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You hear today from a disappointed man – older, sadder, slightly wizened and careworn, but wiser. If you’ve been following my diabetes-busting diet, sorry, this posting is on a totally different topic (but stay tuned – things are not looking at all bad there). No, this article is about how I fell out of love with Apple’s Mac OS X Lion operating system, and how I Did Something About It.

Shock Horror! Ian Piper, Fanboi, Apple Evangelist, Supporter Of All Things From Cupertino, fails to like an Apple product?

‘Fraid so. Mind you, I’ve been consistent. I’ve been faintly irritated by Apple’s ostensibly “upgraded” operating system since the day I installed it. With time, familiarity and the mellowing of temperament that accompanies age and experience that irritation has hardened into a deep loathing, a searing hatred, a despite that permeates the deepest core of my being. Oh, that counterintuitive scrolling behaviour! Oh, the disappearing Library! Oh, the children’s-crayon user interface! Oh, what they did to Mail! Oh, the humanity!

… ahem, sorry.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d simply been able to unwind the installation. After all, you’ve always been able to do that. Apple has been pretty good about letting you roll back to earlier OS versions. Not that it has been necessary, since up until now there has been a uniform improvement in the quality and capability of the product.

Up until now. Google Lion on the net and you will see that Apple’s most recent OS release has received a widespread raspberry from the cognoscenti of the net. Beyond my little wobble above, I’m not going to rehearse the manifold woes of this product. Hey, you can use a search engine, and you probably wouldn’t be reading this unless you also had an issue with ol’ Leo. However, perhaps the most crowning indignity is that, on the face of it, there is no going back. If you’ve bought a recent Mac, you’ve got Lion on it, and even if you own a legal copy of Snow Leopard (a truly great Apple product, by the way), you’ll find that you cannot install it. Seriously. Your Mac will go all grey-screen and mimsy on you, and will downright refuse to install it.

Well, folks, the great news is, I have found a way to sort this. You may have seen various dodges on the net involving hacked OS installations, target mode tomfoolery and other such solutions. Scary stuff, and, as it turns out, unnecessary. As I write I have successfully put Snow Leopard back onto my iMac – an iMac that has until now just refused to play ball. It’s easy, and here’s how you do it.

Just a plug, by the way: I had some great advice on how to do this from Drew Reece and Dilip Rathod of the UK Midlands Mac User Group. Very clever and helpful folks.

Just get on with it, eh?

Here’s what you need:

• The Mac where you want to “downgrade” Lion to Snow Leopard.
• A second Mac running anything other than Lion (don’t worry, you’re not going to damage or even modify anything on this Mac – unless you do something silly, in which case, don’t blame me!). It will need a DVD drive and a Firewire socket.
• An external Firewire hard disk (USB might do, dunno).
• A legal retail copy of Snow Leopard (no hackery needed here).
• A copy of Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware, google it).
• A copy of MacOSX-File (I found MacOSX-File-0.66.dmg on the web).

Once you have these, here’s what you do.

1. Attach the Firewire disk to your second Mac.
2. Put the SL disk into that second Mac.
3. Run the SL installer and install it onto the Firewire disk. If you’re like me, that will install Mac OS X 10.6 (the original version).
4. Reboot from the Firewire disk while it is still on the second Mac.
5. Update it to Mac OS X 10.6.8 over the net (this is really important – the original retail version of SL will grey-screen if you try to boot a new Mac with it).
6. You now have a bootable SL 10.6.8 disk. Attach it to your Lion-infested Mac and boot from it (Shut the Mac down, restart it while holding down the Opt key and choose your Firewire disk).
7. All being well, you now have a Mac running 10.6.8 off of an external disk. Time to sort out the internal disk.
8. You did a backup, right? Time Machine is no help here, BTW – if your Lion installation is backing up to Time Machine, you need to do a separate backup, because a Lion Time Machine backup cannot be restored (AFAIK) onto a Snow Leopard equipped Mac. Just one more li’l irritation.
9. Now install MacOSX-File-0.66.dmg. This is just a set of perl utilities that make Carbon Copy Cloner work better as far as I can see.
10. Now install Carbon Copy Cloner.
11. Zap your Lion Mac’s hard disk (you did a backup, right?). Use Disk Utility or something similar.
12. Bid a tearful farewell to Lion.
13. Clone your Firewire disk onto your heretofore-Lion-equipped hard disk. Imagine cheesy elevator music playing softly in the background while this happens, because it is not quick.
14. Set the internal disk as the disk to boot from (Use the Startup Disk System Preference panel) and reboot.
15. You now have a Mac that is running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 from its hard disk. You can eject the Firewire disk, install your applications and restore your Documents folder (at least) from your backup (er, you did… never mind).
16. There is no step 16. Hurrah!

