OMG, Emma Bartley has completed her six weeks on the diet that deprived her of carbs to make her skinnier than all her friends. Now it's over, the lids are off the snack pots
Zero, count them, weeks to OMG and I’m not sure I’ll ever do another diet. After all that (admittedly half-hearted) work, it was Six Weeks to -2KG. If not Six Weeks to FFS.
Venice A Fulton promised that I’d find subtle lifestyle changes such as breakfast-dodging and fruit shunning so easy to adopt, they would become part of my life even after I completed his plan. But he reckoned without my mind and body’s dedication to being Size 13: together, they conspired subtly to undermine him throughout my six weeks and, now that the diet is over, are telling me to EAT like there is no tomorrow. Not only am I not skipping breakfast, I’m not skipping snacks (mid-morning, mid-afternoon and the killer, late night – all happening).
It’s unfortunately timed with the start of Christmas (for a food writer, mince pies come early, and often). But then something a little more helpful arrived on my desk: G’NOSH healthy dips.
Although dips are my easy home appetiser of choice, I’m personally rather fussy about them. I think this particular phobia was born of my horror of mayonnaise – back in the early days of supermarket dips, everything seemed to be a sort of creamy slop and you had to leave the labels out to let people know which was cheese and chive, Tex-Mex, thousand island, taramasalata… yeuch.
What I like are the healthier options such as houmous, salsa and guacamole – still slop, yes, but slop that is firmly identifiable as having once been food. It turns out that G’NOSH founder Charlotte Knight felt the same – used to the natural dips available in her native New Zealand, she saw a gap in the market here in the UK.
She is hoping to break Britain out of its 15-year houmous rut by offering us a smart range of gourmet flavours including sweet black bean, Muhumarra spicy red pepper, beetroot and mint and smoky aubergine baba ghanoush. In your service, I have tried them all and can report that they are perfect Size 13 fodder: thick, vitamin-packed and tasty. And colourful, as I found to my cost while eating the beetroot one somewhat clumsily in a pale grey dress.
You can get them via Ocado or in Budgens, Whole Foods Market, Planet Organic and Harvey Nicks/Selfridges (told you they were posh) at £2.49 for 100ml. As well as the standard size, there is also a snack-sized range of “dippables”, which include some beautiful little Italian grissini, costing £1.89.
If this is all starting to sound like recycled press release “churnalism”, I can only apologise… after six weeks of deprivation, guilt-free carbs seem like manna from heaven. Will they help me to keep those hard-won kilos off? Probably not, but it’s significantly better than being on the Mince Pie Diet.