An Unfit Mother: How to get your Health, Shape and Sanity back after Childbirth. Kate Cook

the nutrients we need? We might even be malnourished (not enough vitamins and minerals). This rule is therefore about eating real food, food that you can recognise as food. Food that doesn’t have all sorts of words on the label beginning with ‘x’ and are more than three syllables. Food that smells like food. Generally also food that can be cooked and made into something—rather than food that is already something as soon as you get it home from the shops. A drag it may be, but otherwise you will pay for it.

      Rule 6: Make up your own rule

      This rule is not a real rule at all because it is your choice as to what you do with it. You don’t even have to make a rule if you don’t want. You can make this one fit in with where you are at the moment. My rule six, for example, is: ‘I only drink champagne’, which is great because it stops me drinking lukewarm wine at a party but if there is a special occasion, I am really up for celebrating.

      I am hi-jacking this rule also as the ‘blindingly obvious rule’. You are too intelligent to really think that foods lathered in sugar, ice cream, fat, treacle, loads of high-fat dressings or marshmallows are healthy foods or magic foods that don’t count. Also, while a little of what you fancy does you good—seconds and thirds of chocolate or loads of red wine (whatever the French Red Wine Marketing Bureau has told you about the benefits of antioxidants), vats of butter and huge helpings generally will make you fat.

      If you are casting around for a rule number six, one of the best things you can do is to do the following: ‘include a handful of low-burn carbohydrates with my evening meal’. Instead of having a huge great big plateful of the supporting carb with the evening meal, have a smaller handful of low-burn carbs. Slow burning carbs are things with skin on them, which are fibrous. Not white and fluffy foods like mashed potatoes.

      Examples of slower burning carbohydrates are:

* Sweet potatoes	* Bulgar
* Brown basmati rice	* Chickpeas
* Buckwheat	* Lentils
* Whole grain pasta	* Beans
* Barley	* Sprouted seeds

      Other whole grains would be fabulous, too, including the high protein seed quinoa.

      If you are breastfeeding, you must have a goodly amount of slow burning carbs—you are burning 500 extra calories a day and need the energy. The rest of you can choose either to have a handful of slow burn carbs or not to have the big