I suppose I ought to add one of these tiresome legal get-out clauses at this point. This worked for me, but who knows whether it will work for you? Try it, don’t try it, but take responsibility for your own actions, eh? If it all blows up in your face, don’t blame me.

Here is a mental image for you. Go to the fridge now and find a normal 250g pack of butter. Put it on a table. Then imagine another three packs alongside it, so you have four in a row. Now add another three rows behind the first, so you’ve got 16 packs in a rectangle. Now put three more rectangular layers like that on top. You have a block of 64 packs of butter, which is 16 kg. That block of fat is a little less than what I have lost over the last few months: I’ve come down from 77.0 kg to 60.5 kg.

That seems absolutely astounding to me. You see, at the beginning of this business, while I was a little tubby, I wasn’t really obese. And while I’m fairly skinny now, I’m not exactly skeletal. Visualising that mass of butter dispersed around my frame is difficult: where was all that stuff? There is an important message here about how fat builds up in our bodies and has such devastating effects in our health. All of us are probably much fatter than we need to be for our health, and probably a lot of that extra mass is hidden deep inside our bodies, out of casual sight. The current theory about Type 2 diabetes is that build-up of fat in the tissues of the pancreas and liver is a major cause of the failure in insulin production. So maybe a key to tackling the Type 2 diabetes epidemic is to first tackle our poor diets.

So, here I am, smug as all get-out, having gone through an eight-week trial by calorie, and I’m done. I can wheel out the ice-cream, the chips and the beer again, right?

Well, no, not really. That’s the last thing I want to do at the moment. I do indeed want to loosen the reins a bit, and it will be good to have relatively normal meals with the family again. But actually, I’ve rather grown to like being slim, and never feeling bloated and over-full, and continual slight hunger can be a strangely addictive feeling. No, what I really want to do is get things sustainable. So I’ll be ramping up my calorie count slowly and steadily, and I’ll be ready to put the brakes on again if my weight starts to climb.

And let’s not forget what this was all about in the first place. It’s about the prospect of checking and reversing the progress of Type 2 diabetes. The last eight weeks have demonstrated to me that I can take a different approach to tackling this illness, and it can be more successful than the drugs that I’ve had pressed upon me for the last five years. Ove most of that time I’ve been popping one pill or other with really not much effect, when all along the key to bringing down my blood sugar levels was simple – eat less, and particularly eat less refined carbohydrate. I haven’t taken any drugs for the last two months, and my blood sugar has been pretty well normal throughout. Within just a couple of days of starting the diet it was way down from before, and it has continued to drop. My fasting blood sugar level in the morning is typically 5.3 – 5.5 (the final measurement on this trial was 4.8, which is breathtaking).

By aggressively bringing down my weight, the plan has been to see whether the resultant stripping out of fat from my pancreas and liver has enabled my system to start handling its glucose-munching responsibilities like a good citizen. What I need to do now is to test whether that is the case. I’m seeing my GP again this coming Friday to get the results from the final blood test of the trial, and I will be pressing him again to arrange for some tests. I would like to see the results from insulin sensitivity tests and glucose tolerance tests, along the lines of those in the Newcastle study. I’d then have a comparison against a baseline. The last time we spoke my GP dismissed (as only a GP can dismiss) testing beyond the normal quarterly diabetic tests, but I think we need more than that. I’d like to know how successful the hard work of the last two months has been.

