Weight

Those of you have known and met me might wonder why the topic of weight would be on my mind. Lovely Jo Salmon is busy celebrating (and quite rightly) her hard work and acheivement at losing over 2 stone since she joined WeightWatchers. It's hardly likely I would need to lose two stone since that would take me to catwalk model twig slenderness, but nevertheless I am aware that I'm not as lithe as I used to be.

The thing is, I luuurrve food. I eat loads - in fact my appetite is legendary. I would be rich if I had a quid for everytime someone has said "where does she put it all?" and me replying "there's a photo in the attic that looks enormous" (here for the reference if you don't get it). But something is clearly a-wry with our eating habits as neither me or Cloud are getting slimmer as the years pass.

We eat breakfast - at least a toasted teacake with extra sultanas or some cereal (I don't like museli though folks). We've had only skimmed milk for around 2-3 years now.

I always have lunch (or at least as often as I can) and have at least a sandwich or a baguette - often on wholegrain bread. The smaller the sarnie, the more likely I will be rumbling before 7pm and getting increasingly needy of food cooking as soon as we get in. I will often try to have fruit, although this can result in a case of carrying an item around in a bag until it has gone off. Cloud at least always has some fruit (though I think he sometimes falls back on the staple carb rush of crisps). UPDATE: I hereby publicly apologise for this defamation of character. Cloud's legal opinion is that he has never done this and only eats crisps on very rare occasions with me at home... I defer to his judgement (though I think 'never' may be overstating somewhat...)

By early evening, I at least am getting hungry again. We usually eat somewhere between 7 and 9pm. Yes, I know that lateness probably doesn't help but we don't always get in till just before then. I hate cooking and freezing stuff (I don't really understand how it works to be truthful and once I have cooked, I want to eat. Several recipes we follow say 'suitable for 4 persons'. Ahem. Or two greedy pigs.) We don't have a microwave (no space and I don't really like them). Besides, when do I get time to cook multiple worth of meals? I'd need to buy humungous Italien family sized pans to satisfy us and make it workable for freezing even IF I understood it better.

Additionally, we probably only have take-away once every 3-5 weeks. We rarely have pizza more often than once every couple of weeks and often longer apart than that (though it is a handy freezer staple to have with our own garlic mushroom recipe). Fizzy drinks probably cross our lips no more than a handful of times over a year. We scarcely have puddings (usually too full) and if we do, we have usually had less to eat in the main course (say, just some steamed veg on its own) or we have guests and the amount gets shared more. I do like a cooked breakfast - or more realistically 'brunch' - at the weekend. But when we do, we rarely eat again before evening.

What I will admit is that we eat A LOT of pasta. We usually make our own 'sauce' for this since I don't like the processed food issues and preservatives in pre-done ones (herbs plus a tin of toms - or often just a half tin - plus a selection of a couple of ingrediants from a a list such as onions/shallots/mushrooms/leeks/beans).

So where are we going wrong? Is it just volume - 'cos the problem with cutting down is I just get cranky and hungry (and that is never good). We eat pretty healthily and hardly ever eat processed food. So what should we do? If we try and eat smaller portions, all that happens is that I will end up making my remarks of "Neil, you're not going to believe this but I'm hungry again" even more often. By comparison to a few years ago, we DO eat less and more healthy items as well. And the fact that I know that I'm not 'fat' almost doesn't help: there's just no way we could do with cooking separate meals each night.

So, with those difficulties noted, any advice gratefully received!