OneAndOneIs2

At work, I've learned to stay quiet about some subjects. Most of my co-workers are female, and are typically on some faddy diet or other; or are regulars at weightwatchers; or whatever - they gloomily compare forbidden foods and reminisce about the last time they ate something that actually had some flavour to it.

So I won't be mentioning, for example, that I had a baguette-based fried-sausage-and-fried-egg-with-fried-onions sandwich for supper tonight, and am still struggling to slow the rate at which I lose weight.

It's their own fault. If they tried getting off their arses and exercising every day instead of trying to starve themselves thin, they wouldn't be on such miserable diets. There's a near-overwhelming obsession with playing the numbers game with food these days: Everything has to carry a label saying if it's high in sugar, or high in fat, or high in salt, because these things are all bad for you.

Except, of course, that none of them are. Quite the opposite: They're absolutely vital to continued life and health. Salt in particular is not something you want to get too little of: Hyponatremia can hit very hard, very fast. Some people, mostly athletes, have died or wound up handicapped for life as a result of not getting enough salt.

All you ever see offered as solutions to the growing problem of obesity are diets. Eat so few carbohydrates your body tears itself apart for nourishment; starve yourself of vital minerals to shed a few more pounds of water. This, apparently, is considered healthy. I gather that cheese can no longer be advertised on TV because it's too high in fat to be considered a healthy food.

Here's a radical suggestion: Instead of counting calories all day and eating salad for lunch so you can have a dessert after supper, why not try exercising enough that you can have that dessert without going hungry all day?

40 minutes each morning is all it took for me to be losing about four pounds a week, with no other changes to my diet or lifestyle. That's more than any of my diet-addicted co-workers have ever managed. Which is just as well, as I can't bear salad.