And what if I’ve failed? There is a real possibility – if you listen to my GP, a racing certainty – that actually I haven’t reversed my diabetes at all, but simply have lowered my blood sugar by eating less, and “bought myself another year of health”. Well, at the very least I’ve shown that I can control my glucose levels far more effectively by diet – by a proper, clear-minded understanding of the impact of diet – than by using drugs, and I’ve cast off more than two stones of unlamented flab in the process. And if that’s not a modicum of success, I don’t know what is.

More to the point, I’ve got myself into a more healthy way of living. I’m eating better and exercising better than I ever have before, and I’m feeling great with it. The key now, it seems to me, is to make this sustainable.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more news on how my body responds to more conventional eating. And I hope to have some real test results to talk about.

This week’s diet tips

As you will have seen in these postings over the last eight weeks, I have featured a lot of soups. Soup is good – filling, warming and not too calorific. So this week, I’m featuring two that I’ve tried during the diet: one that has become a staple, and one that I’ve tried just recently. And as a bonus, a final tip.

First, carrot and coriander. It could hardly be easier. Just peel and slice 600g carrots (about 240 cal), top up to 2 litre with hot vegetable stock (use a stock cube – it will add no more than about 25 cal to the whole thing) and cook until the carrots have softened (about 20 minutes). Add a good couple of handfuls of coriander leaves (dried will do at a pinch) and whizz to a smooth texture with a hand blender. Season to taste with salt and pepper. A typical 300 ml bowl of this soup will have no more than 50 calories. Far nicer than the commercial stuff, and of course you know exactly what is in it.

Second, pea and mint soup. This is inspired by a recipe by Heston Blumenthal. I’ve held off from making this one until just this week, because pulses are generally higher in calories. Indeed, this one is almost twice as calorific as the one above, but it is a really great flavour – just eat less of it.

Simmer 550 g frozen peas (350 cal) in 1 litre water for no more than 5 minutes. Dry-fry an onion (45 cal) and a couple of cloves of garlic until they begin to brown, and add to the peas. Add about 10-15 g fresh garden mint leaves (sorry, but dried is not a substitute here) and whizz to a smooth texture. Season with 1-2 tablespoons of Thai fish sauce (this will go some way to substituting for the savoury saltiness of the ham in the original recipe). It is astonishingly good stuff. This quantity will do four good bowls, so about 90 calories per bowl.

The final tip is more of a technique than a recipe. I take no credit for it, having seen that young Mr Oliver do this on the telly the other day, but it is such a neat trick that I tried it, and want to pass it on. It’s a simple way to poach an egg.

I used to poach eggs in simmering water with a tablespoon of vinegar added to encourage the white not to disperse around the pan. Even so I often lost some of the white in the cooking water, and the resulting egg is a bit watery (and, let’s face it, slightly acidic!). I’ve also tried those pans with the little hemispherical poaching dishes set into them, but they seem so fiddly and the result seems more like a fried egg to me.

So, here’s what you do. Get a ramekin or some other small container, and line it with cling-film. Smear a thin film of oil if you must (Mr Oliver says it prevents the cling-film from sticking to the cooked egg, but I don’t think it’s necessary) on the inside, then break an egg into it. Bring up the sides of the cling-film and twist the top to wrap the egg up in a parcel. Try not to leave too much air inside the parcel. Seal it by tying it in a knot (I have a nice little bag sealer thing that works just as well) and drop the parcel into simmering water. Leave it for 4 minutes. Lift the parcel out, snip the top and peel off the cling-film. You will have a perfectly cooked white, a completely liquid yolk, and no wastage. It also looks rather nice.

Time to stop

Anyway, that’s it. If you have been, thanks for reading. If you are a Type 2 diabetic and are inspired to try this out, I have to say that it has been an almost completely positive experience. You really should talk to your doctor before embarking on this journey, but from my perspective there has been nothing to lose (apart from all that flab) and plenty to gain (like your health). So if you do this, may I wish you the best of luck.

And finally, a shameless plug. I have been putting my experiences with Type 2 diabetes, carbohydrates and the reset diet into a book, and will be publishing this in all likelihood early in 2012. Keep an eye out for “Falling up a cliff: fighting back against diabetes”.

Week seven gone, and really nothing much new to report. Living on low rations has become a fairly comfortable way of life now, so it’s really not a problem to keep going. My weight has come down by somewhere between 0.5 and 1 kg over the last week, and blood figures are still exactly the same – between 5.0 and 6.2, centred around 5.6.

