Special K and the outer vegan regions

Today I'm starting the "Hallelujah Diet". This sounds a lot more whackjob than it actually is. I'll let a crazy preacher explain a little more.




Right, well that doesn't explain very much about anything except Barley Malt, which according to my bud who actually is a vegan (and has a lovely blog with lots of tips about it here) is fecking disgusting.

The Hallelujah Diet is basically a vegan diet. According to the website:

"Hallelujah Acres was founded in 1992, but the story of how it began dates back to 1976 when Rev. George Malkmus was told he had colon cancer.

In 1976, Rev. Malkmus was a very successful pastor of a large church in upstate New York when he was diagnosed with colon cancer — the same disease that took his mother, despite chemotherapy, radiation treatments and surgery.

Feeling like the “treatment” his mother received was more of a threat than a cure, Rev. Malkmus turned to an evangelist friend, Lester Roloff, who advised him not to go the medical route, but to simply change his diet to raw fruits and vegetables, and to drink lots of fresh carrot juice. He did, and slowly but surely, symptoms began to dissipate and disappear. So he studied everything he could, including the Bible, about this simple way of eating, and found the answers he was looking for in Genesis 1:29."

BASICALLY, this nice pastor suggests that living on a strictly vegan diet is good for you, and I can see how this would be the case. I was thinking about vegetarianism as opposed to veganism and the vegan lifestyle seems to make a lot more sense to me. If you're not going to eat animals, why would you eat their byproducts?

I was at a barbeque yesterday with Velo Vegan herself, and I had the chance to sample some barbequed tempeh and seitan, which were delicious! We chatted about what's available to vegans and it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to do, especially when it's only for one week. You can get your protein from other sources pretty easily, and there are so many delicious and nutritious alternatives to meat. I'm quite excited at the thought of making my own smoothies and cooking up tofu and tempeh.

For lunch today I'm going to hit Govinda's (although now I think about it I'm not sure it's totally vegan, I must ask). I ate some brown bread toasted for breakfast this morning with spread (not butter!) and downed a glass of orange juice, and I just had a kiwi there. I don't feel limited at all, I have to say.

The Hallelujah Diet also recommends 30 minutes of exercise every day, including stretching, and a "daily dose of sunshine". Well, sorry to disappoint mate, but we live in Ireland, currently under an ash cloud. I got plenty of sun yesterday however, so maybe it'll even out.


Moving swiftly along, I'm also going to lay some knowledge on ye today, about the Special K diet, which guarantees that you'll drop a dress size in no time at all if you eat Special K for breakfast and lunch, and a balanced meal for dinner.

Lies!

Well, maybe some people dropped a dress size but I certainly didn't. I didn't follow the plan to the letter however. When I was in school I was considered a little odd by some of my associate contemporaries, a fact not aided by my regular consumption of whole tomatoes, in the same manner one would eat an apple, or an orange. I'm all too familiar with the funny looks you encounter when you're eating something that you shouldn't be and cereal in the middle of the day is one of those things. For this reason, the Special K diet isn't an easy one to follow.

Cereal is nice in the morning. You're just waking up, your body's not fully functional, your taste buds would be thrilled by contact with cardboard- cereal's best enjoyed in the morning. Now, my younger brother eats copious amounts of Special K, mainly because our mother refuses to buy him coco pops. He likes the taste though. I'd like to raise a question: What the hell does Special K taste like?

To me, it tastes pretty much like nothing. Sure, it's a pleasant texture, especially when combined with cold, liberally poured (skimmed, as they would have you drink it) milk, but it doesn't exactly taste like anything. It's very bland, actually. It's not enjoyable when making up two thirds of your daily intake, and to be perfectly frank, Special K ads really grind my gears. The women they display as being supposedly "curvy" are far from it, people who do not need to diet, often women who look like they could do with a good ham sandwiching. They're unrealistic. It's weird advertising, and just like the ads the Special K diet is just something pretending to be something else despite the glossy surface and empowering red colours.

