Before you Start

Since so much of this is about getting your head in gear, what you must do at the beginning is psych yourself up. And since you also need to make it easier for yourself on a practical level by having all the right foods around, you can combine the two by going on a mood- and scene-setting shopping expedition. This does two things: it helps banish any residual feelings of dismay about imminent deprivation (you are, after all, buying things for yourself and moreover things to eat) and it helps propel you into just that arena of obsession that is necessary to the successful outcome of any diet. Yes, yes, yes, to be too obsessed is a bad thing, and no, no, no, I am not for a minute suggesting you totter down the first steps towards anorexia and bulimia and associated eating disorders, but we all know that the less we’re trying to eat, the more we think about it, so it makes sense to exploit that. Here, it means getting every little thing right to facilitate the cooking, and later it means thinking at length about what you’re going to cook and how. The planning is not only a necessary part of losing weight; it also satisfies the part of the brain which wants, in a normally greedy person – and who else would need to be concerned with all this? – to be occupied with food.