I’m into the final week now and the question going around in my head is – what’s next? At the very least, it looks like I have the beast under control, so continuing with good eating habits and exercise seems like a no brainer. On the other hand, I can’t continue to live on 600 calories a day, so how do I make this sustainable?

I think the key is going to be taking it slow: I’ll increase my calorie intake starting next week to, say, 900 per day (luxury!) for a week, then assuming that I don’t balloon back out to 77 kg, up to 1200. That’s twice my current intake, so it will be interesting to see whether I can keep my weight – and, more important, my glucose levels – at healthy figures.

OK, as I say, nothing much going on this week – well, work is absolutely manic, and I’ve been pulling too many late-night writing and coding sessions recently, and maybe that’s why the diet hasn’t been much on my mind – so straight on to this week’s recipe tip.

This week’s recipe tip

This week it’s a low-rations variation on a classic – moussaka. Now, this sounds mad, since classic moussaka is throbbing with calories, what with the aubergines fried in olive oil, lamb mince, potatoes, cheese and other naughtiness. However this version captures some of the essence of the original, and is, in and of itself, a nice dish. I’m taking no credit for this – my wife created it and all credit to her for doing so.

Slice a small aubergine (about 300 g or 45 cal) into half-inch thick slices. Spread on a plate and sprinkle with salt. Leave for 30 minutes then rinse off the salt and pat dry. For me this step is essential since it takes away a significant bitter taste from the vegetable.

Now dry-roast the slices in the oven at 180 degrees for about 20 minutes – the slices will dry out and get slightly firm – neither crispy nor soggy, you’ll know it when you see it.

While that’s going on, make a tomato-based sauce by dry-frying an onion (150 g, 45 cal) and a couple of cloves of garlic (negligible), then adding a 400 g can of tomatoes (100 cal), 150 g Quorn mince (I’d never previously have willingly used this, but it is surprisingly convincing in a dish like this, and it’s only 1 cal per gramme) and a lot of thyme, a pinch of cinnamon and – really important – nutmeg. Cook together into a sauce.

Now slice up 100 g mushrooms (25 cal) (make them into vertical slices, like little T-shapes, so they layer well).

Time to assemble everything, just like a classic moussaka. Start with a bit of the sauce, then layer aubergines, mushrooms and sauce. Try to finish up with mushrooms on the top.

Once done, sprinkle with some salt and pepper and cook in the oven for another 30 minutes maximum.

The total calories for this dish come out at 375, but shared between two consenting adults your ration is less than 190 cal.

The end is in sight – I’ve completed three quarters of my trial, and since I did a mid-week update I’ll keep this brief. It’s all going fine, with another 1.5 kg off in the last week and blood figures continuing around the 5.5 mark. I’m seriously thinking about digging out my braces since my trousers are getting very slack around the midriff… Mind you, my wife has threatened a degree of retribution unseen since the days when I considered waistcoats to be stylish – more specifically, since the day I found that all of my waistcoats had unaccountably disappeared from my wardrobe (moths ate them all?) – if I do start wearing braces again.

I just wanted to reiterate, in case anyone reading this is inclined to do a similar thing to me, that it’s OK. It is hard work, and it there are times when it has been very hard work, but at the moment it’s easy. Actually, on many days I’m well inside 600 calories, and sometimes down around the 400 mark. Unsustainable? Of course. Worth it? If it improves my health, definitely.

This week’s recipe tip

This week it’s chicken with ratatouille. The quantities here will feed two adults with 250 cal of goodness each.

For the ratatouille, dry-fry a medium onion (150 g is 45 cal) and a couple of cloves of garlic, all finely chopped, for about five minutes over a brisk heat. Keep it moving so it doesn’t catch. At the end of this it should be nicely browned. Add a 400 g can of tomatoes (about 100 cal), a chopped red or green pepper (about 150 g = 25 cal) and a chopped courgette (100 g = 20 cal). Add some boiling water and simmer for at least 30 minutes until thickened (it will improve with further simmering up to an hour). Season with salt and pepper.

