The truth about your trousers

Here’s a great weight loss tip – pick up a nasty stomach bug and spent five days in the bathroom.

I’ve lost nine pounds since Wednesday, which is about three weeks worth of dieting normally, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

I knew I was ill when I had lost my appetite, I went 12 hours with so much as a bacon sarnie and didn’t even feel hungry.

I have a weigh in this week and I’m looking forward to clocking in some eight or nine pounds under what I was last time.

But of course once I get over this gastroenteritis, I suspect I am going to be stalking the aisles of my local supermarket tearing various cold meat products from the shelves and stuffing them down my neck with the ravenous hunger of z-list ‘sleb released from three weeks in the jungle.

So I don’t expect the weight to stay off for long, but at least for now I can enjoy the waistband of my jeans being a bit looser than normal.

In fact I am quite pleased because I bought a new pair of trousers last week and I was able to just about get into a pair a size down from normal, without splitting the seams.

Sliding down the scale from 38ins to 36ins was cause for some celebration. How your clothes fit is the best indication of how much progress you are making with weight loss.

As well as my jeans being baggy round the backside for the first time in a while, my Gert Lush t-shirt which use to cling to my torso like a trucker’s vest is also hanging a bit looser lately.

But the party was cut short when I was reading up about obesity on the NHS Direct website. Apparently clothing manufacturers have been lulling us all into a false sense of security for years.

We all know that different shops seem to have different ideas of sizes, particularly with womens’ clothes.

Certain gents outfitters idea of a 36ins pair of trousers is a much better fit than others, they understand our needs.

But what I had no idea about was that a pair of 36ins trousers today is on average three inches bigger than they were some 30 years ago, but they are still labelled the same size.

They have put on the extra inches to compensate for us all getting fatter, but didn’t dare tell us.

It’s unbelievable, it’s been a blatant deception played out on us poor fools who have believed for years that we were still the same size we were in our youth, when in fact we’ve all grown at least three inches.

So while I have been busy celebrating dropping one waist size down, it turns out I’m actually nearer 40ins than 36.

Oh well, perhaps I’ll go and eat some raw chicken and give myself food poisoning and shift another eight pounds next week and launch the Armitage Shanks diet plan.