When it comes to diets, there is only gain if you avoid pain. The best pain is to contract a virus.

Over the last four weeks, I’ve been gearing up for the run-in to Christmas. As I am irreversibly Bah-Humbug about the whole thing nowadays, I think not of shopping days (we no longer give or receive presents) but rather of slimming days. I gained membership of a partly German family by marriage seventeen years ago, and as a result have become used to the extended Christmas/New Year thing that only the Germans really know how to do.

It gets bloody cold and very dark in parts of Germany in the winter, and thus the solstice feast/Christian festival/snow/warmth/big food/bockwurst/light/night/Tannenbaum axis takes on a unique significance. In that sort of context, during the holiday period you can keep warm in many ways, but the three favourites are eating, skiing, and gluwein. Ten years after gaining membership and giving up skiing, I noticed I was also gaining weight. Five years after deciding to spend the summers in southern France, I accepted that switching to lower-calorie beer now and then just wasn’t going to cut it. But now I have it sussed.

This year, I began the anti-flab attack on November 3rd. It’s an effective method for most people over 50 – the result of many years of research, and bemusement after stepping on the scales – so listen up. The regime contains six elements:

1. Eat less. 2. Stop all fat. 3. Don’t eat bread. 4. Skip breakfast in favour of brunch. 5. Don’t eat anything after 7 pm. 6. Catch a virus

Of the above, 1 and 6 are the crucial considerations. Eschew all diets telling you that this is a painless process: without pain, there is only gain. So then, let us take the points between those two irrefutable dictates.

Fat: ignore all the bollocks about animal, vegetable, mineral, and yellow chemical fats. You are not here to skirt your way round a major heart infarction: fat puts weight on, period. We all need fat in a sensibly balanced diet. But you’re overweight, and thus likely to overbalance at any second. Do not eat fat.

Bread: for anyone trying to lose weight, bread is the Satan who needs to get behind you, otherwise the behind behind you will keep on getting bigger and bigger. Complex man-made carbo is hard to digest and easy to store. Do not eat bread.

Breakfast: we have all been hoodwinked – by every multinational from Kelloggs to Nabisco – into believing that breakfast is the powerhouse that kick-starts the day. For those busy with the thrust stage in life, breakfast is good. For everyone else – especially we Silvers – breakfast makes you feel like going back to bed again. Do not eat breakfast.

Instead, eat a brunch at around 11.45 am. Take those porridge oats you were going to have for breakfast, add some boiled spuds, a bit of chicken stock and some soy sauce. Add a little water, and bake in the oven for 15 minutes. Eat. Wonder how you never discovered this ambrosia before. Be amazed by how you aren’t hungry until around 4.00 pm. Consume some extra-low fat Cottage Cheese to keep you going – Sainsburys is the best.

Early dinner: Five years ago I read how Michael Winner had lost a gigantic amount of weight based on this metabolically based idea of not eating after 7 pm. I figured that any approach capable of making Winner fit onto a Cinerama screen must be miraculous. Staggeringly, it works for other people too.

Above all, however, portion control – eating less – is the medium-to-long-term copper-bottomed way to make your bottom smaller, stomach flatter and face more sculptured.

But having said that, the short term seven-pounds-in-five-days way to lose weight is Number Six – catch a virus.

We have a virus doing the rounds here in Devon at the moment. Locally, it is referred to as The Thing. It isn’t just ‘something going round’. It is The Thing.

Regardless of all the circulatory systems involved, the nasty WomanFlu/ManDeath Thing works like any other virus served up to us from the sub-bacterial realm: it starts at the top and works down.

For the trolls about to bombard the comment thread, let me say right now that most viruses die quite quickly, but on the way help cause secondary infections. Strictly speaking, then, it’s the secondary infections that obey gravity. But the principle’s the same: what started in the nose as The Thing winds up in the bowel as some other Thing soon to be in the sewers.

When in the nasal area, The Thing delivers a constant drip down the throat so despicable, the last thing you’ll want is food. Once it migrates down to the larynx, you’d like to eat, but swallowing is pretty close to having Jack the Ripper at work in your throat. Next stop is the lungs – so even if you are by now dying of starvation, the compulsive desire to cough up important body tissue acts against any form of ingestion. And from then, via the stomach, The Thing invades the intestines. You’re eating by now – mainly imodium – but any and every form of sustenance ignores pharmaceuticals in its headlong dash for the exit. F-f-f-f-fire! yells that plain chicken with rice, let’s get the hell outta here.

Using this amazing regime, I have shrunk from 13st 9.75lbs to 12st 10.25lbs in 30 days.

So there it is. Eat less, get ill, and do some other stuff. It is the answer. Give your shelves a rest: throw away all those point-scoring, macrobiotic, Atkins, Montignac, Dukan and Vegan diet books. In this one relatively brief Slogpost is all you will ever need to know about how to lose weight.

Merry Christmas.