For the chicken, just dry-roast or griddle two chicken breast fillets (a typical breast is about 150 g and 150 cal): it’ll take about ten minutes maximum.

Serve the chicken breasts whole or in thick slices, with the ratatouille spooned over.

I had to do an update today, even though it’s only half-way through the week, because of two things that have happened since my last bulletin.

First, I hit my target weight today: 64 kg or 10 st 1 lb. Why this figure? Because this is the level at which my BMI is below 23.0. Obviously I need to keep at it, and I’ll see where I can get to, but it feels really good to have had a target and met it (more than two weeks ahead of schedule).

The second reason for the update is that not all medics are as skeptical as the GPs I’ve been talking to: it turns out that I’m not alone! A Channel 4 programme two days ago (you can see it here:  http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-food-hospital/4od) featured a man who did more or less what I’m doing, and has, it seems, successfully reversed his diabetes. The programme actually tackles several people who are trying to address serious health issues  (like breast cancer and migraine as well as Type 2 Diabetes) by diet, and is fairly interesting viewing.

Anyway, that’s it. I’ll report again next Monday, at the six-week mark.

Five weeks out of eight gone, and it’s still going well. Two kilogrammes off this week and only one left to get to my target weight. I’m getting thin everywhere – my wife compared my appearance unfavourably with that of Woody Allen yesterday, which was lovely. My blood figures are indistinguishable from a non-diabetic and I feel great.

Sorry, there’s a rant coming

I have to say that I am less happy with the medical folks. I met with my GP last week to talk over the test results at the half-way mark. The results were excellent, with the HbA1C figure at 6.1. That, incidentally, is short for haemoglobin A1C and it is a measure of long-term glucose control. In a nutshell, this measures how high your blood glucose has been on average over the last 8-12 weeks – it specifically measures the levels of glycosylated haemoglobin (formed when glucose molecules in the blood stick to haemoglobin molecules). It is not the same as the measured level of glucose in the blood, though by coincidence the ranges are about the same: for normal people blood glucose levels are around 3 – 7 before meals, and HbA1C levels are 3.5 – 5.5. HbA1C levels for a diabetic under good control are 6.5 – 7, while for those under poor control the levels can be anywhere north of 10. So, with a figure of 6.1, where am I on the spectrum? Well, going back to the paper published by the Newcastle group, I am bang on target – exactly where the successful patients were in the study, in fact. And statistically, towards the top end of pretty well normal.

So why am I irritated? Because of the ingrained skepticism of those medical folks, that’s why. My GP’s assessment of the results (their blood tests and my daily blood and weight measurements) could be paraphrased as “This is great. Your diabetes is under good control. But I don’t believe that this means a reversal. You’ve probably bought yourself another year of health, but you still have a progressive condition”.

Gee, thanks.

I asked what it would take to demonstrate that my diabetes was reversed (if indeed it has been by the end of my trial – even I don’t think it’s a done deal). He didn’t really have an answer – it doesn’t look as though they are interested in agreeing to tests for hepatic and pancreatic triglyceride measurements, or insulin sensitivity, or even glucose tolerance. The best he could suggest was regular HbA1C measurements over the coming months. Hardly a ringing endorsement for what could be one of the most exciting opportunities for dealing practically with what is shaping up to be the biggest avoidable health problem in Western society.

So I asked him, why, given the number of diabetic patients they must have to see at just my local practice (I estimate that for a town of 6000 adults there are probably 150 Type 2 diabetics going in and out of this one surgery) they are so ready to roll a pill across the desk and resign themselves to increasing costs for the future progression, rather than give people a really stark message about fixing their diet?

Well, it turns out that diabetic drugs don’t cost the practice much, provide an instant if short-term fix and people don’t have much will-power when it comes to improving their lifestyle. I don’t buy that, personally. Lots of people are intelligent enough to stop smoking and drinking when it affects their health, and these are really addictive drugs. I think doctors should trust more in people’s ability to fix their own health problems when there is a clear and obvious way to do it. And it would be great if they had a little bit more faith in well-executed research. In summary, if indeed I do manage to reverse my diabetes, it will be in spite of head-wagging skepticism from a medical profession that prefers pumping you full of cheap drugs for a short-term fix over spelling out practical lifestyle measures to fix your health. Small wonder we have a Type 2 diabetes epidemic.

