In times gone by, people preferred the ‘eat less and do more exercise’ method but sadly those times are gone, consigned to the days when policemen weren’t afraid to clip children round the ear and you could buy a house for sixpence and still have change for the cinema.

Society now demands instant satisfaction, we want to have our cake and eat it, minus the cellulite. Who hasn’t heard of Atkins, The Pritikin Principle, The Fat Smash Diet, Weight Watchers and many other attractive oppositions to ruin mealtimes for the foreseeable future, all for the sake of minimal reward?

I find the concept of diets ridiculous, why eat cabbage soup for a week, why torture yourself like that? It is for these reasons that I have embarked on a challenge to eat only bread and cake based products for a week. It may seem irrelevant and pointless to the diet debate but if a guy can eat McDonalds for a month and pull it off as an innovative documentary then I’m arguing the same!

When the idea was suggested my first thought was ‘crumbs’! How hard could it really be? If anything the idea seemed a little half-baked. It would be irritating, since it’s hardly the food you want to tuck into on a hot day and I wasn’t even allowed to eat it with a filling, only the variation of bread was permitted. But how hard could it be, as long as I used my loaf?

In truth for the first couple of days I was on a roll and couldn’t see what the fuss was all about; a croissant here, a cheeky bit of crumpet there, and safe in the knowledge that it was only seven days of mild suffering. Dry and bloated suffering yes but nothing worse than what an Asda ready meal can chuck at you.

Then on day four, came the slip up. I can see why the famous Hollywood women who only eat celery and cotton wool are such well adjusted human beings – eating the same stuff drives you mental. The whole experience gets stale and becoming hungry is met by fear and slight dread, knowing that things aren’t going to get baguette-r any time soon. The Ciabatta beckoned in the cupboard and my hands began to become slightly scale like. People around me began to note yeast like tangs in the air. I became afraid to venture out in the heat for fear I would begin to rise with the amount of self-raising flour in me.

Feelings of lethargy and anger began to simmer in my yeasty blood, similar to the outbursts that I had been prone to witnessing when an ex-girlfriend was on a diet last summer. Even the knowledge that my diet would be here today and scone tomorrow wasn’t enough. I gave in to the glory of McCoys.

From that point on, it all seemed like a waste of time. Even though I kept to the diet it was easy to see – in a perverse and nowhere near as serious sort of way – why some people get so caught up in what they eat. In some respects I began to admire their will power, even if it seems completely misplaced to me. I only spent a week focusing on food and it became a big deal, one mistake made all the suffering and hard work seem a waste of time. Thankfully, I managed to keep my sanity and saw it just as time annoyingly spent but it can become obsessive at points and it is worrying to see girls become so. I think I’ll stick to the exercise.