Don’t waste your ‘get out of jail free’ card on dessert
Tuesday November 24 2009
In my experience, nothing that's actually worth having is ever easy to get.
And this includes the dream body, if such a thing exists. Us women can blame whoever we want -- from marketing experts to magazine editors -- but our obsession with our figures is entirely of our own making at the end of the day, mainly because we buy into the hype, the diets, and the 'how to look like Jennifer Aniston in 10 days' articles which we all get drawn into reading.
There's the Atkins lark, the cabbage soup diet, the caveman diet, the master cleanse, the facial analysis diet, the Zone diet -- and the list goes on.
Take your pick and give it your best lash if you're so inclined -- but the only thing that is guaranteed Irish is that none of them will work in the long term.
If you stick to a punishing and, for the most part unrealistic, regime then you will lose weight in the short term.
But try living the next 20 years of your life eating the same boring foods, dictated to you by a strict rule book, in a bid to maintain a figure not suited to your build and you'll soon find yourself piling on even more curves than you had before the magic weight loss.
Obsessions with food can lead to people -- and for the most part this is female territory -- dreading every restaurant date, every family occasion and every holiday in case their chosen dietary habits are not catered for.
I'm something of a fussy eater myself and have some odd taste in food so I'd never be too hard ass about us girls, even slightly, when it comes to our behaviour around food.
But at the end of the day, what I do know is this (not that I always follow my own advice): moderation is the key to making 90pc of your life manageable and happy.
The other 10pc you get to keep as a 'get out of jail free' card. A wild card that lets you go crazy and follow your heart. Just don't waste it on dessert.
- Dee O'Keeffe
