I suppose I should have shared this with you sooner: The Yummy Mummy and I have discovered the World’s Most Enjoyable Diet. Essentially it consists of eating all the cheese and cream and steak and sausages you want. With a side order of eggs fried in butter. It’s very like Atkins or Noakes, but without portion sizes, branded food bars or any sense of self-control.

Apparently the Yummy Mummy has a friend who dropped 15,000kgs* in three days eating double-cream greek yoghurt and bacon, so she resolved to try it too. When the Yummy Mummy reported back that she’d lost 2,000kgs* four days later, I decided to join her.

These are the instructions she sent me:

“No bread, potatoes, rice and pasta. But lots of oats, some crackers, veggies and salad, KFC, chicken with the skin, peanut butter, eggs scrambled in butter, cream cheese, full cream yoghurt, cheese, sausage, streaky bacon, chops with the fat…”

She forgot to put ‘entire bottles of wine’ on the Can Have list, but she did assure me that they made no difference to the diet’s effectiveness. (Note: in order to be good little dieters, we have sacrificed beer. Most of the time.)

I then read every article on this website: garytaubes.com and decided that vegetables were probably too much of a carbohydrate risk, so heroically decided to go without those too.

The real challenge, however, was to find a lunch place that would accommodate my new healthy diet within my perennially-trim lunch budget. But as I was strolling up Parliament Street wondering where I could buy deep-fried sausages with a side order of cream, I came across this:

I didn’t want the evil roll, chips and coleslaw, but was pleased to find I could still get half a chicken for R25. And what a delicious half of a chicken it was! Inkuku do theirs as a lemon-herb roast, with crisp yet greasy skin that’s well worth eating. The only thing missing was the mayonnaise – for flavour and a bit of extra fat. (I had to go to Spar for that.)

*Weight-loss figures may be slightly exaggerated. In case you were wondering, I myself have lost almost 1,000kgs in the last month. Or, at least, I haven’t actually gained any weight.