Nuneaton

A few months ago I started doing the 5.2 Diet. Some of you may have heard of this one - it was first featured on Horizon (the TV show) last summer and then a book appeared back in (I think) February. It's a pretty simple idea - you just eat just a quarter of your recommended calorie intake two days a week - and that's it. You can (within reason) then eat what you like the rest of the week.
I had never done a diet before - largely because, I suppose, I'm a man, and let's be honest, we blokes come under far less social pressure than women to worry about our weight. Organisations like Weight Watchers and pretty much every diet magazine are geared almost entirely towards women too....
But the time came when I finally had to admit to myself that, alas and alack, I was no longer the ripped Adonis of my youth*...and it was time to take action.
A few months in yes, there's less of me than there was before, but I have also discovered a few interesting things about the nature of food. Like most people, I had always eaten with a vague sense of obligation - a feeling that if I didn't go and eat lunch or have decent breakfast, I'd be overcome with terrible hunger pangs and be unable to function. Nonsense of course. What actually happens is - you feel a little odd. Slightly out of place, as though you've slipped out of phase with the rest of the world by half a second or so. And, barring the odd mild rumble, that's it. I have always felt a little more focused on 'fast days' like today as well, a little lighter on my feet. Who'd have thought digesting food was such hard work?
The theory is that when you don't eat for a period of time, your body (which evolved to cope with the feast or famine lifestyle of our ancestors) switches modes from growth to repair, so shenanigans at the cellular level get fixed and your chance of developing various nasty diseases drops as well. If so, that's obviously quite a bonus.

And if I may now gone off on a total tangent, what is with women and spiders?? A big yin appeared in a corridor at work today, causing horror amongst several of the secretaries (I work for a place with a lot of secretaries) - although they also found time to name him Boris I noted! But really, the little critter wasn't doing anyone the slightest bit of harm - he was just chilling up near the ceiling, doing his inscrutable spider thing....
I have lost count of the number of women I have met over the years who claim, in all apparent sincerity, to be afraid of our eight-legged pals. Examples include at least three former colleagues and an ex of mine looked like she was going to faint one evening when something came scuttling over her living room carpet. I was proclaimed her "hero" when I caught it for her. Pssah.
Intriguingly, if you look up 'arachnophobia' on Wikipedia (a site of which I will never tire), you'll see that the percentage of women showing with symptoms of chronic spider dislike is thought to run as high as 50 per cent, compared to only ten per cent of men.....
Personally I am never overjoyed to find the wee guys creeping around my house but I don't like to kill them (seems a bit mean). Instead I invite them to leave with a glass and piece of card.