DIETS
IT’S that time of year again: the school summer hols are over, a new term begun — and for figure-conscious workers, that means the wheel of dieting purgatory has turned another circle.
Examine your colleagues’ packed lunches and you should spot the return of packaging marked “lo-cal” and “lite”. The office food year runs like this: January, post-Christmas diet; February-May, post-resolution pork-out; June, pre-beach panic; September, post-holiday-blowout guilt; October-December, seasonal stuffing.
It’s a binge’n’purge world. In a new survey, almost half of Britain’s female office workers claim to start a diet every few weeks or are “always on a diet”. Yet despite this self-sacrifice, half the dieters admit that they don’t know many calories they consume a day when slimming.
It gets worse: despite the near constant dieting, nearly 83 per cent of the women surveyed say that they plump for high-calorie lunches. Of the rest, two thirds choose low-fat menu items and only a third actually eat those pre-packed low-cal meals.
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Does any of this bring our dieters the smug pleasure of having a Baywatch body? Hardly. The survey, commissioned by Adios, a slimming supplement brand, says that “most of the women questioned were very unhappy with their bodies”.
This circle of calorific shame reflects another nigh-inescapable cycle of office life: every so often we resolve to work faster, work smarter, aim higher, then after a few months we slump back into our backsliding ways after our “new self” has failed to reap instant rewards.
We’d rather have instant answers: the diet survey found that 80 per cent of female office staff would consider liposuction, breast reductions, tummy tucks, even gastric bands, to shed those pounds. If the NHS offered similarly ghastly operations that would get you promoted, the queues would stretch round the block.