In which I distract myself on the journey home across the Pennines

I would like to offer a hypothesis that among those people (for sake of ease I'll use a feminine pronoun but it equally applies to men) who can be called "slim" (or perhaps, rather, average-ish of size) there are probably two distinct types.

Type A is your natural slim person. Your typical A has never been on a diet in her life and seldom weighs herself. She doesn't really need to because she naturally regulates herself. If she has a large slice of cake mid afternoon she might not have much for dinner. On the other hand, a hungry day is a hungry day - she'll eat if she needs to because she knows perfectly well she'll be less hungry (and eat less) tomorrow or the next day. Perhaps after Christmas, or a week away, her favourite jeans will feel a little tight so she'll cut out the mid morning biscuit for a while and fit in an extra swim. No big deal.

Type B, on the other hand, has probably been on some sort of diet for as long as she can remember. She tried out the Cabbage Soup one, and the weird one with the frankfurters and bananas and had a glorious few days on Atkins mainlining protein until she realised it WAS possible to get sick of cheese. She is slim now but the rituals: of weighing in, of self denial, of wondering if she is slim enough...they never leave her.

I have been wondering, you see, if it is ever possible to move from Type B to A (or, I suppose vice versa; although every child probably starts out fairly A-ish and then picks up habits and thought patterns elsewhere). This migration, it is what I aspire to (assuming I reach the Hallowed Halls of slim first - nothing like getting ahead of oneself!) Actually, I was thinking today it is one of the reasons that I like Weight Watchers as a diet plan. As you juggle your points and sacrifice a biscuit in the afternoon for a piece of naan bread with your curry, you are making the kind of decisions that your Type A makes naturally - without a tracker and a constant, twitchy desire to check up on the nutritional information. So do you, can you ever lose the tracker and the twitch?

And now I've just thought of a quote from Friends (there really is one for every occasion) when Monica says something like "I owe it to the fat girl inside me - I never let her eat!"

Do we EVER get to ditch the fat girl?

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