I lost 3½ pounds in my first week!

Going on imperial weights, that's the equivalent of seven packs of butter. And though I don't appear to be one millimetre thinner anywhere, it's spurred me on with the points-counting.

In fact, I'm wondering if it's a cunning WeightWatchers plan to keep fresh recruits keen.

Do they spot us newbies in the queue, shedding glasses, shoes, jewellery, false teeth et all before we step on to the scales and make a few shifty adjustments?

What's your favourite slimming tip? Post your comments here.

It's been hard work, though, counting up all those points and trying to make low-calorie, fat-free stuff taste as if it isn't.

And it does make you more aware of how many calories we needlessly add to things.

Every time I see Jamie Oliver glugging olive oil around with the gay abandon of a lad with cheap Christmas aftershave, I want to shriek at the TV screen: Do you realise you've just added 10 points of unsaturated fat to those perfectly healthy, points-free vegetables?

Last week, I watched him make an Italian cabbage and bread soup. It started off well, but descended into a calorie-counter's nightmare as Jamie, the man who kicked up such a stink about fatty school dinners, shoved man-handsful of cheese into the pot.

He adores olive oil so much, it must run in his veins. And while it is healthier than the gloopy, modified trans-fats that pad out the nation's junk food, at the end of the day, it is still laden with calories. And the healthiest veg are naked ones.

Nigella's the same. Leaf through her cookbooks and you'd think she'd been commissioned to keep the entire British dairyfarm industry afloat.
Listen to me: I sound so virtuous and this is only my second week.
It's also a great talking point. Friends started telling me about the ridiculous diets they had tried over the years.

Kate remembered the agonies of the Cambridge diet – she existed on 600 calories a day for two weeks. All she ate were little packets of dried stuff – which of course she had to pay the Cambridge Diet people a small fortune for.

I could go one better; at the age of 17 – and crikey, looking back at photos I can't understand why I thought I needed to – I ate nothing but natural yoghurt and cucumber for a week. Notice the "and". You "had" to have both together otherwise it wouldn't work! It was a ghastly combination; even now I can't face raita with my onion bhajis.

Others reeled off the grapefruit diet, where you eat that foul, sour fruit with everything in the belief that it burns fat, the milkshake diet, the food combining diet, the Atkins, the cabbage soup plan. Others went for months sipping apple cider vinegar before every meal because they'd read that it curbed the appetite – and that Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts swear by it.

I checked out diets on Google and found some even weirder ones. Would you believe there's one based on surely the most calorific substance known to man? Yes, there's a peanut butter diet. And that didn't do Elvis Presley much good, did it?

The all-time craziest has to be this one, though... Breatharians believe that eating isn't something we need to do in order to live. They say it's nothing more than "an acquired habit" and believe that we can all train our bodies to rely on air and sunlight as our main forms of sustenance. Oh, really? Then how come people end up dying of anorexia?

You may also like to know that the man who founded the Breatharian Institute of America, and claimed he hadn't eaten for 19 years, was recently spotted eating a chicken pie. Whole, I presume.
I doubt the scales will show much of a result this week, though... on account of my friend Nikki's 40th birthday dinner. I simply cannot bear to choose slimline when I'm paying for it.


READ MORE
LETTERS: Sheffield's 'appalling' buildings. Give us your views.
COLUMNISTS: Confessions of a dieting convert.
FASHION: Why Granny knows best.
Main news index.
Latest sport.