Diets work essentially by lowering your calorie intake below that which you need to survive. It is suggested that if you wish to lose weight to stay at or below the 1500 calorie mark. If you have stored fat your body will resort to burning it for energy, and when you exercise regularly, at an accelerated rate. Special K is masquerading as a wonder food when all you're really doing is lowering your calorie intake pretty dramatically, and let's face it, it's antisocial. For me, the Special K diet is all a bit "meh" and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone when you can get the exact same results by swapping one of those bowls for a fresh salad, getting more vitamins and nutrients in the process. And as the saying goes, variety is the spice of life, which is one of the reasons I'm so looking forward to trying out being a vegan for a week- I might just expand my palate.

Check back this evening for an update on how my first day sans meat went. Besos.

A letter from a friend

Since starting the blog I've been overwhelmed by the number of people who've approached me, seeing a lot of themselves in what I've written, and sharing experiences of dieting and body issues.

What has most surprised me however is who those people have been. Mainly young women, no major surprise there, but confident, intelligent, educated women. What shouldn't come as a surprise to me, but does, is that they are all thin. Often I'll gaze longingly at someone's miniscule waist or toned tummy and think "guh, I'd love to have washboard abs... but right now I'd also love a sandwich." What is becoming more and more apparent is that often, those tight arses and rockin' legs are the result of a lot more worrying and introspection than the exterior suggests. Also, the people we are today doesn't reflect in many ways the people we were on the road here, the changes we went through and the experiences we had, pleasant or unpleasant, and at times self imposed.

What I'm saying in a roundabout way is that you can't look at any person and immediately think: eating disorder. Eating disorders are often the best kept secrets, and every anorexic has ways of hiding the fact that they're not eating. It is often only when someone is verging on being dangerously unhealthy that friends and family members call their weight into question, and by then an obsession with food is long formed and deeply ingrained into their lives.

One such person is a dear friend of mine. As someone who helps people daily in their career, she (somewhat ironically) only told me of her own experience with eating disorders and weight obsession after reading the blog.

It touched me greatly that she contacted me, and in fact upset me, to think that I had been so wrapped up in my own business that it had never even occurred to me that Christina* had so much going on.

She has permitted me to share what she wrote here, and for that I thank her. I think many young women feel alone in their fears about weight, and as someone who has been told to "shut the f*$k up" several times when I vouched the opinion that I was fat, I know it's not an easy thing to talk about in public.

However, I think she tells it best (she's a damn good writer) so I'll let her take it from here.

"I was about your age when I began my own dietary exploration. Much of the history you speak of in your blog resonates with me, so I don’t have to tell you much of mine. But I saw Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Sliding Doors, and, in utter innocence I wondered… What would it feel like to be that thin?

It’s so easy to slip into, and, I think, it’s a life sentence. I don’t give this information out lightly, for many reasons, but I am a, perhaps former, perhaps not, eating disorder sufferer. At my lowest weight, I was five and a half stone. My teeth are ruined from purging. I have enormous issues with eating in public, still. Food remains my enemy, and victory over it is an important of every day for me. I will never be the pretty girl, the smart girl, the creative girl… but I can sure as hell be the thin girl."

"When I first read your blog, I sensed that it would be about more than the mechanics of various diets, and the more you write, the more I think that it is your insights into the mindset that informs the need to lose weight that is the point. You’re so right: there are so many women, of all shapes, makes and walks of life that suffer with body issues, and think – even if they know differently in an intellectual way – that losing weight will make them feel better about themselves. I thought that too, and while being thin didn’t erase any of the problems from my life, I can’t deny that in many ways I did enjoy it.

That’s the heartbreaking part. "

And lastly, an article Christina* wrote, about six months ago.


I Used To Be A Size Twelve

It’s become something of a guilty pleasure – you know, because I still haven’t finished Ulysses yet – but as a young teenager, I was quite happy to admit I enjoyed a good magazine. I started out with the girl comics, and finally began stealing my Mam’s women’s mags, which were filled with a lot of the same stuff you find in them today, with a couple of notable exceptions. Today, magazines seem completely devoted to stories about celebrity, rather than this type of stuff taking up a page or two. And one article I remember very vividly from younger years had a decidedly different slant than it might have today.

