Cook yourself thin

This is one of the summer TV offerings from Channel 4. Since I love cooking and am losing weight I've been tuning in. I like the basic premise a lot: teaching people how to make their favourite take-out or restaurant meals in equally delicious but lower-fat versions. It reminds me of a feature I used to love in US Shape magazine, where readers would send in their favourite recipes and the Shape dietician would produce a healthier version for them. So, loving the recipes, intending to try out the Chicken Caesar Salad sometime very soon.

But. But but but. I have a real problem with the presentation of the show. A feminist problem. All the "diet transformation" candidates seem to be women. All the cooks are women. That's fine! If only there were more casually all-female shows on TV. But... gah, where do I even start? Perhaps with the fact that the four female chefs are introduced each week with their name and their dress size. Not their qualifications, not the restaurants they've worked in, not even the fact that they might have lost weight themselves. Their dress sizes. I can't believe that any bloke, even one fronting a show about healthy eating, would agree to have his waist measurement listed before a list of actual accomplishments.

And of course, it's not really a show about healthy eating, is it? It's not a show which demonstrates to busy parents how to feed their children tasty meals that are healthier than ready-meals. It's not a show that educates lawyers in how to prepare quick healthy food more easily than ordering in takeout. It's a show that takes women, buys them a dress a size below the size they're currently wearing, and then gives them six weeks to fit into it. In which all the women cook wearing cocktail dresses and cleavage-plunging tops. Which, far from impressing us with the creativity and intelligence of good chefs, has them uttering lines like "We're making this with beef, which comes from a cow." From now on, I'll be just cribbing the recipes from the website. I guess the title should have told me everything I needed to know.

Freshness

I don't have a garden, but I do harbour secret "The Good Life" fantasies of growing my own food, even keeping my own animals. One day, one day. Until then, I have a couple of tubs in an outside area next to my flat where I grow a few things from time to time. Last night, I used some of my gorgeous home-grown spring onions (aka scallions) to flavour some rice (which I ate with some grilled chicken wings and piles of sauteed mushrooms, mmmm). I noticed that the home-grown spring onions were so much sweeter than the kind you get in the supermarket. Seriously, it tasted like I'd dumped a couple teaspoons of sugar in there. I've heard this before, that just-picked vegetables have a sweetness because the natural sugars in them haven't had time to turn to starch.

So, like Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn't help but wonder... is the lack of freshness in our food another contributor to the "obesity crisis"? Do we all crave fresh just-picked food of the kind we would eat if we were living off the land or hunting-and-gathering? Is our constant consumption of sugar our body's attempt to find that sweet taste it associates with freshness, goodness, high vitamin content? The sweetness we don't get from the weeks-old supermarket freighted veggies we eat all year? I, for one, will be filling up some more of those tubs with fresh produce, to try to get more of that good, sweet vegetable taste.

About the title

Like Nicole, one of the most inspiring blogs I've read, I'm starting in the middle. I've already lost quite a bit of weight. 22% of my starting weight, in fact. I've done it by eating sensibly, getting exercise and having huge quantities of therapy. And the title comes from a therapy insight. That, by losing weight, I am getting closer and closer to just being Normal. Regular. An ordinary size, not someone who stands out. These are good things, in one sense. But also, Normal means not being some kind of food-eating-hero anymore. Accepting that I have limits, that I can't do everything, take in everything, take on everything. That, crucially, sometimes (quite often) I have had enough. Like everyone else in the world, there is such a thing as "enough" for me. And while I'm not quite ready to say that that's great and wonderful and peachy and awesome, I'm getting there. Just starting to embrace it. It's a journey.