Bitter sweet

Last Sunday I spent half an hour rifling through the contents of my larder cupboard and checking the sugar count in our cereals, sauces and tins. For months I have been reading about the damaging effects of processed sugar - sweet poison as one food campaigner calls it - but only recently have I started to take notice. Ransacking the cupboard brought home to me just how much sugar has been added to our food without us realising - if sugar is in the top three on the list of ingredients, there's probably too much of it.

Emma's wants to pack nutrients into baking!

I partly owe my Damascene conversion to a friend who has recently studied to be a nutritional advisor and now runs her own business offering advice and cookery lessons. Emma Wildgoose, owner of Eat Real Food, is on a campaign to bring nutrients back into food, which means that she avoids using processed sugar and white flour in the recipes she designs. "In combination, these two ingredients have a catastrophic effect on blood sugar levels," she says. Her mission is also to "get children unhinged from sugar and pack into baking as many nutrients as possible".

The end of thin fascism?

There's nothing like wearing a bikini for a week to make you feel a little body-conscious. My family spent half term in a hotel in Gran Canaria, surrounded by a palm trees and two glistening swimming-pools. Each day, after we had plundered the buffet breakfast, we lay like beached whales on our sun loungers. By day three, my husband and I were feeling so bloated we volunteered for poolside yoga, followed by some thrashing about in the water (aka aqua aerobics). 

Holiday excess: one too many helpings...

When we got home, after a week of gluttony, I was too afraid to get on the scales. On the plane home, however, I was comforted to read an article ('I was born with curves') in The Sunday Times about an American, plus-size model called Ashley Graham. This young woman, apparently a British size 18, is a ravishing beauty who turns heads in restaurants and brings traffic to a halt outside. She also loves pizza and dips her crusts in Nutella. "My butt rolls, it's really out there," she told the journalist, Eleanor Mills.