Bang goes the diet

I love autumn, the scarlet and golden leaves scattered beneath the clear blue sky with the bite of the fresh cold air. I look forward to the seasonal parties around this time of year; in the last couple of weeks we've had a Halloween party and this week we went to a couple of bonfire parties.

We tend to go to see fireworks round other people's houses rather than organised ones. It's a good way of getting together with friends and family but best of all there's normally loads of food and it's free. Christmas is the excuse used by the supposedly tee-total to have a tipple; for me, bonfire night is the excuse for dieters to become salad-dodgers again for the night.

Anything goes tonight, except tinned hot-dogs. Dieting means that I read the labels and I have found out what they're made of, go on, have a guess. The answer is chicken, but not chicken as we know it, mechanically-recovered chicken, don't look it up if you're squeamish; it's meat residue blasted off the carcass. The burgers, sausages, pizza, soup, curry, chilli etc were all fair game and I would have my share as well as someone else's.

I'm well aware that a couple of episodes of bonfire-night binge-eating can have lasting affects on diets. They should perhaps put up posters warning of the dangers of this next to the ones illustrating the dangers of fireworks with a picture of a scarred child. It could have a picture of a sad looking fat man holding a burger and a sparkler pointing at the stretch marks on his belly.

I made sure that I visited the gym and cut down on my other meals to mitigate the damage but I'm still not going to weigh myself this week.