The article was entitled ‘None of these girls is a perfect size 12’. I remember it so well because I was filled with young teen angst about my size, and this article implied that size 12, the size I was, was the one to strive for. Theoretically, at least, I was perfect in one regard. These days, if you want to read about that size, you might want to pick up Meg Cabot’s book, ‘Size 12 is not Fat’.

And then came a subtle shift. By the time I reached my late teens, the magazines had gradually begun to tell me that a size 10 was the one we all wanted, the figure that we strove to achieve. Soon, celebrities, because they have to be one step ahead of the posse apparently, were shrinking to a size 8, which became the skinny size, the admirable size. And then there’s now, when size 8 is positively porky, and we’re all talking about size zero, double zero, and becoming some sort of minus size, anti-matter, invisible.

Most of my friends and colleagues aren’t celebrities, and quite a few of them are rather sensible. They come in the same variety of sizes they did when I was that angsty young teen, and I honestly think they all are gorgeous. They’ve grown up, they lived their lives, and they have mighty stories to tell. I have one too, and it’s largely informed by the fact that I’m not a size 12 anymore.

Always conscious of my appearance, I became anorexic in my early twenties. The power of this word has become muted by overuse, partly, and by the fact that anorexia has become so normative among a certain cache of women, but I didn’t just lose a few pounds over a broken heart. People who claim to drop to like, six stone, just like that are mostly lying, because nothing about drastic weight loss happens so easily. Achieving a weight of five and a half stone, as I did, and it was an achievement, takes almighty dedication, and a lot of hard work.

People who say they are tired because they’ve worked hard all day, and people who say they’re hungry because they’ve missed dinner sometimes irk me, sometimes fill me with wonderment. I would have given so much to be like that. Instead, I felt compelled to survive on a small bowl of cornflakes and a couple of pieces of fruit a day, walk four miles to, and four miles from work, and do an hour long aerobics class in the evening. I barely slept, waking constantly in the night with hunger, or a pounding heart that made me fear I was going to die. You don’t know tired and hungry intimately until you’ve been anorexic.

Because it’s horrible. And the celebrities that are grossly underweight live this horrible, dedicated life. They are not people to be admired, emulated. It is awful that we have become trained to think they look good. We think that deprivation, exhaustion and fear are attractive.

I don’t care that Victoria Beckham says she eats like a horse, or whatever. She is lying. If celebrities want to look like that, then fine. But I loathe them for refusing to admit what they have to do to maintain that look. It is unfair, particularly on the young girls and women who think they too can look that way without making huge sacrifices. And believe me, the sacrifices do not simply involve missing a Big Mac meal or two. These people are starving for food, and their bodies are responding appropriately. They are exhausted, they are disinterested, and they cannot think or feel or experience as deeply as a well-nourished person can.

If that’s the look you want, then fine. Just stop lying to me about it.


*Name changed

18 is the magic number

(I have received some very interesting and moving correspondence since starting this blog. It's amazing to think of who has suffered with body issues, or still is suffering. Some of the most confident and beautiful people I know have stories and if you have any I would like to hear from you, and hopefully reproduce them here. Please email me in total confidence @ ornacunningham@gmail.com. No reference will be made to anyone's identity unless they so wish.)

Models with a BMI (Body Mass Index) measurement below 18 were banned from Madrid catwalks in 2006 after the death of a Luisel Ramos.

Ramos died of cardiac arrest shortly after stepping off a catwalk in Uruguay. According to reports she had been eating nothing but green leaves washed down with diet coke for three months prior to the show.

Shortly afterwards, her sister, Eliana Ramos died of similar heart complications brought on by starvation.



Eliana


This video contains some potentially shocking images of anorexia for the first two minutes. If you find these images disturbing or upsetting, just skip ahead.



For an interesting repository of intelligently written articles on plus size modelling and focus on healthier sizes, Jezebel is a very good read.

Our next story: Special K- leaving you feeling not too special...

And please do email me if you have anything you'd like to share.

Story one: bleeding Atkins- literally, bleeding

Alright, that title was a little misleading. What I'm referring to is rare, bloody steak. So rare it's still mooing preferrably.