I left my GP with an offer that I would be delighted to talk with, mentor, encourage other diabetics who want to try what I’m doing. I doubt whether the practice will take me up on that offer.

Right, rant over.

This week’s diet tip

This week I’m going to talk about drinks. The diet doesn’t allow for alcohol of course, so I’m afraid that’s out. Incidentally, let’s get rid of a minor myth about alcoholic drinks. A lot of people (including me, until I actually looked into it) assume that wine and beer are high in sugar. They are not. Red wine is typically around 0.6% sugar and beer (as in normal British beer) can be as low as 0.05% in sugar. Obviously some wines are higher, like sweet white wines and fortified wines like port and sherry, and some beers like stouts are also higher in sugar, but for most alcoholic drinks that have not been fortified, the sugar has been almost all used up in fermentation. That’s not to say that they are low in calories… the alcohol itself is highly calorific. So a typical (for me, anyway) 175 ml glass of wine has about 110 cal, as does a 50 ml glass of whisky (roughly a healthy double). And that’s why they are out of the question for this diet. Sigh.

So what am I drinking? A lot of black coffee and teas without milk. I’ve tried out a whole range of different teas, and I can recommend these (mostly Twinings):

• Earl Grey with a squeeze of lemon juice
• Blackcurrant and vanilla (my favourite)
• Blackberry and nettle
• Orange, mango and cinnamon
• Peppermint (which used to fill me with disgust, but somehow my tastebuds have adapted)
• White tea (this doesn’t mean tea with milk – it’s a type of tea, and very refreshing it is too)
• Golden oolong

Alas, I cannot recommend camomile…

Now, try this for a nice way to drink coffee. Take a single shot of espresso, top up in a normal-sized mug with hot water (OK, that makes it an Americano). Cut about 1/4 inch from a vanilla pod and drop it in. It will give a lovely infusion of vanilla flavour into the coffee. You could use a few drops of vanilla essence instead, but I think that can have sugar in it.

What else? Occasional soft zero-calore fizzy drinks for variety, though I’m not a fan. A lot of water. I probably drink 2 – 3 litres of various drinks every day.

End of bulletin. Three weeks to go, and yah-boo-sucks to the medics.

Well, I’ve done four weeks on the Type 2 Diabetes reset diet – the halfway mark. Time for a look back and a look forward.

My daily fasting blood sugar measurements continue to be well in the normal range, and my weight is still coming down steadily – another kilogramme off this week. It’s becoming very noticeable in physical terms – I really am starting to look a bit skinny, a word I haven’t used about myself in probably 40 years. Having discovered a waist a couple of weeks ago, I realise that I also have things called ribs. Whoa, what other physiological discoveries do I have in store?

Actually, the current phase of this diet feels quite different from the first couple of weeks. I’ve had much more of a problem with hunger this week, though I have continued to eat reasonably well – does this indicate a different type of metabolism going on?

I’ve been thinking a lot more about what this all means for diet and health. I’m coming to the conclusion that a lot of what we think about good eating is misplaced. Most nutritionists still talk about the need to eat plenty of carbohydrates. Even the Diabetes UK website recipe pages (for example, this: http://goo.gl/nAlPV) are heavy with muesli, oats, rice, couscous and honey. With respect, I don’t think so. When I wrote last week about carbohydrates and craving I realised that maybe these are very closely related. Carbohydrates are slightly insidious beasties in that they are both comforting and addictive. Eating bread, pasta, rice and other such refined carbs is satisfying – they have the capacity to give an instant fill and available energy. That’s why carbohydrates have traditionally been the food of the poor – they are a cheap and quick satisfying fix for hunger. That is fine of course when you have a lifestyle involving lots of hard work – instant energy intake is used up. The problem comes when the amount you want to eat is far more than the amount you need to eat. That’s where I think the problem starts for a lot of us with the Western diet.

