Life with Zoe – how does it score?

Will the proof of the pudding prove downsizing? And a lovely summer salad to take advantage of this year's fabulous strawberries

The proof of Zoe is in the pudding – or rather in my case, the sad lack of it.   I am excited but slightly dubious about the pudding. The blood-sugar thing is definitely helpful – and not a surprise – and obviously I am delighted that my blood is well up to a spot of bacon (although not according to Zoe; Zoe does not approve of bacon), but the rest – the scoring, the food sub categories – will need to work hard to prove themselves.

But before I get onto all that, I should say that after a week of beginning to put some of it into action, I am feeling full of energy, my fingers are markedly less painful,  and a patch of psoriasis is beginning to retreat.   

It has to be said that this also happens  when I eat a largely low-calorie-dense diet – which means basing my eating on unlimited fruit, veg (apart from potatoes, baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, and avocado), pulses, fish, eggs, tofu, and lean meat, with everything else – refined carbs,  fats, puddings and cakes, carefully limited.  Also  alcohol, which turns the whole thing into a Greek tragedy.   But with the Zoe, as well as all the low-calorie-dense stuff, there are some rather surprising things that they suggest I eat freely – like olive oil, avocado, nuts, and seeds.

Don’t get me wrong –  nothing makes me happier than eating avocado and nuts – and the idea of glugging olive oil freely over my food again makes me delirious –   but avocado is pretty high on the calorie chart, and nuts and oils are the most calorie-dense food on the planet, and the idea that you can eat handfuls and bucketfuls of them and still lose weight, is either the most marvellous news I’ve heard for a very long time, or completely bonkers.   

Although sadly they have the same miserable approach to alcohol as everyone else  – they assure you that your gut microbes do not thrive on gin.  As if anything would fail to thrive on gin – and at the drop of a hat, or rather too many gins or bottles of wine, they reduce your score to zero. Which makes me suspect that people who devote their lives to improving people’s health are secretly psychopaths.

Which brings me onto the scoring system and how to put my particular scores into action.

 All foods are given a score between 0 – 100, as well as a sub-rating for their effect on blood sugar, blood fat, and gut microbes. The higher the score the better it is for you. The general idea is that every meal should score 75, and the daily average should be 75. So in theory you could eat doughnuts for breakfast  (doesn’t everyone) scoring 4 but recover for the rest of the day by eating kale or something.

The zero rated foods are mostly things you would expect like cocoa cola, white bread, white rice which are all sub-rated bad for everything . But so is a baked potato, which is not – and it scores well below chocolate, crisps, french fries, and even doughnuts – and not just any  doughnuts: Krispy Kreme Doughnuts – which are the poster-children for Big Food’s plot to make us all fat and ill.

Other zero-rated tragedies are balsamic vinegar, honey, and TOMATO KETCHUP.  I practically live on balsamic vinegar and add a teaspoonful of honey to many things. I am not prepared to even discuss my relationship to tomato ketchup,  but put it like this, without my mother, Heinz would have gone bankrupt.

I have noticed that if I do add small amounts of balsamic or honey, it barely alters the overall score for a meal, so perhaps they just don’t want me to quaff it by the pint.

Some of the sub-ratings feel a bit off the wall too, particularly regarding effect on blood sugar:  cola, sugar, doughnuts, and  baked potato  all have  a ‘bad’ rating, which makes sense – but  so do   lemon juice, carrots, and cabbage, which  does not.

And saying that the juice of something will have the same effect on blood sugar as the whole thing, i.e. carrot and carrot juice is plain wrong:       It’s not the sugar itself that causes the sugar spikes, but the speed at which it enters the bloodstream: things with a lot of fibre – like vegetables – mean that the body has to fight hard to get its hands on the sugar (the body likes getting its hands on sugar, it gives it energy), so it enters the blood stream at a dignified speed the body can cope with.

I am in heated correspondence with Zoe on the subject.

Something I am ecstatic about, is the idea that you can turn a food that is not particularly good for you into something you can eat freely by pairing it with things. For example, one of my favourite comfort foods is spaghetti aglio olio.  Spaghetti is not a recommended food either for blood sugar or my gut microbes, but if I add loads of olive oil and parmesan, and eat a couple of vegetables with the meal, the score rises to something I can eat freely. Which is perhaps why Italians, who eat pasta as part of a full meal, are able to do so without becoming the size of a house or falling asleep for the rest of the day, whereas we, who tend to treat pasta as the whole meal, cannot.

So for the next few weeks, I will be putting the whole pudding through it’s paces – and comparing it to life with Weight Watchers, which up to now has been my benchmark for a liveable with, healthy approach to losing weight – and will report back.

In the meantime, here is one of my favourite summer salads, which takes advantage of the particularly fine strawberries that are around this year.

Radicchio with strawberries, ricotta, and black olives   

Radicchio makes for excellent salads – gorgeous colour, robust enough that it doesn’t collapse into a wimpy heap if you add heavier ingredients, and just enough bitterness to be interesting, without making your eyes water. There are many salads to make with it, but I love this one.

I have an absolute passion for ricotta – its creamy softness, and flavour so delicate it is hardly there – and it combines fabulously with the sweetness of the strawberries and bitterness of the radicchio..

Serves 2 – 3

• 1 head of radicchio

• 40g ricotta

• 10 black olives

• A large handful of strawberries

• Small salad onion,

• Lemon zest

• Olive oil

• Balsamic vinegar

• Teaspoon of honey – optional

• Salt and pepper

1. Roughly chop or break up the radicchio – so you have a good, but not unwieldy expanse of leaf.

2. Very finely slice the onion.

3. Hull and quarter the strawberries – unless they are very large, in which case chop them smaller.

4. Roughly slice the black olives into rings.

5. Put it all in a bowl and grate the lemon zest over it.

6. Add the olive oil (As much or as little as your downsizing requires), honey, balsamic vinegar, and salt and mix really well.

7. Scatter small pieces of ricotta over it.   

Diva Notes

Strawberries

Strawberries must be sweet or there is absolutely no point in eating them. Very often the ones for sale are not. There are plenty of sweet and delicious varieties, so could somebody please explain why these are not mandatory? And why governments all over the world sit back and do nothing?

Black Olives

I either use the mild ones you get in tins – which I slice into chunky rounds – or the bitter squidgy ones, which I leave whole.

Leftover Radicchio

Radicchio looks terrible the next day – as if it’s had far too much to drink and has a massive hangover – but it’s actually really delicious. So don’t throw away any left over; eat it for lunch.