Sure Fire Miracle Diet Revealed! (Listen. Do You Want To Know A Secret?)

After yesterday's soul-searching and thoroughly miserable marathon (or snickers, as we've been obliged to call it in the UK these past twenty years), a brief word that is guaranteed to change your life. Don't thank me for it - just send money. This earth shattering secret is revealed ONLY to you Boot Camp initiates in the next paragraph, so sit down before you read it. I can't be responsible should you get overcome by shock or awe at my insight and profundity and end up falling to the floor in a Jane Austen-like swoon, or something. Here goes, then.

I'm more and more convinced the only real diet plan is 'count everything, carbs, calories, protein. Jot down precisely what you're ingesting and evaluate the outcomes, tweaking as you go to find the route that's right for you. But when you are busying yourself with all this counting, recording, evaluating and tweaking, stay away from booze and syrupy drinks, and above all eat less of whatever it is you're eating to start with, and don't allow yourself to eat processed junk at all.'

Doesn't seem too bad a plan, does it?

The food industry won't like it, though. As a species, we seem to have been doing OK before their factories sprang up. Mind you, they did very well out of it, while the rest of us have ended up doing rather badly, if our ill-health is anything to go by. Their turn to suffer, don't you think? Only fair.

Example: when I wrote something less than generous about McD's on the Low Carber Forum the other week - in fact I hoped they'd die as a business because we'd be better off without them, but what's wrong with a heart-felt shot of venom every now and then? - someone (who I suppose could have been Ronald's corporate mole on the forum), flamed back that this was a great company I was slagging off, and that it would be a tragedy if they failed - for all the shareholders, franchisees, employees, customers, and probably for the mighty USA itself.

I don't see it. If something's wrong, it's wrong and it should end there and then. Child prostitution, sweated labour, land mines, slavery, crack cocaine, and so on, and so on. It's wrong and we're right to demand it be terminated.

No matter how hard I look, I just can't see the Golden Arches having any redeeming features. It is the gastronomic equivalent of a pernicious weed. That they are the biggest private sector employer in France fer chrissakes is a national scandal that the country should have woken up to and extirpated a long time ago, one of a number, in fact, that have gone a long way toward diluting or destroying what was unique and valuable about L'Octagon in the first place. Big Ron's food is horrible and we all deserve better - even the bloody French.

Here's incontrovertible evidence of extensive and disgustingly relevant English ignorance and illiteracy revealed, from this time last year. I despair. God help us all.

Wondering, till the next time, where on earth it all went wrong,

Your baffled old pal,

Fred