Eating carbs results, I believe, in short term satisfaction followed by craving. I’m a classic example of the result of this. For many years refined carbs were the cornerstone of my diet, giving me instant hits of energy. Of course, the bits of me that get most exercise are my typing fingers (hey, at least I touch-type, so all ten digits get a workout), and like most people I have an otherwise sedentary life. So that instant energy hit doesn’t get used, and is turned instead into flab. I have no business eating food with highly available energy – I should be consuming stuff that takes more work to digest. My calorie profile should be far lower in carbs and much higher in good oils, protein and green vegetables. Turns out that protein is a better filler than carbs anyway, another good reason to eat it.

Whatever is behind this different hunger sensation, it’s been hard keeping to the diet. We had friends visit at the weekend, and I can tell you that it is torture to sit in on a feast – venison casserole, pear and chocolate tart, wonderful breads and cheeses, nice wine – and to have to restrict yourself to a salad and chicken with vegetables and water on the side. The company was delightful and the conversation was lively, which went some way to keeping my mind off food and drink, but it was still hard work being good.

Anyway, that’s enough whining. I’m having a mid-term discussion with my GP this week and it will be interesting to see how the recent blood test results look.

And looking forward to the next four weeks? If the last week is anything to go by, I think it’s going to be a trial. But I’m sticking with it. I’ve only got as far to go as I’ve already gone, and it’ll be less distance every day. Oh gawd, I’m starting to sound all evangelistic.

This week’s recipe tip

This time it’s another soup – french onion. Take 500g onions and two cloves of garlic, chop finely and steer them briskly around a frying pan (prepared for dry-frying by adding a teaspoon of olive oil and then wiping out with kitchen towel – you should be left with a sheen of oil but nothing you can pour, if you see what I mean) for about 10 minutes. Now add about 100 ml of boiling water, and stir it all around until the water has evaporated (takes just a couple of minutes). Add another 100ml and evaporate it off again. This process makes the onion much softer and slightly caramelised, and enhances the flavour of the final product.

Now transfer to a saucepan, add a litre of hot vegetable or beef stock and leave to simmer for 30 minutes or so. Whizz with a hand blender (adjust the amount of water at this stage if it’s too thick) and serve. The result really begs for the authentic French touch of a lid of bread with melted cheese, but even as it is it’s a fragrant rich soup and a great warmer-up now that winter is looming.

Three weeks gone, two bad ideas and an interesting discovery. The discovery was that your weight can go up even when you are eating next to nothing. It was probably water, but during this week I briefly put on half a kg before dropping it off again. The key thing is to look at the trend, and not to be disheartened by a bump in the road. Overall, I’ve lost another kg over this week, and there’s another 4 kg to go to reach my target. Blood sugar has stayed bang on target, settling around 5.6. All good.

The first bad idea resulted in serious carbohydrate craving. During this week I allowed myself some occasional skimmed milk in tea and coffee (no more than 50 cal worth per day, and still keeping within the 600 cal limit). But it was a bad idea, and I’ve stopped again. The problem is that having a small amount of carbohydrate seems to make you want much more. It’s an insidious thing, but it’s there. I’ve felt more hungry as a result over this week than any time. So the milk’s off the menu again.

This weekend was a difficult time, because of birthdays. My son and I have birthdays on adjacent days, and they fell over the weekend this year. We agreed to let me off the leash a little on Saturday, and I tried a few (very limited) sinful treats. My calorie count went up to nearly 1000 for that day.

It was another bad idea. It was nice to try some wine, cheese and a tiny sliver of birthday cake, but as with the milk above it’s unsettling and causes cravings. My strong advice – if you do this, stick with it ruthlessly and don’t give yourself a day off.

Anyway, I’m back on track now. Last week’s wobble aside, it’s becoming a way of life, and the next five weeks are going to be fun.

This weeks’s recipe

Haddock with smokey salsa. The fish is grilled, griddled or dry-fried (to dry-fry, add 5 ml of olive oil to a pan, heat it and then wipe out the oil with kitchen towel. You’ll be left with the slightest gloss of oil on the surface of the pan – do it properly and the calorie increment is negligible). A typical fillet of 150g will take just a couple of minutes on each side – never over-cook white fish!

