BREAKFAST:

... “Delicious” strawberry or chocolate milkshake.

Lunch: More of the same.

Tea: Four chips, a chicken breast and pinch of coleslaw.

Welcome to my new Slim-Fast world.

I’ve been driven to yet another extreme form of deprivation all in the name of shopping at Monsoon and stopping my underwear trying to escape up my back and down under, if you know what I mean.

But it’s no New Year’s resolution. I cunningly got around that by starting the Slim-Fast regime on December 28.

I slipped it into my daily routine without much fanfare, not even bothering to tell anyone about it.

I eventually broke the news to my mother on Saturday, warning her that I needed to eat my Sunday dinner on a tea plate and that I intended to put my money where my shake is and cut down “to just the one Yorkshire”.

I’ve even got a brand new flask for work. While others are filling theirs with soup or sugary, sweet tea, mine has frothy pink or brown stuff in it, meal replacements which are intended to convince my belly, deluded beast that it is, that I need less food to survive.

I’ve never really tried Slimfast before, preferring a McDonald’s strawberry milkshake washed down by six chicken nuggets to two spoonfuls of a meal replacement.
But, with my trousers looking shorter and elasticated waistbands digging into my loveless handles, I knew drastic action was needed. And who has the patience for calorie counting?

Not me, which is ironic because you can’t go over 600 calories for your evening meal in case you explode. Or eat your arm off. Or something like that.

I’m trying to tell myself that I’m only doing what I’d be able to manage if I had a gastric band.

On that, you’re only allowed about 500 calories. So in the La La Land of my weight loss story, I figure I’m quids in and 100 calories up.

And two roast potatoes are two roast potatoes when you’re starving.

Ricky Gervais would be so proud of me too. Because he’s branded people who have surgery to lose weight “lazy f****** fat pigs”.

So eloquently put for someone who obviously has never had a weight issue.
Oh, hang on, it’s THAT Ricky Gervais... I take it all back then.

He’s had a right old dig at those who undergo liposuction to shed flab during a rant in his audio book The Ricky Gervais Guide To Medicine.

He said: “I really don’t know why a doctor under a Hippocratic Oath takes the risk
of something going badly wrong, sometimes with general anaesthetic, because someone can’t be bothered to go for a run.

“They have bits sliced off and tied up and sucked out. I want to say to them, ‘You lazy fat pig. Just go for a run and stop eating burgers. You might die’.

“If your a*** is too fat, stop eating and go for a run.”

The Office star also suggests a way to encourage overeaters to slim down.
The wise one said: “In supermarkets, the really fattening stuff should be behind a really thin door.

“Shops should be full of salads, but if you want to get to the pies and cakes, you’ve got to crawl through a little tube.”

Frankly, I’d rather be on Slim-Fast for the next six months.

No degradation or crawling necessary. For now at least...