The three letter F word

Well, I finally had an epiphany. In my minds eye, having seen myself as a slim, happy 29 year old, the mirror told a different story. I won’t use the ‘F’ word but let’s just say I was very overweight and physically way below par suffering from a variety of niggling ailments. 29 was a distant dream.

Oh I’d tried dieting over the years but failed miserably. The very word ‘diet’ made me want to stuff myself with chocolate and have another bottle of wine. My new husband and I are what you might call 'foodies'. We love cooking, eating, drinking and entertaining. In fact, you could say that we live for those and egg each other on. I blame him and he blames me. I was really feeling quite desperate.

Quite aside from the weight, I’d been suffering from crippling panic attacks for the last four years. Initially triggered by a traumatic divorce, they varied in number and intensity but to an extent, they were ruling my life.

I turned to the bony shoulder of an über slim and very fit friend who tentatively suggested that I see the naturopath she herself had consulted. Her problem had not been weight but hot flushes which were driving her to distraction. She claimed that since seeing the woman and making some small changes to her diet, she hadn’t had another hot flush.

I’m a born again sceptic and don’t really believe in any hocus pocus, supplements, food combining or tarot cards. But, I was at that I’ll-try-anything-once stage so called for an appointment which wasn’t easy to get.

A month later I found myself waiting to see Elizabeth Gibaud, naturopath to the stars and credited with bringing various well known names back to health and slimness. I took an instant dislike to her.

She works by doing ‘facial analysis’ by which I mean she has a good look at you under a bright light and says things like “you should never eat mushrooms again”. She doesn’t respond well to being questioned and her level of explanation of her methods is minimal in the extreme. As a nosy parker and one who like to know what I’m doing, I felt very uncomfortable with the idea of blindly following her baffling advice. Anyway, after weighing and measuring me, she set me on a ‘detox diet’ (oh, how the very word made me laugh inwardly) which she told me to follow for a week before seeing her again. I won’t bore you with the finer details of the ‘detox’ but it involved giving up coffee, tea, salt, pepper, sugar, alcohol, red meat, yeast, mushrooms, sweet potato and parsnip. It meant embracing dandelion and nettle tea, various supplements, large amounts of water and a daily jacket potato. As I’d paid my money, I put scepticsm aside and thought I’d give it a try for a week.

I’ve never been one for weighing myself so resisted the temptation to get onto the scales during the course of the week. Anyway, I could hardly move because the coffee withdrawal set up a thumping three day headache and I felt incredibly tired, lethargic and stiff. In a quirk of fate, as a result of having a minor surgical procedure, my husband was diagnosed with high blood pressure that same week and told to lose weight and drink less. This made rigidly sticking to the diet rather easier as he was 'in the zone' too.

A week later, I was back in front of Elizabeth who weighed me, measured me and triumphantly announced that I’d shed eight pounds and lost a total of around 6 inches from various parts of my body. Indeed, my clothes were feeling more comfortable and blow me down, by the time of that visit, I was starting to feel quite a bit better. I also realised that during the past week, I hadn’t had to take a drug, or even a Rennie, for my oesophageal reflux and I’d had a week free from panic attacks.

Maybe there was something in this after all.

Watch this space for the next instalment.