The salsa is a general purpose spicy tomato-based sauce that goes with white fish or chicken, or even mixed vegetables such as mushrooms and courgettes. To make it, chop up an onion very finely and dry-fry for a few minutes. It will start to go translucent and brown at the edges. By the way, I don’t think I will go back to frying onions the conventional way – dry-frying produces a really nice, slightly caramelised result. Add 6 chopped fresh tomatoes (thank you garden, it’s been a wonderful crop this year!) or a 400g can, and a chopped red pepper. Add a dessert-spoon of smoked paprika (actually, check your taste-buds with a dab of this stuff first – you may need less!) and enough water to make the whole thing mobile, and stew it on a gentle heat for 20 – 30 minutes. You’ll know it’s done when the tomatoes have assimilated into a thick sauce. Spoon out over the fish and serve – this amount will serve two. The smoked paprika is essential by the way – chilli-hot and with a smokey hit reminiscent of barbecued meat, it’s a quite addictive flavour.

The low-calorie treatment grinds on. My fasting blood sugar continues to be well inside the normal range: around 5.7 – 5.9. Weight is coming down – another 2 kg fell off this week. So how has it been, you beg to know?

Fine. Really, it has been fine. I had predicted that it would start to get a bit tedious – the monotony of such a restricted diet is, I’m sure, part of what made some people in the original trial give up. So I started out by working out a 2-week diet plan that gave me a different “main meal” (I can’t bring myself to call it “dinner” when there’s so little of it!) every day. And that has worked out well, for the most part keeping tedium at bay. What’s also worked out well is eating soup at lunchtime. It’s really easy to make excellent soups containing the square root of bugger all calories, and the stuff certainly fills you up. The only area where things get a bit boring is breakfast time. You can’t eat soup or salad for breakfast! In fact, I am reduced to three options: grilled tomatoes, dry-fried mushrooms (by the way – don’t ever, ever be tempted to cook mushrooms in a microwave) and eggs. So these go around on a three-day carousel, and I confess I’ve been wondering what else I might try.

I wondered whether I’d feel tired, being on such short rations. I don’t – actually, I have more energy than I’ve had for years, and as the weight tumbles off and I discover that I have a thing called a waist, I’ve started exercising again. I’m doing only about 200 calories worth of exercise per day, but I’ll be trying to ramp that up over the coming weeks.

Highs

Breaking the 70 kg barrier. This is a big barrier for several reasons. 70 kg is 11 stone, more or less, and I haven’t been below that figure for maybe 20 years. Also, it marks a sort of half-way point – when I started losing weight back in the summer I weighed 76 kg, and my target is 64 kg (taking my BMI below 23 which is the real target).

Lows

Having to resist a particularly nice-smelling loaf of brown seeded bread. Apart from that, none – every time I think of a downside to this, it’s easy to quash it: “you’ll live longer and be healthier”. Pious, sanctimonious? How little you know me!

 This week’s recipe

One of my favourite recipes is Nicoise salad, and my normal version of this is, though I say so myself, pretty good. I wondered whether I could do a reset diet version of this, and it sort of works. Bear in mind that some of the things normally associated with a Nicoise salad are off-limits, including potatoes, butter beans, olives and a serious extra virgin olive oil vinaigrette. Given that, here goes:

Chop up a couple of handfuls of cos or romaine lettuce (little gem will do, or iceberg at a pinch, but definitely not round lettuce). Add two palm hearts (about 30 cal) sliced into thin rounds (see below), a can of tuna (in water, not oil, about 130 cal). Take a 30 g can of anchovies (70 cal), drain and pat off as much oil as possible with kitchen paper. Then break them up and sprinkle over. If your calorie count is low for the day you could add a sliced boiled egg (adds 75 cal) or half of an avocado (adds about 130 calories, so you’ll need to have been saintly). Sit down with a partner and share it – your share is no more than 150 cal.

It’s not a real Nicoise salad, but it is close, and it has great flavour, nice textures and fills you up. The key ingredients here are the palm hearts and the anchovies. In case you haven’t encountered them, palm hearts look a bit like leeks and taste a bit like artichoke hearts (which, by the way, are an effective alternative in this dish). You can buy them in cans. Sliced and mixed through the salad they bring a texture that makes up for the lack of the beans and potato. The anchovies are a luxury, but a small luxury that makes a world of difference to the result.