Now, all my life I've loved food. I have an early memory of stealing six Rich Tea biscuits, thinking I was a total ledge for getting away with it, and only managing to choke down about three and a half before cotton mouth set in.

However, I have always really, really, really liked meat. My mother used to joke that my brothers (who stand at a very respectable 6"5 and 6"7) and I were as tall as we were because of all the hormones we ingested through meat as children. While she might (somewhat terrifyingly) have a point, I've always had one true love. It is steak.

I must apologise. I failed before I started (because I didn't start). I am of course referring to my diet, and subsequent blog thereof, but I've been rethinking whether or not I will do the "follow the food pyramid and exercise" diet- one of the biggest plotholes when it comes to dieting is cheating or non completion. I'm not innocent by anyone's standards and I have to wonder how effective a crash diet is when stuck to religiously. More on that later though.

My boyfriend informed me the other day that he "doesn't get" steak. He's not the only one. I've heard this from a few people. I know what you're thinking, I know- preposterous, eh?

I, however, "get" steak. Mother of jaysus, steak does it for me. I don't even see cows. Just pre-steaks.

When that plate is swimming with water and juices, the first cut into a rare, bloody steak is just so satisfying. Eating rare meat feels naughty. Take that, HACCP.

A few years ago (actually, about ten years ago, now that I think about it) I read an article in a woman's glossy about the hazards of carbohydrates, one woman's tragic story about how she had bloated because of too much brown rice, something she had been duped into eating by the powerful healthy eating lobby no doubt. Obviously, no man anywhere wants to be seen dead next to a woman with a belly so he ousted that barrel of a woman. Plunged into a dark, deep depression by the dissolution of her wondrous relationship our heroine stopped applying herself in work, in life. She lost her job, she became homeless as a result of not paying rent and died on the streets, a husk of her former self, but more importantly, fat.

Yeah, I made all of that up. Well, not the bit about the bloating. You know that myth about pigeons exploding as a result of eating rice thrown as confetti at weddings? This was worse.

It had never occurred to me that bread and rice were so bad for you. Bread, or rice, potatoes or pasta. BREAD IS OUT TO GET YOU. Armed this knowledge, I went forth in life, eating toast and feeling really bad about it.

When Atkins started to get popular there was a lot controversy surrounding it, this new wonder diet. I read an article about a woman who had nearly died of dehydration. I thought to myself, well that foolish woman. I'll just drink more water.

I went out, bought the book, got it home, realised there was a lot of reading, purchasing and commitment required and left it unopened for four years.

For all my postive body image, "I love myself" mumbo jumbo, I'm not afraid to say I'm not happy with my body. Does this make me a hypocrite? Yeah, in a way, sure. However, I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who preaches good body image and is totally satisfied with their body. I'm not making a point about nutritional experts- just about people. I just think (in the interest of full disclosure) it seems like a bit of a logical disconnect to state in one post (as I previously did here) that you're relatively satisfied with what you look like and to then state that you were on a diet as recently as four weeks ago.

Because I was.

I'd like to entitle it "Adventures in Attempting to make Carbohydrate-free Bread".

To break down the science of the Atkins diet I'll explain it thus:

For the first fortnight, you essentially eat meat. It's called the induction period, because you're being inducted into the most boring eating habits imaginable.

Now, the world and their aunt has a spare tire. When you eat glucose (sugar) you invariably eat more of it than you need to simply survive and this excess is saved up as glycogen. Glycogen is your body's secondary energy source, after food. When you exercise and exert yourself you use up glycogen. If you don't exercise and instead sit around in your pants on the couch all day, eating pringles, this glycogen turns into fat.

Fat, as we all know, is bad.

For the first three days of the induction period you feel fine. Fatty meats are something we're warned to eat in moderation but Atkins allows you to eat as much as you like, which is a liberating sensation. A clever little kook about the Atkins diet is that protein is an appetite suppressant (it takes much longer to digest), and meat is salty, so you'll be drinking a lot more water (which is recommended anyway) and you'll feel less hungry.

Day three or four is when most people initally fail. This is probably because they feel death is imminent.

