Summer Holiday Blues

The annual summer holiday presents a dilemma to those that diet. Do you loosen the rules a bit by remaining sensible but occasionally having the odd luxury? Do you stick rigidly to your daily allowance of calories? Or do you forget about diets for the week and tuck in?

Loosening the rules will mean you’ll spend the holiday checking your calories and seeing that the odd indulgence is sending you over your daily limit. You’ll end up spending the holiday feeling guilty about everything you eat so not a good way to spend the week.

Sticking to the diet rigidly is a good approach, after-all, a diet should be a change of lifestyle rather than a temporary reduction of your food intake if you want it to work, so to keep going while on holiday is a good way of cementing this new way of living.

You’re on holiday though, it only comes around once a year, this can be the excuse you need to fill your face until you can eat no more. It’s outside of your daily routine so as long as you get straight back on it when you come back you should be fine.

Those of you that have read my previous columns can probably guess which approach I took, you can’t go to France and diet.

Every day started with a continental breakfast; croissants, French bread, smoked ham, salami and fresh orange juice.

We’d go out sightseeing some days and have lunch at one of the many cafes. It normally consisted of omelette as I know the French word for omelette. There was always time to pop to a patisserie for the most amazing cakes of a quality that you wouldn’t get in the chain-store bakeries of England.

The other days involved cycling with a packed lunch of ham sandwiches and crisps.

All of this contributed to me arriving home with an upset stomach and an extra half-stone of weight that my new scales kindly informed me of upon arrival. I’ve got to get round to undoing all of this now.