Fiona McCade: An unpalatable fact - losing weight takes time and effort

After a couple of weeks, I wasn’t noticing much difference, but I didn’t say anything. After all, permanent weight loss takes time and patience, doesn’t it?

Then, one fateful morning, he was running late for work, so I offered to make him his breakfast shake. “NO!” he yelled, with such force that methought he protested way too much. So, I didn’t let it lie. I probed and nagged until he ‘fessed up – and the truth was worse than the waistline ever was.

The reason he didn’t want me to make his shake was because he had become rather too imaginative with the ingredients. Instead of just adding water, or milk, to the mix, he was making it with…wait for it…cream. And sometimes, Bailey’s Irish Cream.

Needless to say, the so-called diet crashed and burned the moment he realised he wasn’t going to get away with these “special” ingredients any longer. In fact, if I hadn’t rumbled him, I bet Slim-Fast would have eventually banned him from buying their products, as he was such a lousy advert for them. Trouble is, he was a typical slimmer – so bored and desperate, he could make himself believe in the waist-whittling properties of whisky and cream.

Given the chocolate-overload, the Easter period is traditionally difficult for dieters, but this week, the news is even worse. The Harvard Medical School has surveyed 4,000 obese American adults and come to this, official conclusion: the only way to successfully and permanently lose weight is by eating less and exercising more.

Of course it’s bleedin’ obvious, but it’s not what any of us wanted to hear. We’d rather take solace in our special diet drinks and potions, so we can blame them – rather than ourselves and our feeble willpower – when things inevitably go pumpkin-shaped.

Harvard’s cruel-but-true findings indicate that liquid diets, popular diets and pills will help us lose a little weight. But if you want to lose 5 per cent of your body weight, only serious exercise, strict calorie-control – and maybe some super-strength prescription medication – will do the job. And if you want to lose a whopping 10 per cent of your body weight, joining a weight-loss club or programme is probably your best chance of success.

It makes sense, of course. If you’re being constantly monitored, it’s more difficult to cheat; more difficult to knock back the Bailey’s Irish Cream without someone noticing how nervously you’re shuffling towards the weigh-in.

If slimmers actually pay attention to these findings, the fad-diet industry should suffer. But they probably won’t. We’re hooked on the quick-fix, because it gives us hope. We want to believe that, somewhere, somehow, there’s a diet that will allow us to keep on eating what we really like, without changing our lifestyles one jot. That’s the dream, and we love it when the dream seems possible. If someone developed the Trifle Diet, telling us that so long as we ate nothing but trifle, we’d lose weight, I bet there would be people who would try it. Actually, I probably would – it sounds fantastic – but we all know that honestly, truly, long-term, it’s not going to work.

I know the Harvard Medical School isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know deep in our hearts, but it still hurts to be told so bluntly that the only way to lose weight is the hard way; the long, slow, painful way; and despite the plethora of apparently easy options we’re offered, only our own dogged determination is going to get us into our bikinis this summer.

So, the bad news is that slimming properly and permanently will take self-discipline and possibly a lifetime of dedication. There are no short-cuts; no pain – no loss. Accept the fact that you’ll have to canoe for an hour to burn off one, teensy Crème Egg.

However, the good news is that if you don’t cheat, and don’t expect miracles, you can do it. And you can start by laying off the Bailey’s for breakfast.