The bodies of the Western world don't use protein as an energy source. Our metabolisms have changed dramatically from those of our caveman ancestors to the grain guzzlers we are today.

We use carbohydrates as an energy source. Carbs aren't just in bread, cereals and grains though. They're in any sugar that ends in 'ose (glucose, sucrose, etc), so they're in fruit, and anything that has sugar in it. Like... chewing gum. Or cakes, chocolate, ice cream. Even milk is out of bounds. All that damn, dirty, lactOSE.

So, basically, you can eat meat. Meat and some vegetables and a very limited number of fruits and vegetables. You can eat up to twenty grams of carbohydrates and no more during induction (as much as in one small pot of yoghurt) so you definitely don't want to waste those grams on sugar and carbohydrates. (I discovered a Kinder Bueno is around the twenty gram mark and ate nothing apart from chicken and a Kinder Bueno one day. That fairly sucked.)

After day three your body's used up its supply of glycogen, and you feel terrible. Weak, and tired. I had planned for this eventuality however. Atkins says no caffeine because it increases cravings, but I loaded up on coffee and pulled through.

After all the glycogen is gone your body has to find its energy somewhere else, lest it die. The metabolism has to be switched, in a sense, so this isn't an easy change to make, physically, or mentally (I challenge you to imagine never having dessert again). When blood sugar levels are low, as they are in Atkins (due to the lack of dietary sugar) a process called ketosis begins whereby the body starts burning stored body fat for energy. Ketosis Lypolysis is when some of the lipid stores in fat cells are transferred to the blood and are used for energy.

This is a very basic breakdown, and to be honest, I don't fully understand the science behind it. I do however know that it initally works. It works really well, and you're buoyed up with confidence. However, Atkins is not perfect. Oh no.

Atkins is time consuming. It's easy enough to pour cereal into a bowl, chase it with milk, and time permitting, eat it with a spoon. However, I have on average about a half hour to shower, get ready and leave the house in the morning, like many other people. I don't really have time to boil eggs, or poach eggs, or fry/grill bacon, or make an omelette. Atkins assures you that there's thousands of food options available to you. However, once you attempt carbohydrate free bread the expense and time involved will ensure you never attempt it again.

Atkins doesn't just require imagination and the ability to stop time in the morning- it also requires deep pockets. My mother very specifically wanted me to make the point that Atkins is hella expensive when I told her I was writing about it. Meat is really expensive, especially when it's basically all you can eat. There's a reason students live on pasta, noodles and chips. They're cheap.

Diets are limiting but in the case of other diets you can at least opt for a low fat option, or avoid one particular food group. If you're out eating with friends you have to be careful, avoiding root vegetables (anything made out of potato) and breads (that includes breaded chicken). You can't eat pizza. You can't eat burgers, sandwiches, you can't drink sugary fizzy drinks, or eat ice-cream. You can't eat chips, pasta, or chicken goujons and you have to be very careful of any sauce that comes with anything. There could be a lurking sugar content.

I suppose what I'm saying is that you could never really order from Domino's again.

If you think limiting yourself so extremely is hard, you'd be right. However, something that makes it more difficult is that your friends are not going to leave you alone. They are going to plague you with questions about how the science of the diet works and query how so much fatty food could possibly be good for you. They are going to try and tempt you with trips to McDonalds. They are bastards, and they are going to succeed.

One facet of the diet that seems to worry people is constipation. If you're ingesting less carbs you're ingesting less fiber too and something that might have come easy to you might now be something of a feat, to shyly sidestep the term "pooing".

Luckily, I was in the thirty precent of people who don't experience that. Seventy percent do, however, and I think I would have quit a lot sooner if that had been the case.

Ketones, which are a byproduct of the energy consuming process Ketosis, smell bad. Have you ever noticed after having not eaten for a few hours that your breath starts to smell? It's because your blood sugar is low and Ketosis is occurring in your body. However, when you're on Atkins you're constantly in Ketosis. Which means that you'e always going to smell bad. I'm a little paranoid about how I smell at the best of times. Some days I'll skip a shower if I really don't have time but I only did that once while on Atkins, and I spent the whole day wondering if I smelt bad and if everyone was too polite to say anything. They may well have been.

