Nuts or what?

If you are what you eat, then you also are how you eat - so Lucy Cavendish decided to ditch the diets, ignore convention, and try to just eat mindfully

This is what I had for lunch today: nuts. That's it, really. I had some nuts and then a few seeds and then I felt full. For breakfast I had a boiled egg and a square of dark chocolate. For dinner it will be chickpeas and green tea.

It sounds crazy, a weird mixture, but every day everything changes for me. A year ago, if you'd told me that all I would eat for lunch would be two handfuls of nuts, and that I would have chocolate for breakfast, I would have thought you were mad. All those calories - 166 in the nuts alone (I know my calories!). Yet these days this is how it is. I eat what I want, when I want, no matter what it is. The only caveat is that I truly have to want to eat it.

It is not part of a diet.

A year ago I was on the Dukan. The year before that, Atkins. Before that, Montignac, South Beach, Raw, Blood Group. I've been flirting with Caveman and Intermittent Fasting for the past few months, but now nothing. I eat whatever I want and I've lost 3kg. According to statistics, a third of women in the UK are on some form of diet at any given time. They spend 31 years on average on a diet in their lifetime. But not me. Not now.

So what has changed? In a nutshell (sorry) just about everything. Instead of being diet obsessed, I now listen to my body. I am, as Geneen Roth, the author of Women, Food and God, puts it, "the perfect answer". "I spend a long time trying to persuade women to listen to their bodies, to eat only what their body is telling them they need, but after many decades of dieting this is very hard to do," she says. She's not wrong. To be honest, it's brought me to the brink of destruction.

At first, given that I had no idea what my body wanted to eat, I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I was so confused, I thought I was going mad. I sometimes found myself standing in the kitchen trembling, on the verge of weeping. It made me want to curl up in a ball and tell the world with its pâtisseries and coffee shops and three-course meals and cheese platters to go away and leave me alone. How had I become so out of touch with my body?

"It's really hard," Roth says. "We like to be on a diet because we like being bossed about by 'mother'. But it's never about the diet. It's about control. I work with women who want to lose weight and, for many of them, it's about the fact that they have not landed in the centre of their own life. They are not at peace in any way at all."

Yet now, two months on, I am at peace. I may not be the best dinner date on the planet (for reasons I shall go into later) but I feel my body and my brain are finally working together. Not all the time, but most of it. I have discovered what Susan Hepburn, a hypnotherapist who treats food issues, calls "mindful eating".

"It's not a new thing, but it's a hard thing to do," says Hepburn. "Mindfulness is a highly effective psychological tool. I put in place the idea of really savouring food, so that my clients enjoy and get the most out of eating, becoming more aware of what they put into their bodies, and therefore making healthier choices. What we need is a mindful awareness that will change your attitude to food forever."

Like most women, I have a complicated relationship with my body. "It's particularly pertinent to women," says Hepburn. "Men don't feel that need to diet in the same way." That doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, though. "They just don't worry about that in the way women do," she says. But I am a woman in my mid-40s. On the one hand, I am realistic about what a woman of my age looks like. I don't expect not to have breasts, hips, a stomach. I have had four children.

However, I am always trying to lose weight. Even as a teen, I stuck posters of models on my walls. I became obsessed with my weight, counting calories, weighing everything out. I remember worrying about the fact my mother had cut up a mango for me to eat.

"It's very common," says Sophie Boss of the Beyond Chocolate weight-loss workshops and support group. "After years of dieting and being told what to eat and not to eat - by diet books, magazines, weight-loss organisations, doctors - most women spend the best part of their adult lives on a diet and the diets are made up of rules. They forget how to make choices. The messages and the diets are all contradictory. For ages we were cautioned to eat only one egg a day - now they are considered good for us and we can have more or less as many as we like. Is it any wonder that we don't know what to do anymore?"

It is a food tyranny that, for me, had to stop. I got up one day and made a commitment to a new way of being. I wouldn't diet. I wouldn't calorie-count. I would try to listen to my body and what my body needed at all times.

