New Thing #20 – Try the Slim Fast plan

When I was a child I wanted three things more than anything else in the world – a hoverboard, to ride in the Batmobile and to try freeze-dried ice cream like the astronauts had on the space shuttles. The closest I ever came to achieving any of these things was when a boy in my school won a life size replica of the Batmobile in a newspaper competition (I KNOW) but then refused to let me sit in it at weekends because I set fire to his pencil case in chemistry once. Other than that, my childhood dreams remain annoyingly unrealised. I’ve even had the chance to try the freeze-dried ice cream when I bought some for my Godson’s birthday earlier this year. But he wouldn’t share it with me either.  Git.

So I suddenly though the other day perhaps it was about time I started trying all those things I was intrigued about as a kid. After weighing up the various pros, cons and dangers of eating cheese straight from the block, doing a wheelie off a building, eating everything off the MacDonald’s menu, scoring at Wembley, drinking nothing but Coke for a week and trying to look up Carla Freeman from 4B’s skirt, I suddenly remembered the pink milkshakes.

When I was a kid, mealtimes were a fairly joyful affair. Old Lady New Things was an adventurous cook and we rarely had the same meal twice. She was generous with the chips, bountiful with the pies and trigger happy with the custard. My lasting memory, however, is not of the astonishing variety of things she made us eat every night at 6pm just after Home & Away. No. My lasting memory is of the vivid pink milkshakes she would solemnly drink while we shovelled meat (and occasionally veg) down.

This absurd drink is actually called a "milkshake"

I was fascinated by these things – they were so thick and bubbly and viscous and…well, pink. Mum always used to say they were her “special drinks” and steadfastly refused to let us try them, even a sip. Even when the old man started drinking them he wouldn’t let us near them (and he was the soft touch). Me, my brother and my sister would go literally out of minds trying to convince them to just let us try a sip. To us, they were an unholy combination of the best strawberry milkshake we’d ever tasted mixed with sweets, ice cream, jelly, more sweets and anything else we could fathom up. To our parents, however, they were simply a Slim Fast Milkshake.

Twenty years later and its weird what you remember. I’m starting to find it difficult to recollect my gran’s face who passed away about fifteen years ago but I can vividly recall my dad leaning against the kitchen counter and grimacing as he necked another pint of Pink Milkshake. He didn’t even like it and we wanted to try it! So I decided to write to Slim Fast and tell them of my desire to finally try a Pink Milkshake as one of my New Things.

That is a lot of slimming products

Credit to the PR team at Slim Fast, my email was answered almost immediately and, even better, in the affirmative. In fact they’d be delighted to send me two weeks supply of Slim Fast products to try. 2 WEEKS? Hang on, I just wanted to try the Pink Milkshake. But then the box arrived filled with a veritable haul of gaudy-looking bars, shakes, snacks and more shakes. So, after last week’s full body MOT revealed it probably wouldn’t hurt to shed a few man pounds, I decided to take the plunge and ‘do’ the whole plan that the PR had sent me. I was going to slim. Fast.

So I’m writing this post on Day 3. Apparently things have moved on from the days of “a healthy shake for breakfast, one for lunch, and a healthy meal”. Now they can actually make a chewy bar that substitutes an entire meal. Science fiction writers of the world relax, your wildest predictions have come true. These bars are weird, ricey, yoghurty behemoths that take about an hour to eat and, to be fair, do fill you up. The snacks they provide (apparently the two shakes per day wasn’t actually a great idea) are okay too, the cheeslet style cheeslets even tasting remotely of cheese.

But the shakes. My god the shakes. I was sent a tub of caffe latte flavour shake which wasn’t exactly the Pink Milkshake I had envisioned but under the circumstances would do. These things are incredible. How anything can turn milk from a delicious, refreshing liquid into a horrific, grey sludge is beyond me. It’s like drinking cement. But again, to be fair, it does fill you up…but what’s the point in feeling full if you feel like you have Meat Loaf and Beth Ditto sitting in your stomach playing the bongos. Luckily they included a sample of the infamous Pink Milkshake which was…..well, disappointing. It tasted similar to Frijj, but faker….if that’s possible.

It was like drinking Pepto-Bismol that had gone off....

I’ve never dieted before. In fact, I’ve kind of taken pride in the fact that I’ve needed to diet so in a way this is a double-header of a New Thing. I’ve finally tried the Pink Milkshake and I suppose I am technically dieting for the next 10 days. But by jupiter its boring. A girl I know had a MacDonald’s today. I don’t even eat MaccyDs anymore but the smell alone almost made me strike the poor girl and run off giggling manically with her food. How can this be a good thing? However in the name of scientific research and dedication to this blog, I am going to continue for the full 2 weeks and see how I progress. I weighed in at just over 16 stone (stop laughing) at the beginning of this frankly fruitless exercise and I’ll be interested to see what happens in a couple of Monday’s time.

Until then, it’s back to the shakes. Sigh.