In conclusion, Atkins is antisocial and expensive. It's supposedly a lifetime plan but I have no doubt that if you were to look at the figures of people on the diet that very few would go on to the lifetime phase for much longer than a few months before creeping back to old habits. Much like any other diet, you still end up hungry and malnourished, awkward in social situations and generally grouchy, mopey and tired.

I will say however, that it's probably, save for starvation, the quickest way to lose weight. And not just water weight either- fat.

Welcome to the blog

In the interest of science (no doubt) some of my class and I are starving ourselves.

Allow me to backtrack a little.

My name's Orna, and I'm a member of DIT's fourth year journalism class. As our final hurrah, for one week we're going to be running a fully functional, spots n' all, news website, which is a very exciting prospect to say the least. However, a news website requires content, would you believe, and so, while throwing ideas around we decided to start diet blogs. These blogs will follow our progress for a week, in an effort to see if the diets really work and what all the hoo-hah with faddy diets really is.

The diet industry makes serious amounts of money every year. If it's not peddling books telling us we're too bleeding fat it's pushing low fat mayonnaise on us in sandwich bars and low sodium salt in supermarkets. THE OBESITY CRISIS is more scary than monsters under the bed and the world health care system is wracked with fear as hospital hallways fill up with trolleys groaning under the weight of dangerously large potential cardiac arrests. News reports are filled with images of roaming headless fatties, no doubt lumbering off to McDonalds or KFC for another hit of that sweet, sweet, grease.

Now, I am of course being glib.

You know how people say, "I was a fat kid?"

Well, I wasn't. I was a painfully skinny child, and very tall. I was gangly, bless younger me, but I was. Very awkward indeed.

I was, however, a fat teenager.

When everyone was discussing what diets they were thinking of doing, I couldn't help but think, Jesus Creeping Christ. I've done all of them.

Between the ages of.... I'm going to say twelve and fourteen, I piled on the pounds. There could be any number of explanations as to why this is the case- less physical activity as I entered secondary school, simply eating more, poorer eating habits, a poorer diet. Whatever happened, I got fat.

When I look back now, I realise that I wasn't fat, exactly. I was overweight, and I was still very, very tall (5'10') in third year of secondary school, but everywhere I looked I was surrounded by pristine, tiny beauties. Being tall didn't help my feelings or enormity and awkwardness. I was slowly growing into my unusual height, which eventually brought me to where I am today at a nice even 6'0' but I was terribly jealous of the smaller amongst my friends. My mother is a very thin woman, and my younger brothers are respectively a rugby player and a long noodly string of skin, sinews and not much else. I was the fat child, and I didn't like it.

My family slagged me mercilessly. I shouldn't have expected much else, they're a rowdy, opinionated bunch of people, from good hardy peasant stock, and the mere idea of a few extra pounds was pretty distasteful to my mother.

I ate cereal bars, rice cakes, low fat this, that and the other. Nothing seemed to work to shift the extra weight, and at the beginning of transition year, when I was fifteen, my mother enrolled me in Weightwatchers, and a gym.

And the weight melted off like butter.

And then it came back again.

I've been on every diet imaginable. I don't think a single day has gone past in the last few years when I haven't thought about what I'm eating, judged it in terms of its nutritional value, its calorie content, its carb, sugar, fat content. Very rarely do I eat something and feel satisfied without also feeling guilty. For years I avoided eating in front of boys, so distasteful did I find the idea of someone watching me eating, let alone someone I was trying to get stuck into.

I've tried Weightwatchers, Atkins, and South Beach, to name some specific ones. I've tried low GI, and I've tried a variety of fad diets, ones intended to help you drop a dress size in a week, cough*Special K* cough.

I've tried fruit and vegetable only, protein only. I've tried drinking four litres of water a day, and I've tried eating nothing but tomatoes, popcorn, diet coke and marlboro lights. I've tried going out and dancing and partying constantly. When I drink I drink vodka and diet coke. God forbid I should get calories from alcohol.

