Not a fan of Christmas calorie counts

Christmas – a time for celebration and joy. With the frosty month of December already upon us, I am sure many of you are organising Christmas meals out with friends and family, and getting extremely excited about seeing pals from home, opening up your presents and the prospect of five weeks with no lectures.

Personally, I like looking forward to the Christmas food. Yummy, warming food, which is far better than your (well, my) standard baked beans on toast, placed beautifully on your plate by somebody else.

I also love the way restaurants appear to get completely swept up in the Christmas spirit (I will continue to pretend to be ignorant of the fact this is probably a sales tactic).

My parents came to visit me recently, and decided we should go into Leamington Spa for a meal. Lovely idea.

The restaurant greeted us with a lit-up Christmas tree, dozens of cards lining the ceiling and ‘Christmas deal’ flyers pushed into every nook and cranny. The beaming waiter led us to our table and it all seemed hunky-dory. But then I opened my menu…

Disgusting black font seemed to be stalking every item on the menu, like an unwanted tag-a-long. Calorie numbers. Every single piece of food on the menu had a bunch of figures next to it indicating how many calories I would be consuming during my meal.

It’s no surprise then that when the waiter came back to take my order, I glumly replied, “I’ll just have the prawn cocktail starter at the same time as everyone has their main meal, thanks.”

I wasn’t the only one affected; Mum went for the salmon with new potatoes and my sister decided to play it safe and have the same as me. Dad, well, Dad wasn’t affected and went for the biggest steak on the menu. With fries. But that’s beside the point.

Calorie counts at Christmas? Really? I want to enjoy my food, not quickly Google how many lengths of the pool it would take to burn off that one particular item. I don’t want to flick anxiously through a menu to check I’ve ordered something with a heart by it or in the ‘500 calories or less’ section.

Christmas is a time for eating! It keeps you warm. You need that extra bit of food in your tummy. If many of you are living in student houses this year you will know how flipping cold this term has been.

There appears to be a trend that every student household will possess one house mate who will not allow the heating to be turned on until there is snow in the sky. Many of us have ended up shivering around the house, huddled up in hoodies, attached to hot water bottles, downing tea like our lives depend on it. One of my friends has even resorted to jumping round the house in a sleeping bag.

So we need food. We need to make sure we reissue our body with the calories that it is shivering off. Christmas provides the perfect opportunity.

Britain started introducing calorie counts on menus in the summer (desperately trying to copy our American friends), yet, surprisingly, not many restaurants have taken to doing it. It just isn’t appetizing. It’ll make people, like me, order starters instead of main courses, ask for dishes to be provided in a different and more time-consuming manner, or simply buy a drink and grab a sandwich on the way home.

Don’t insult dieters by doubting they are bright enough to access the restaurant’s website where calorie information is usually provided. If they have decided they are going to stick so religiously to their diet, then they will probably have already manoeuvred the evening specifically so that they could go to a restaurant where the food is fairly healthy anyway.

Counting the calories is for the New Year, not for Christmas. So next time I visit a restaurant I will be firmly ignoring any type of small black writing; I’ll have what I want.

By all means, order something healthy if it is what you really want. I am simply arguing that when you do go out for a restaurant meal, usually it’s an indulgence, and you want to eat something without feeling guilty or dissatisfied.

In the present day, with so much importance placed upon image and size, it’s no wonder that the three girls at my dinner table felt they needed to pick the lowest calorie items on the menu.

Therefore, I am begging restaurants to stop cluttering up the menu with calorie counts. Let us decide for ourselves whether we want to research your meals online.

It’s Christmas for goodness sake!