The Frog Does a Diet: The Amazing Ciderman

Fourteen course degustation menus, brie with truffles, potato gratins and mousses au chocolat are things of the past for my French husband Maxime. Mostly. Along with his new fitness regime, there is Maxime’s new diet, which I alluded to last time (The Frog Becomes a Fitness Freak), and his entourage have been most impressed at how he’s persisted with it.

This has been possible, says the thinning one, because of the move to Australia. He’s a hemisphere away from the old triggers and the old enablers/fellow bon vivants. In France, even the tradies were trouble: like the time a bloke came over  one night after work to discuss renovating our bathroom. I’d let Maxime handle it, due to my lack of French vocab concerning tiling and towel rails. I’m not sure how much bathroom discussing went on, but apparently, it was thirsty work.

‘Maxime!' I said the next morning. ‘You drank FOUR bottles of wine with the bathroom bloke?’

‘How did you know?’ said Maxime, all round-eyed.

‘Er, let’s just say the four empty bottles on the dining room table were a bit of a clue.’

Now, following the dictates of his PT, Maxime has been transformed – he hardly drinks any wine at all. This has had unexpected consequences: when we went out the other night, Maxime shunned red wine and ordered a pear cider, followed by an apple cider and then – OMG! – sparkling moscato.

‘Maxime!’ I said, ‘You’re drinking like a teenage girl! You must be out of practice - you’ve forgotten how to drink like an adult.’

‘Oh. Yes, I suppose so,’ he said, a little embarrassed.

Now, instead of calling him the Wine Lord, I call him the Amazing Ciderman.

Maxime can stick to his new low carb, low fat, low sugar diet, he tells people, because he finds something yummy to eat that’s healthy. Surely, I think to myself, he can’t be referring to his hand-squashed chia seed and cayenne pepper smoothies/lumpies? (‘Muddy puddles’, as two year old Julien calls them in a homage to Peppa Pig.) Or does Maxime mean yummy and healthy like his cupboard full of assorted birdseed and various denominations of chaff? What’s more, despite all those pepper smoothies and delicious psyllium husks, occasionally, Maxime will be tempted by the Dark Side. His parents send him chocolate from France, for instance. He defends this by saying he ‘needs’ a supply of good quality chocolate (i.e., French chocolate. (Michel Cluizel and Bonnat, for example)).

‘Why?’ I ask him.

 ‘Because if I buy Cadburys I have to eat the whole block,’ says Maxime.

‘Huh? Why?’

‘It’s because it’s bad quality.’

I’m still struggling with Maxime’s logic.

‘With good quality chocolate I only need a couple of squares.’

I think hard about this and decide that I think he means that because the chocolateness is so dilute in ‘bad’ chocolate, he needs to eat much more to get a hit.

How many treats does a frog need?

Mystery packs of Tim Tams also appear in the pantry from time to time. And then disappear. But Maxime doesn’t berate himself, knowing that guilt is counterproductive (and not much fun). He thinks the odd blowout is necessary to maintain discipline and thinness the rest of the time. For instance, Maxime announced this morning that he has to be good:

‘I got a bit out of control on the weekend,’ he said. ‘There was a packet of chocolate biscuits at your Dad’s place. And I could see it was from ALDI too, but I couldn’t resist - it was at my hand reach, so I ate the whole packet.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said sympathetically. (Although I think those biscuits were meant for the kids, not Maxime’s stomach.)

‘But I know that I be back into my good habits this week. And I’ve been doing a lot of skipping at work.’ (He keeps a skipping rope in his office.)

So it's all good. Except maybe for Maxime’s colleagues having to listen to the boom boom boom of Maxime’s skipping. Especially since his office is between the CEO and the CFO ...
IF YOU LIKE THIS POST, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE (see email subscription box in the sidebar)