Motivated by a mysterious inner prompting, I’ve started a no grain diet. I have almost zero background in planned, organised dieting, but yesterday a voice inside my stomach (possibly an ingrown conjoined twin) said, ‘Hey, why don’t you stop eating grains for a while?’ I looked up ‘no grain diet’ and sure enough, such a thing exists. I won’t bother here with the benefits claimed for it; as always there are claims and counterclaims and the only way you can find out if it works for you is to try it.

I don’t have any particular health problems, but as I’ve moved through my late twenties and early thirties my energy levels have dropped, and while I’m down the low end of normal (whatever that means) weight for my height and even have muscle definition here and there I do have about 4 kilos (9 pounds or so) of fat I’d like to lose - yeah, I’m talking to you, squishy bit on lower stomach, and you, wobbly bit on thigh! But the energy is the priority. As for exercise, I’m still doing the tai chi and a bit of kung fu, and have found an ice rink, which I want to get to once a week. Other than that, I’m not adding anything. I want to see what the diet does on its own. And I hate the gym, there’s nothing more boring; I would actually rather keep the weight than endure any more hamster hours on treadmills or penitential sessions with the shoulder press.

There are things I already don’t eat because I don’t like them - dairy milk, red meat, poultry except for chicken, soda pop, brussels sprouts, French beans, strawberries, durian, and fried grasshoppers. So they’re off the menu. But everything else is on - coffee, tea, sugar, alcohol, cooked, canned, genetically modified, and if I eat yoghurt you can be sure it’s the kind with fat, sugar, emulsifiers, chemicals, and probably not a single lactobacterium. I’m not measuring portions or denying myself candy when I want it; this is purely about cutting grains out.

So, yesterday I ate tinned tuna with three bean mix; salads made with cucumber, tomato, raw salmon, sunflower seeds, cashew nuts, edamame, oil and wasabi; yoghurt, dried figs, coffee with sweetened soymilk, tea, sesame peanuts, pumpkin chips and three or four toffees. Today I ate similarly, with the addition of Asian salad veggies in some kind of butter sauce, and tinned apricot halves with the yoghurt (I have to put yoghurt or cream on most fruits before I can eat them without feeling immediately sick - no idea why). And water. And a shot of Baileys. I feel pretty chipper, have had less in the way of sugar cravings than usual today, and, incidentally, seem to have completely gone off cheese. I’ve been enjoying my food and am not missing bread and the like. It’s now 8:30. I feel like I’ve got more mental energy and maybe a bit more physical energy than I normally would have by this hour, though today wasn’t particularly hot, which also might explain it.

I think my stomach’s now going ftw at the unprecedented amount of greenery (bearing in mind that dinner at Chez Bishop is usually anything from cheese cubes with raspberry jam to chocolate cake to the scrag end of yesterday’s curry served on a bed of peanut butter, but definitely not anything green and leafy), but I guess it’ll cope. Unless I get sick I’m going to keep trying this for a few more days and see how it goes.