Wendyl Nissen: Beware the diet dictator

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I'm not drinking that," I told my husband, who was holding up a bottle of lime cordial. "It's artificial. Not going near it." I'm not sure what has happened to me since I went on holiday but I have become a walking diet inventor.

Last week, as you may well know, I started my cellphone diet, which will last a month and is going very well, even if it did take Vodafone six days to disconnect my phone. Thank you for asking.

This week I have started my "only eating foods with a maximum of five ingredients" regime. Which is also my "only eating foods with a maximum of five ingredients that are natural" regime.

This means when you're dying for a gin, lime and soda (part of my "only drinking wine on a Friday and Saturday" regime) and your husband arrives home with a low-calorie lime with artificial sweetener, the gin is off the menu.

And you're an unhappy diet dictator.

"I thought you'd prefer fewer calories," he said, disappointed that his thoughtfulness had been rejected.

He should have known better. We have just returned from a holiday in the United States, which he could successfully write up as "The great corn syrup hunt".

Having a passing interest in food activism, I was acutely aware that high-fructose corn syrup is put into just about every food an American eats.

This highly processed sweetener is being blamed for the nation's rising obesity levels. All because the Government, having subsidised farmers to grow lots of corn, needed to find a way to use it all, so it went into food.

Everything from mayonnaise to bread and so-called health foods such as cereals and yoghurt.

"Corn syrup!" I would announce, having taken the trouble to get my glasses out of my bag and read the fine print on whatever I was eating or had picked up in a supermarket. And if it wasn't corn syrup it was aspartame, an artificial sweetener I won't go near.

My husband should have known about this before he bought the offending lime cordial because while in the States I had bought a box of "natural", "wholegrain" and "sugar-free" high- fibre cereal in my effort to avoid yet another lethal dose of corn syrup, only to find it had aspartame listed on the label.

"Disgusting!" I announced. "Why does everything in America have to be sweet?"

Gradually, as we traversed a path through the Caribbean and Mexico, I became less obsessed with corn syrup and settled into a fixation with buying a tortilla press. I found one in Costa Rica after walking several miles into a dusty village with a couple of mangy dogs and little else except a small grocery store.

"Too heavy," announced the buyer of artificial sweeteners, who has haunting memories of me lugging frying pans home from Belluno (near Venice) and coffee pots home from Paris, both times attracting excess baggage fees.

"Don't care," I fought back. By this time the woman who owned the store was doing her best to ignore what she could only assume to be two stroppy Americans on a corn-syrup high.

I put it back and sulked. For the rest of the holiday. In fact, it would be fair to say I'm still sulking and have retaliated by buying one online at huge expense, as well as a molinillo which I also failed to bring home with me.

This wasn't my husband's fault but mine for not realising that a molinillo, which looks like a wooden spoon but isn't, is great for whisking up hot chocolate.

I will need the tortilla press to go with my instant corn masa mix for making tortillas, which actually has six ingredients, but one is listed as a "trace of lime" so I'm choosing to ignore it as it's a trace.

This, of course, will all be part of next week's diet, the Mexican diet, which should be quite easy to combine with the "five natural ingredients" diet, the "only drinking wine on Friday and Saturday" diet and the "cellphone" diet.

My husband, meanwhile, has announced a diet of his own he's lovingly named the "being married to Wendyl diet" and it involves large amounts of time spent ignoring me.