two weeks without looking too thin! I have a round head, if I get too skinny I get all disproportionate... kind of like one of those bobbing statues you put on the parcel shelf of a car. And anyway think of the tortoise and the hare...slowly, slowly catchy monkey... I'll get there in the end.