On the first day of my new regime I started with breakfast. I looked around the kitchen: eggs, bread, milk, cereals, porridge, yogurt. I immediately felt ill. My brain was whirring. I became shaky and sweaty. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to eat. I felt quite nauseated. I ended up eating nothing at all.

This feeling of near-paralysis continued for a few days. My brain overrode every decision I made. If I felt I wanted nuts, my brain would harp on about how calorific they were. I couldn't accept any decision as being "natural". The freedom to choose threw me completely.

"This is exactly what happens," says Hepburn. "It's difficult to do this by yourself. We are often ill-placed to know what we want to eat. It sounds simple, to get in touch with our bodies, but it's actually very complicated."

I started to question whether I could tune into my body in any way without these deep-seated food prejudices clouding my judgment. As soon as I reached for anything "unhealthy" my brain would stir and I would have a meltdown. Conversely, every time I did think my body was telling me it could do with a square of chocolate, I overrode it, convinced it was my brain speaking rather than my body.

"But your body may well have wanted one square of chocolate," says Roth. "The thing is to eat it mindfully. Savour that first square. Too often we are thinking of something else or concentrating on the next square. When we eat things mindfully we eat with true enjoyment and in moderation."

After a few days I became convinced I would not be able to achieve any harmony between my physical desire for food and what my brain was telling me. I was hot-wired to a state of paranoia about food and dieting. It was genuinely shocking to realise this.

"It is not surprising this is what happens," says Boss. "All of the women I meet have lost sense of how to eat. The concept of eating what you want is quite terrifying as it puts the onus back on you rather than, say, the 'diet guru'. It is hard to change that."

It was Boss who suggested I ring-fence my experiment. "Tell yourself you will do it for six weeks, then it is achievable and doesn't feel like a life sentence." She also suggested I did away with the concept of breakfast, lunch and dinner. "Free yourself from all constraints! It takes time to adjust, so be prepared to be very open about it."

I took her advice and, by the second week, began to calm down. In fact, as I started to listen to my body more and become aware of what I actually wanted to eat, rather than what I thought I wanted to eat, certain factors became rather revelatory.

The most interesting thing was that I ate less. I'd expected the opposite to happen. I assumed that, once I was freed from the tyranny of dieting, I'd be hogging bacon sandwiches by the dozen. But no, I ate so little I felt that I had somehow put myself on rationing. By week three I felt I was truly beginning to take on board what my body wanted and, more importantly, what it didn't want.

This doesn't mean to say that I didn't have cravings. I had - and still have - them all the time. I still happily eat Rich Tea biscuits, but only when my body is telling me to. What has surprised me is that rather than pigging out on all the foods I thought I would crave - sweets, ice cream, crisps, salted peanuts - I have become an almost parsimonious eater.

 I have no desire to eat meat. I haven't touched pasta or potatoes. I love rice, beans, pulses, lentils, fish and shellfish. Middle Eastern food and flavours go down well, as does highly spiced Indian food. The mental and physical benefits have been immeasurable.

 I have energy. The lethargy that used to beset me has gone. I am ready to move, run, jump, take flight at any given moment. I love the sense of freedom it has given me.

There have, however, been some major drawbacks. Society in general does not celebrate someone who is eating "mindfully". The foodies I know were appalled. "It's not very sexy, is it?" said a male friend. "There's nothing worse than going out with a woman who pushes salad leaves around her plate." There is, of course, something attractive about a woman who enjoys food and wine. It shows abandonment, enjoyment, a devil-may-care attitude. But a woman who lives off pulses, nuts and seeds is hardly alluring.

I ask Hepburn about this. While my new mindful attitude to food has made me feel healthier and happier, I am mourning the woman I once was, a woman who would eat a dripping camembert and down a glass of vintage port. Where has that woman gone? "It's not about what you eat. It's about the enjoyment of food, and you still enjoy food," she says. "Loosen up the rules. Let yourself truly enjoy your food. If people find it hard to accept, it's because you are holding the mirror up to them. Everyone hates that."