The Fatslayer Chronicles

If there wasn’t such a thing as calories or fat grams, and if every food item in the world was equally as good (or bad) as the next, I reckon I’d still follow a reasonably healthy diet.

On a good day, anyway.

I don’t mean that I wouldn’t eat more sweets and chocolates and pastries and stuff like that, because I know I would. On the other hand, though, I’m pretty sure that after a while I’d start to crave ‘real’ food - squidgy wholemeal bread, veggies, fresh fruits, wholegrain cereals, protein, pasta, and other proper nutritional stuff.

After all, woman cannot live on chocolate and Danish pastries alone.

My colleague weighs around 7 stones (98lbs) and in the year we’ve worked together in adjacent desks I’ve never seen her eat anything even remotely healthy. This morning as an example she sat at her desk at 8am and ate a cold-cheese-crust-pizza-and-deep-fried-onion-rings-white-bread-sandwich for her breakfast, followed by two chocolate filled doughnuts.

She never gains an ounce.

I hate her. Heh.

She told me (somewhat proudly, it seemed) that her son eats nothing but McDs, crisps, sweets, cakes, biscuits, fizzy drinks and chocolate. Apparently he’s never tasted a fruit or vegetable, never eaten a proper dinner, never tasted yoghurt, never drunk a glass of water, and never even eaten a plain and simple sandwich.

When I laughed (I thought she was joking!) she assured me she was telling the gospel truth. He went straight from breast milk to burgers without a morsel of bread or banana along the way – and at the grand old age of 13 he has a mouthful of rotten teeth, a figure like the Michelin man (he takes after his dad), and a face full of zits and pimples to corroborate her testimony.

Just wait until he discovers drugs and alcohol, she said, laughing.

I was horrified.

I asked her why she doesn’t ‘encourage’ her son to follow a healthier diet, and she said that his eating habits were none of her business, and that he had the right to choose his own diet. Ditto for his 4 year old brother, who apparently subsists on a diet entirely comprised of Cheesy Wotsits and Tizer. She’s hopeful he may branch out to eating French fries and ketchup when he starts ‘big school’ in January.

I was doubly horrified. But then I figured the kids didn’t stand much of a chance since their parents eat crap all day long, and by her own admission neither she nor her husband have cooked a proper meal since they got married in 1987.  

As a kid I hated most veggies - Brussels sprouts and cabbage in particular - and mom would pile a big serving of them on my plate, and then not let me leave the table until I’d eaten at least a few forkfuls of the green stuff.

Gradually over time my loathing became dislike, then neutrality, and one day (ok, so I was an adult by now – I’m not pretending this happened overnight!) I realised that I actually LIKED veggies. I enjoyed eating them cooked or raw, and knew I’d miss them from my diet if I was prevented from eating them regularly.

So mom’s perseverance (or sadism) paid off in the end, and my health is the beneficiary of all that maternal wisdom. Yay mom!

Giving myself the benefit of the doubt, I’d probably have discovered the joys of veggies in my own sweet time anyway, with or without my mother’s not-so-subtle encouragement. But her intervention probably speeded up the process and also ensured that, whether I wanted to or not, I did get SOME vitamins in my developing years.

God only knows what state I’d have ended up in if my mom had adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards my diet, and left me to my own devices. I’d probably have been en route to a coronary by the time I hit puberty…