The Porridge and Soup diet

Pic caption: How I'll be looking after eating porridge for the next six months, without the skirt or Freddie Mercury-style white vest. I never realised how homo-erotic that cereal packet really is.
 

I know I have about as much patience as Basil Fawlty on a bad day having to put up with a coach-load arthritic 90-year-olds attending a pet sloth convention, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to see some kind of payoff on the scales after running 8 flippin' miles in the cold and wet last night.
But no, the digital dictator in the bathroom mocks me with its stubborn reading of 16 stone, still. In fact that's more than I was this time last week.
So I got a bit huffy and kicked them across the bathroom floor and was mildly satisfied by the crashing sound it made against the skirting board, the mechanical equivalent of bone-crunching.
I guess that packet of Maryland choc chip cookies I rewarded myself with last night wasn't really the sort of reward that would do me any good. And if push comes to shove I have to admit I didn't need to finish Amy's pasta for her either, especially as she had barley rested her fork at the edge of the plate before it was scooped away to my side of the dinner table.
I think this is the hardest point, denying myself lots of food after having gone out and done loads of exercise. In my head it should mean I can eat what I like, and maybe a few years ago that was true, but not now. Of course.
I feel that while my training is going well and there's some real good progress being made in the mileage I'm racking up, all the wobbly bits are still wobbling and the fight against the flab has rather stalled.
This is annoying because of course the lighter I am the easier it will be to run, but also because I set myself this ridiculous goal of losing eight stone by the time I line up for the marathon, which is now less than 6 months away.
So, in a bid to make some real progress in the war on lard, I am adopting a radical new diet recommended to me by the eminent sports and nutrition expert Professor Marc Cooper, fresh from his recent sacking by the Government on account of his opening remarks on the Committee for the Reduction of Anal Palpatations which went along the lines of "Now, I'm not doctor, but..."
Anyway, Marc suggested a while back that a diet of porridge for breakfast and soup for lunch has worked wonders for a friend of his who shed loads of weight sticking to that and not snacking.
I have some faith in this approach as when I had my record-breaking healthy year a few years back I did eat a lot of porridge and it was great for releasing energy slowly and providing energy all day, and all that.
So from today my breakfast and lunch is going to be more predictable than a Jordan and Peter Christmas reunion, and I will be enjoying a bowl of porridge in the morning, and one of the many tins of Heinz I stocked up on at the weekend for lunch.
I tried something similar with SlimFast a little while ago, sticking just to their milkshakes, but got very bored and quite repulsed by the thought of milkshake ever again, so ditched it.
I'm hoping the little dollop of jam in the porridge, which is a lot less bad than you might think, and a range of interesting soups may stop that happening. I'm determined to give it a go this week and see if it makes a difference at my next Weight Watchers weigh in next Monday. I've decided not to go this week.
Plus I'll be doing a few runs this week to help. I'm kinda getting into the winter training thing. In the film of my life which plays out in my head most of the time, running the cold and dark is the real heroic part, like in Rocky when he's training in Siberia. The Downs in the winter are very much the same.