Cranberries, cranberries everywhere

Today I ate cranberries. Nothing but cranberries. Poached cranberries, boiled cranberries, fried cranberries, flambéed cranberries, and my particular favourite was crushed cranberries. It’s a particular delicacy which requires getting a cranberry and slamming your fist down on it. Delish.

I am, of course, joking. I just don’t like cranberries that much, and I don’t think anyone else much does either, unless they’re having a bladder problem. But if you read that eating only cranberries was the latest diet craze, would you be surprised? Probably not. 

Have you heard about the new fasting diet? Dubbed ‘intermittent fasting’ (purlease), for two days a week you eat only 600 calories, whilst presumably also imagining that a colleague’s head is a sausage roll, and for the rest of the time you can stuff your face.

How about the woman who claimed she lost 85lbs by only consuming Starbuck products? The guitarist who nearly DIED whilst doing the ‘Master Cleanse Diet’, involving a ‘cayenne-based dietary drink’? Enough. I admit that I say this as someone who doesn’t have the best diet, but I like to think I’m not gullible enough to genuinely believe that these diets are a long term fix for my being on the larger side of life. I know what my own long term fix is. It’s to stop eating baguettes and drinking cider, and start doing some exercise. Which I'm trying to do.

And that’s what it’s all about. It really is about finding your ‘own’ long-term fix rather than following the conventional, one-size-fits-all approach. John Nicholson will tell you that.

For twenty-six long years, John was a vegetarian. No meat, no fish, no guilt. He was a walking advert for healthy eating. Brown rice, lentils, tofu, fruit, vegetables, low fat and low cholesterol – in the battle of good food versus bad, he should have been on the winning side.

But the exact opposite was true: his diet was making him ill. Really ill. Joint pain? Tick. Exhaustion? Tick. Chronic IBS and piles? Tick, tick. Not to mention the fat belly and the sky-high cholesterol.

His mind may have forgotten its taste for flesh and blood but had his body? Tired of being sick, John decided to do the unthinkable: eat meat and eat lots of it. Going against all the official healthy-eating advice, he returned to an old fashioned red-blooded, full-fat, high-cholesterol diet. The results were spectacular. Twenty-four hours later, he felt better. After forty-eight hours he was fighting fit. Twelve months on, he had become a new person. His health was utterly transformed. He was first shocked, then delighted, then damn angry.

He tells his story in The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me!, which charts one man’s journey to the top of the food chain, uncovering in the process an alternate universe of research condemning everything we think we know about healthy eating as little more than illusion, guesswork and marketing. The body is a temple – but, as John Nicholson discovered, we may have forgotten how to worship it.

So the next time you’re wondering whether eating only blue food for five days is going to transform you into a goddess of tiny proportions, think again, and get yourself a copy of John's funny and enlightening book.