It may seem slightly shocking to hear someone admit to practising what is essentially years of damage to their body, but at six feet tall I always figured modelling would be the easy peasy lemon squeezy way to cash and accolades. And it would be a reaffirmation of what realistically is the end goal of dieting- confirmation that you, as a person, are attractive. Attractive enough, even, to act as a standard of attractiveness for others to aspire to.

I'm twenty one now. I modelled for about a year and a half, between the ages of eighteen and nineteen. I didn't do very much, I wasn't very good at it, and I hated every minute of it. Wearing shoes that were too small, being poked, prodded and judged, changing around strangers, constantly comparing myself to others (even at my smallest I was still a size ten) and terrible pay or pro bono work paled into insignifigance when one day a certain director (who will remain nameless) of one of Dublin's more auspicious agencies asked me if I was really going to eat all the food I had on my plate, because quote unquote, "Youre not going to fit in those trousers if you do."

It was a plate of mushrooms. I smiled sweetly and told him of course not, that I wasn't really that hungry to begin with, even though we had been in the hotel where the show was taking place since seven and at four o'clock that was my first meal. My first meal being a plate of bloody mushrooms. So instead, I left the plate, stood out the back puffing away furiously on a cigarette with a waif-like mother of two and apart from favours to friends, never modelled again.

I have to wonder though. For years I have gladly accepted the idea that I am simply not good enough and recently I have begun to think that maybe, just maybe, I am.

I wish someone could have gone back and told fifteen year old me, "listen mate. When you finish growing you're going to be two inches taller than you currently are, and I know you think you're fat now, but after years of dieting and occasional starvation as well as becoming addicted to smoking and fostering feelings of regret and inadequacy, you're still going to end up over a stone heavier than you currently are. You won't be fat- you'll have huge boobs, and a bum, and let's face it, a bit of a belly, but they're not going anywhere and the sooner you accept it the happier you'll be in the long run."

To be honest, I can't say no one said that to fifteen year old me. They said it to me at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one and someone said it to me yesterday.

The reality of the world we live in, and I can rehash every angry statement about weight, the fashion industry and advertising ever made, but I won't, is that we're supposed to be skinny. Just this morning on one website alone, I read stories about mothers' body issues influencing their daughters, about a CEO of a clothes company unable to fit into the clothes her company produces, and a quantitative, if slightly unscientific analysis of how many messages we are bombarded with yearly suggesting we are not good enough, without ever once opening a fashion magazine. It's 386,170 unhelpful messages every year, in case you were wondering.

Well, you know what, after years of messing around with my metabolism, nurturing a conflicted relationship with food and mooning over pictures of pre-pubescent models with ribs you could play a tinkly tune on, I'm done. I give up.

I have tits n' ass and nothing is going to change that. It's how I was made and there's no diet in the world that's going to make me a size zero, just like there's no diet that's going to make you as tall as a model or give you exotic Eastern European features.

I'm not going to give a lecture on the evils of the fashion industry, or the body image crisis, or the insideous nature of advertising. Everybody knows about these. I think as much as we are targeted by the weight loss industry we are equally told how unscupulous they are.

I am however, going to give you an insight into what it's like actually being on any number of stupid, expensive, limiting diets. Dieting ends in failure. Every time, you will end up miserable. You will lose weight, return to normal eating habits, and regain weight, only to start another diet again. I've spoken to personal trainers and the only thing that's going to work, time and time again, is regular exercise and healthy eating.

Next week I'm going to go on a diet, and it's a "diet" I've never tried before.

I'm going to eat whatever I want and work out every day, and change up my exercise schedule so it's a bit more craic than chasing a carrot on an endless treadmill.

I might lose weight. I might gain muscle weight. The important thing to bear in mind is: who the hell cares? If I'm happy in myself then I've already achieved that which so many people aim to with milkshakes, pills, and harsh exercise regimes.

In the meantime I'll tell you a few stories. I hope they're helpful and interesting, but one thought occurs to me- while they may be cautionary tales, they are not to be taken as guides.

To fifteen-year old me: don't try and take tips from this, you fool.