A diet delivered to your door

Special delivery: Genevieve takes in her daily three meals and snacks

There's nothing like the Oscars ceremony to make us mortals feel lacklustre, lardy and green with envy. I've long suspected that if I only had a personal trainer, nutritionist, my own chef, life coach and valet I could give Jennifer Aniston a run for her money. Last week I came close. I went on an "energy diet". My aim was to feel not merely less tired but to look and feel fantastic ... fast.

I wanted to lose the grey shadows under my eyes, improve my dry, reddish skin, tackle a yeast intolerance and, having reached an optimum weight over the autumn, not put on any extra pounds. The fame and fancy frocks would surely follow.

The Pure Package, a new diet delivery company aimed at time-poor, cash-rich metropolitans, assured me it could help me meet all my goals. Set up by Jenny Irvine, a farmer's daughter with a commitment to ethical sourcing and traceability, Pure Package offers a minimum 14-day programme tailor-made to your own dietary needs.

For £26.99 a day, three fresh portion-controlled meals and two snacks are delivered in a black, Prada-esque, temperature-controlled-bag between midnight and 6am every day. All you have to do is collect them from the door when you wake, and eat them.

Before I began my energy diet, I phoned the Pure Package nutritionist, Pip Hartnell. Reluctantly, I laid my eating habits bare: two or three cups of tea and one latte a day, biscuits, remnants of children's fish fingers and potato waffles to fight off pre-supper hunger pangs, two or three glasses of wine every other day and no water. My breakfast is usually muesli, lunch is vegetable soup or a sandwich, and supper is fish and vegetables with fruit on a good day. These meals, while neither hugely satisfying nor interesting, kept my weight off. But I was always hungry, especially between lunch and a late supper, hence the raiding of the office biscuit tin. Feeling run down was my biggest gripe.

"You need to cut out the things that reduce your energy levels, such as yeast overgrowth," explained Pip, "which means cutting out sugar and refined carbohydrates - which feed your yeast. When the body doesn't like something, it fights it and it's a drain on your energy levels.

"You need to increase your water intake and decrease your stimulants, allowing more circulation, which provides more oxygen for your body, so you feel more invigorated. It's time to get back to the basics and provide you with steady energy, hence the three meals a day and the two snacks, all of which will provide that holy trinity of carbohydrates, protein and essential fats. That way your blood-sugar levels will be steady, with no peaks or troughs.

Also, I want you to limit the amount of wheat you have in your diet. We're all eating too much of it and becoming intolerant to it. It's an energy drain. I want you to experiment with some new grains, like quinoa and barley," she said, before hanging up to consult the Pure Package chef who was to devise a special diet for me.

I was dreading Day One. I retrieved my first black bag with a heavy heart, anticipating bland muesli, carrot sticks, plain fish and mounds of scary quinoa. Yes, there was muesli, but the container was wrapped in pretty raffia, which softened the blow. And the rest of the day was a food fest. In fact, the whole programme was a food fest.

On that Monday I ate homemade houmus with wakame crackers, an organic marinated tofu Caesar salad for lunch (the tofu was flavourful and not at all slimy), strawberries, pecan nuts, monkfish, scallops and rosemary bruschetta with Mediterranean vegetables, all of which contained the required balance of carbs, proteins and fats to give me the nutrients I needed, which I can burn up at a steady rate.

By Wednesday, however, I started to panic. I was convinced that the nut snacks, the mixed seeds and that morning's wheat-free muffin would be fattening me up. All those calories!

"The body needs fuels and, like a fire, you need to stoke it," explained Pip. "The idea of eating little and often is that you are stoking the fire and upping your metabolism. We need fewer calories nowadays since we're not living as fast as we used to, we're not off killing prey, but the foods still need to be incredibly rich in nutrients.

"People have a phobia about nuts. They think they are going to put on weight. But they provide essential unsaturated fats for healthy hair, nails and skin. Your dry skin is caused by a lack of essential fats which help keep the skin firm and plump. That's why we're putting nuts, seeds and fish, especially oily fish, in your diet."

I took her word for it and scoffed my meals with impunity. At the end of the programme, I had never felt so good psychologically and physically. Yes, the feelgood factor of having all your meals made for you, cutting out the gruesome supermarket run and cooking, certainly helped. So did the detoxing effects of my hugely increased water intake and cutting out wheat products.

So, what's the downside? Spending £175 for a week's food is fiendishly expensive. However, having priced my Thursday and Friday meals, I think it's worth it, bearing in mind the convenience, the quality of the ingredients, the on-call nutritionist and, crucially, the restaurant-standard complexity of the dishes.

One Friday's menu, for example, included seared blue-fin tuna Niçoise salad plus wild mushroom and barley risotto (the barley is a low-glycemic grain with a high level of soluble fibre, both of which give sustained energy levels). Sourcing those ingredients from Ocado, Waitrose's delivery company, and Fresh & Wild, the total came to £32.85 for the meal. And, of course, you would have to prepare the meals.

The other downside is life after Pure Package. The nearest I've got to something sugar-free in my fridge is a bottle of champagne which, Pip assured me earlier, is low in sugar and yeast. But liquid diets are banned so, like a common civilian again, I'm off to the supermarket for the first time in a while, and with a very heavy heart.

  • The Pure Package: telephone 020 7229 4455; www.purepackage.com; info@purepackage.com

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