Sammy Leslie interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003.

In the Leslie family, people are either very slim or very big.  Sir Jack Leslie, the octogenarian nightclub fanatic is skinny and always has been.  He weighs the same now as he did when he was a teenager, and can still wear all his old clothes, from before the war.  But his niece Sammy, who runs Castle Leslie, the wonderful hotel where Sir Paul Mc Cartney and his lady wife held their famous wedding, is not skinny.  And hasn’t been since she was a school-girl.   At the end of last year, Sammy, who recently separated from her husband Ultan and is in her mid-thirties, was horrified to step on the weighing scales and see the needle hitting nineteen stone eleven pounds.  Being a practical and pro-active kind of a girl, as all the Leslies are, she thought whoops, better do something.  The bummer, she says, was that it was one of those electronic weighing scales that don’t lie, so she couldn’t ignore the situation.
‘My weight swings from twelve stone to twenty stone.  That’s quite a swing!’ she tells me cheerily, as we peruse the menu at the Morrison hotel.  I am shocked.  Because Sammy is over six feet tall, and very attractive, with dark hair and eyes and because she carries herself with regal posture, born of years of horse-riding, I didn’t notice how big she was, in the same way that I would have, if she’d been timid and self conscious about her weight.
That’s like carrying Kate Moss around all day, I point out.
‘More like two Kate Mosses!’ Sammy says.
Sammy wasn’t always over-weight.  When she was a child, she was skinny.  But at boarding school she fell in love for the first time, with a boy and when the boy moved on to go out with one of her friends, Sammy turned to the biscuit tin-catering size-for comfort.  Her chosen career as a hotelier hasn’t made things any easier, weight-wise.
“I went to Switzerland, to hotel school, where you had things like chocolateering classes and pastry-making classes.  We used to go clubbing and then on to the bakery at four in the morning and get croissants and watch the sun come up.  It was great fun, but not the best way to stay slim.  When I came back, my stomach was all over the place.  And I went on the Candida diet for two years.  I lost a huge amount of weight, but I ballooned again, when I came off it.  Within three years, I had put on eight stone.”
Did she not notice it going on?
“I did, yes!  But it goes on gradually.  Also, I was at a place in my life where I was concentrating on other things.  I was under a lot of pressure and using sugar to keep me going.”
Did she go to a doctor?
“Yes, he just said I had to eat less.
Luckily for Sammy, her sister Antonia, a renowned beauty and ex-model had recently tried the controversial Atkins diet with much success.  The diet was easy to do, Antonia said, and it worked.  So Sammy tried it.
Living, as she does, in a hotel with one of the best restaurants in Ireland, it would have been torture to try a normal low-calorie, low-fat kind of diet.  The smell of a full Irish breakfast being prepared in the kitchen every morning and the sight of all those fabulously fatty, tasty meals would have been intolerable.  Besides she had already tried every diet known to man, with limited success.   But the Atkins diet promised lots of fatty foods and no calorie counting.  What could be easier?  And it worked.  She lost five stone, and can fit into clothes that had been stashed away in the attic for years.  She is delighted, she says, because she feels fantastic and is more energetic than she has ever been in her life.  And apart from allowing you to eat lots of nice things, Atkins helped to reduce sugar cravings, by eliminating sugar from her diet.
“ I know from experience that I am very sugar-sensitive,’Sammy says.  “When I start eating sugar and starch, I can’t just eat a little bit.  I start craving it,  and I get that ‘Feed me or I’ll rip your head off” syndrome!”
Come to think of it, I know that feeling!  I say.
“Especially just before my period.  That’s your blood sugar dropping.  What the Atkins diet does is stop the peaking so you don’t get the blood sugar crashes.  And once you level out, you don’t even get hungry.  I was terrible, I couldn’t calorie count.  I wouldn’t have been able to do Weight Watchers because on Weight Watchers, you are allowed sugar and bread.”
As we chat, we order lunch and I am struck by a dilemma which is currently gripping anyone who has ever tried to lose weight.  The dilemma is whether to follow what nutritionists  say is a healthy, well-balanced diet, with a mix of protein and carbohydrates and plenty of fruit and vegetables.  Or to follow the revolutionary Atkins approach, which includes very few carbohydrates, very little fruit or vegetables and lots and lots of fat and protein.  Sammy orders a chicken salad.  And I order a couscous salad.  I eat more carbohydrates than anything else, on my healthy eating plan and Sammy avoids them.  But which of us is right?  The Atkins diet has been in the news lately because a Rachel Huskey, in America died of a heart attack, while following it.  Doctors haven’t ruled out the possibility that her death was linked to the diet.  Doesn’t Sammy worry about that?
           ‘There are so many people saying so many different things.  I read them all and think about them.  Then I do what feels comfortable for me. I think the Atkins diet was great to kick start my system but long term I think that not eating fruit and vegetables and eating all that meat can’t be good for you.”
          One of the unpleasant side effects of the Atkins diet is supposed to be bad breath.  Something Sammy claims not to have experienced.
“Or at least nobody told me, if I did!  The diet did settle my stomach, though.  I used to have terrible problems with bloating and, I was taking dramanine just to be able to eat.  That’s totally gone.  You know when you eat something and the next day you are three sizes bigger and your stomach is like a rock?  That used to happen to me all the time, but not anymore.”
Another of the side effects is constipation, from not having fibre in the diet, but that didn’t happen to Sammy either.  She does consume a colossal amount of calories, though.
“In the morning, because the restaurant is there, I would put an order in for scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and tomatoes and mushrooms and bacon and all those sorts of things.  You can eat as much fat as you like.  Just no bread!”
What I want to know, as I’m sure everyone would like to know is where does the fat go?
“I don’t know. It doesn’t go on my ass, so I don’t care!”
She goes on to describe some of the things she’s been eating, on the diet.
“Loads of avocado and bacon, spinach and mozarella with mustard and crème fraiche, wicked stuff!  Chicken with cream sauces.  Fillet steak for dinner, most nights.  I did that for four months and then I started to ease off and eat fruit and vegetables.”
Did she miss the bread and the potatoes?
No.  It’s funny, the hardest thing is the smell of freshly ground coffee.  Coffee increases your insulin, so now I have hot water with a half a teaspoon of honey. The bread I don’t miss.”
The only problem with losing all the weight, she says is that it’s expensive.
“  You have to buy new clothes, nothing fits.  But what’s wonderful is when you haven’t been out for a while and people say “Oh you’ve lost loads of weight, you look wonderful!’  I just think say that again!  Keep saying it!  Because you would have dreaded going out, when you didn’t have anything that fitted.  When you are nineteen or twenty stone, you can’t really hide.  You can distract the men for a bit, with a low cut top, but not for long!”