Badgerstoke on Diets

There always seem to be a new diet fad that is being introduced and so I thought it would be good to give you the Badgerstoke wisdom on this topic.

My wife, Mrs Badgerstoke, is an expert on diets as she has been continuously on one for the last twenty years. It has not been the same diet for the whole time as she likes to try anything new that comes along. In this she cooperates with Madge, the lady in the cake shop where she shops on most days.

Mrs Badgerstoke was a large woman when we first met (she was a Miss Prendergast then of course) but she became much larger over the first years of our marriage. It started when she was pregnant with our first child Gloria and she got cravings for sherry trifle and coal (which was inconvenient because we had gas central heating). The first of these is fattening I’m led to believe although the second is not. She did try to get her figure back after Gloria was born but Brian, our second child, came along shortly afterwards and the cravings started again, this time for bacon rolls and ice-cream. Strangely she still has these same cravings twenty years later.

Since Brian was born Mrs Badgerstoke has tried many different diets to get back into her original shape but without much success. She is four pounds lighter than she was twenty years ago but it is difficult to know which diet to ascribe this to as there have been so many over that period.  So I have decided to describe just a couple of the diets she has tried and you can make your own mind up.

CalorieCounter: This is a diet where each food item is given a points value (1 for a slice of cucumber, 2 for a crème cake, etc.) and then you add up the points and make sure you don’t exceed a certain number each day. Once you have paid your money they will tell you the secret value of each piece of food and allow you to partake in the other part of the treatment, which is being publically weighted and humiliated each week.

Mrs Badgerstoke and her friend Madge from the cake shop did try this for a while but they didn’t lose any weight. The main problem seemed to be how to judge the points value of food. For example is a large piece of Dundee Cake worth more or less than three chocolate éclairs?  My wife did attribute some of her overall weight to the clothes she was wearing (she normally wears some fairly substantial underwear) and she did manage to lose a few pounds one week by leaving some of this off but when she came home from the weighing she said that she felt “all wobbly”.

So I’m afraid that she didn’t continue with this diet for very long.

Detox Diet: The theory here is that normal foods contain toxins which stay in the body and cause problems. One look at the contents label on a food packet in the past would have confirmed the truth of this with names like Monosodium Glutamate and Trinitrotoluene. Now manufacturers use E-numbers so you can’t see what the foods really contain which is very sneaky I think.

Mrs B (I sometimes call my wife this instead of using her full name just to add a little variety to our conversation) did decide to try a Detox diet (I can’t remember which one) and so she sent away a large amount of money and in return received a box containing tins of liquid that she was supposed to drink instead of eating meals.

The second part of the programme was something called colonic irrigation. The theory here is that food can get stuck in the final part of your digestive system and start to rot there and this can be removed by shooting warm washing up liquid up your bottom through a rubber tube. So every couple of weeks Mrs Badgerstoke would catch the number 17 bus to a clinic where this process would take place. She seemed to be quite taken with the young man called Kevin who was in charge of inserting the tube.

The trouble with this diet was that the liquid that my wife was supposed to drink tasted horrible and she soon gave up. Not wishing to waist the liquid we did try adding it to the dog’s food but he promptly threw up on the dining room carpet.  And so we tried it with a stray cat that often frequented our garden and we never saw it again.

Although my wife gave up the meal replacements she did decide to continue with the colonic irrigation. However the cost of this was a little steep and so after a few more visits to the clinic I suggested that I could undertake the process at home as I had a rubber tube and a funnel in the shed. However my wife assured me that as I didn’t have the years of training that Kevin had that she thought there was a real possibility that I might have an accident during the insertion.

So for financial reasons we also gave up on this diet.

There have been many other diets (F-Plan, Pineapple, Radish, etc.) but none have proved successful for my wife although they seem to work a treat for the celebrities that is publicising them.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: If your wife asks you if she need to go on a diet then honesty is not always the best policy.