Doing the Disney diet

The boys are currently counting down the days until we jet off to Disney World, and while I share their excitement at going on holiday, I am more than a little apprehensive about how I will deal with the gargantuan portions of greasy food that usually accompany a break Stateside.

Over the last four months I have managed to shed almost as many stones of blubber and I really, really don't want to put any of it back on again as it was such bloody hard work shifting it in the first place. At home I have developed a disciplined approach, whereby I eat very little and haunt the gym floor to such an extent I am almost on staff.

But being away, in America of all places, is going to be tough. A normal break in Florida is saturated with trips to fast food joints, from Waffle House to Dennys. Breakfast is a stack of fluffy pancakes drenched in sweet maple syrup with a side of crispy bacon, the way only the Americans make it. Lunch is burger and chips theme park style and dinner is some calorie laden combination of cheese, fries, steak, pizza and ice cream.

It is no wonder that the US is home to the super obese. I know if I lived there I would require a mobility scooter to drive me from one feeding trough to the next. The trouble is that while I may be a woman of elegance and sophistication in many areas of my life (ahem), when it comes to food my tastes have not left the trailer park - at least not when I am on holiday.

I suspect it's that same foreign blindness that means you will happily toast yourself lobster red, wear unsuitably small clothes and drink luminous cocktails in a way that you would never dream of at home, that allows me to gorge on fast food that I would actively avoid in the UK. I would never kick off my day with an Egg McMuffin here, but in America it seems rude not to.

My eminently sensible other half tells me I shouldn't worry so much. But after spending months attempting to persuade myself, in the teeth of all the evidence, that I no longer crave fatty, sweet treats, I am terrified that just two weeks in the birth place of junk food will see me backsliding at a supersonic pace.

I am just hoping that if I spend enough hours pushing a double buggy around the baking hot parks, traipsing from visits to Mickey Mouse to rides on It's a Small World, I will burn off at least some of the excess calories I am destined to consume. But it's questionable whether I can take the unrelenting 'magic' of Disney without self medicating on comfort food.