It used to be that when I would sit in a lecture all the people around me would be quietly taking notes from the slides while their desks were littered with coke bottles, crisp packets and baked chocolaty goodness. The only sound being from those cold ridden individuals who so kindly decided to share their sickness with the rest of us and were hacking up a lung or trying hard to contain the Niagara falls within their nose.
Now however those sounds are almost non-existant having been replaced by a new and altogether more troublesome noise. Stomach growling.
Not just the growling that you get just before a meal but that of people who hadn’t eaten in quite some time and their body had given up with the polite ‘feed me’ signals and had opted instead for the ‘if I am loud perhaps she will notice meeee’ route.

The majority of people on my course are of the female variety and take their fashion, fake tan and acrylic nails very seriously, so of course the size O (which is what? A UK size 4?) fad sweeping through such literary gems as ‘Heat’ and ‘Now’ magazines have begun to be adopted by these girls because to them your weight is everything.
The desks formally littered with coke are, and I kid you not, now home to ‘metabolism increasing water’ and..well, that is it.

A new hobby of mine is, on the route to lectures in the morning, to pack a muffin (blueberry bitches, no one can say I don’t get my five-a-day) or something of a similar food group for that 5 minute break we get in the middle. I carefully take it out of my bag when I arrive and place it lovingly on my desk where it will sit for an hour until I get the chance to tenderly unwrap it and break it slowly into little bite size pieces for eating. It is during this hour and the 5 minutes of actual eating that this humble blueberry muffin becomes the most watched thing since Britney’s mental state. People will turn round to lovingly gaze upon the muffin and fantasize about how many gym hours they would have to put themselves through to earn just one bite, the girl who sits on the row with me will spend more time shifting her gaze to the food than she spends on the actual course content being presented and you know what..the sick part of me delights in this new hobby.
I have never, and will never, understand some of these fad diets. I can understand the need not to eat 7 big mac meals a week because it will kill you, but surely, starving your body of food until it makes you dizzy just so you can show off the genetic superiority of your rib-cage on the beach this summer is going to kill you too? These girls are not stupid, they can’t be to get onto the course and they certainly don’t have a disorder like anorexia, no these girls choose to pursue this route and sometimes I just think they are life stupid.

I am a firm believer in eating fresh, good things wherever possible and I do so regularly, and I also allow myself some not so good food because everyone needs those things but you know what? They key words there are eating and regularly . One of the characters on Devil Wears Prada joked ‘I’m on this new diet..I eat nothing all day and then when I feel faint I eat a cube of cheese!’ and yet why do I get the feeling this is a reality lol. It won’t be long before the Red Cross start deploying their advertising on TV featuring the gaunt faces of Lindsey Lohan and Victoria Beckham and slogans such as ‘Please..just one packet of mini eggs could provide enough calories to feed these girls for a week…’

Slowly though, the muffin torture is working. Today for the first time the girl next to me left the lecture in the break and returned..with a chocolate chip muffin and I silently rejoiced along with her stomach.

Links: A BBC reporter tested out this crash course in starvation which you can read here