Too soon to think about the post-Christmas diet?
Here’s a diet plan from 1953, taken from William Banting’s “reducing diet” from 90 years earlier. I remember people of my grandparents generation would still sometimes refer to dieting as “banting”.
It’s not far removed from current advice, being based on proteins, with little carbohydrate and mainly avoiding sugar. Pleasingly, there seems to be quite a lot of booze involved – I count that you can have up to five drinks a day. You’re allowed two or three glasses of claret, sherry or madeira at lunchtime, and another couple at supper. Maybe it is an ideal post Christmas diet, just eat the leftover turkey, drink the leftover booze and somehow avoid those tins of Roses and, in my case this year, a large batch of Nigella-recipe mince pies with large blobs of thick brandy cream on top.
Still, there’s no point thinking about this until January. As Douglas Adams partly said, time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so, and the week in between Christmas and New Year exists in its own little bubble outside of time and space.
