EXCLUSIVE 'I pray my mother burns in hell': These words seem unthinkable from a son. But read the unfathomable things 'abusive monster' Kate did to his beautiful cancer-struck sister before you judge his anguish
Just days before she lost her young life to cancer, 23-year-old Paloma Shemirani turned to social media to showcase the healthy foods and sweat therapies she believed were curing her.
Having turned down the chemotherapy which offered a high chance of surviving her non-Hodgkin lymphoma, this beautiful, brilliant Cambridge graduate had embraced a 'natural' regime of juices, coffee enemas and saunas – all carefully administered at home by her mother, Britain's most notorious conspiracy theorist Kate Shemirani.
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BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
South London man shares his distress over Royal Mail delays
A man says he and his unwell mother have gone almost two months without receiving critical NHS appointment letters due to ongoing postal delivery failures in south Marwaha, who lives with his mum in a flat in Hackbridge, claimed since April they had not received letters in the post which had led to missed appointments."I have diabetes, high blood pressure, and I've had a bad infection recently. My mum has diabetes too. She needs those appointments, and they're just not arriving," he Mail told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that deliveries to Amit Marwaha's address had been taking place as normal and the company took "the timely delivery of mail very seriously". Mr Marwaha, who has lived in the property for 20 years, said he has also received multiple letters intended for others, including neighbours and people living on entirely different a result, Mr Marwaha said his mother was "panicking" about where her private health information might be being delivered the NHS letters, they are also missing financial documents, including bank statements and utility bills, and worry that sensitive information could also be misdelivered, he Marwaha said his mother was "really behind on her bills" after not receiving them."My neighbour has come to give me my letters sent to their house," he said. He said he had repeatedly raised concerns with local postal workers, but was told there was no post for Marwaha said he had made numerous complaints to Royal Mail, only to be told the post would arrive shortly - but these promises have not yet been fulfilled."They said I would receive all my mail in 72 hours after I complained, but none of it came," he said. "They've never even come back to me or said sorry."Last week, it was reported that Royal Mail performance data shows 71% of first-class post in Sutton, where Hackbridge is located, was delivered on time between January and March 2024, far below the 93% legal target. 'Extra safeguards' In a bid to confirm something was wrong, he posted a letter to himself almost four weeks ago. "It still hasn't come," he said. "I knew then something was wrong."I would like to get my mail, so would my neighbours. It's really stressed me out."Royal Mail said, according to its records, post was delivered to Mr Marwaha's address on five separate occasions between 12 and 23 June.A spokesperson said "extra safeguards" had been put in to ensure post was delivered to his flat."Two long-serving postmen, who are familiar with the residents and their circumstances, regularly speak with the customers and let them know whether or not mail has arrived that day," they added.
The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
I tested supermarket chicken nuggets – the budget winner is joint with M&S and over HALF price compared to Birds Eye
FROZEN foods like chicken nuggets tend to get a bad rap. But this freezer staple can be incredibly helpful for busy weeknights and many offer up a decent serving of protein to hungry kids. 9 Emma Shafqat, of said: "Chicken nuggets often get a bad reputation, but they can be a convenient and reliable source of protein especially for fussy eaters. "Look for ones made with chicken breast as the first ingredient and aim for low salt and saturated fat per serving. "A short, recognisable ingredient list (foods your find in your kitchen cupboards) is a good sign. "Nuggets can be a quick source of protein when added to wraps or salads for a balanced meal. "Like any processed food, it's about the quality you choose and what you serve alongside it." But which nuggets to choose? LYNSEY HOPE investigates: M&S Breaded Chicken Nuggets (600g) £4.75, £7.91 per kg Cook from frozen: 20 minute s Lynsey says: "Impressive nuggets from M&S, which looked and tasted great. Chicken makes up 53 per cent of the total ingredients and it's all breast meat. Once cooked, it was tender, while the breadcrumbs were nice and crisp after the recommended 20 minutes in the oven. "The ingredients list garlic, herb and sage which were subtle but gave these nuggets a tasty flavour. "The bag is mega expensive, setting you back £7.91 per kg which was even more than Birds Eye. But as they tasted great, I've still given them a reasonable score on value for money. "If you can afford to spend a bit more on nuggets, I'd recommend these ones." Taste: 5/5 Value: 4/5 Total: 9/10 Birds Eye Chicken Dippers (697g) £5.50 for 38, £7.80 per kg Cook from frozen: 15 minutes 9 Lynsey says: "The branded nuggets have a very distinctive taste and that is down to the batter I think, which is lightly fried. "Overall chicken make up 50 per cent of the ingredients and again, it's all breast meat. They are pricey but quite moreish and well-filled with meat. "One of the quickest to cook in the oven, taking just 15 minutes. They were quite similar to McDonald's nuggets in flavour and texture. "The biggest problem is the price, they cost nearly double most own brands per kilogram and the difference is minimal." Taste: 4/5 Value: 2/5 Total: 6/10 Sainsbury's Breaded Chicken Nuggets (450g) £1.49 for 30, £3.31 per kg Cook from frozen: 15 minutes Lynsey says: "Very meaty nuggets with British chicken making up 60 per cent of the ingredients - it's not necessarily breast meat though. The ingredients were simple, which I liked, with less rubbish in than other own brands. "They cooked well in the recommended 15 minutes and the breaded coating came out an appetising colour and had a lovely crunch. "The nuggets were small but excellent value too, on a par with Aldi when it comes to price per kilogram." Taste: 3/5 Value: 5/5 Total: 8/10 Asda Battered Chicken Nuggets (670g) £3, £4.48 per kg Cook from frozen: 18 minutes Lynsey says: "Asda's nuggets are made with 100 per cent breast meat and chicken makes up 58 per cent of the ingredients so a decent proportion. "They took a while to cook, probably closer to 20 minutes than the recommended 18. But once cooked, the batter was nice - they were very similar to McDonald's nuggets with quite a salty taste. "I also thought that there was quite a lot of air in the batter and they could have done with a bit more meat to fill them out." Taste: 4/5 Value: 3/5 Total: 7/10 Aldi Roosters Chicken Nuggets in Breadcrumbs (450g) £1.49 for 30, £3.31 per kg Cook from frozen: 16-18 minutes 9 Lynsey says: "Excellent value nuggets from Aldi and a decent sized bag. They are one of the meatiest with 60 per cent chicken in the ingredients and it's breast meat too. "Filling - though the flavour was a little bland, perhaps they need a little more seasoning in the meat." Taste: 3/5 Value: 4/5 Total: 7/10 Morrisons Battered Chicken Dippers (450g) £2.30 for 25, £5.11 per kg Cook from frozen: 16-18 minutes 9 Lynsey says: "Apparently these contain chicken breast but it was a strange texture and a grey mushy colour which was a bit off putting. "The batter was light and cooked well but it fell off the meat when I was trying to serve them and it all got a bit messy. "Over priced too. At £5.11 per kilogram they were more expensive than every other own brand, bar M&S. There wasn't 25 in the bag either - only 24." Taste: 2/5 Value: 2/5 Total: 4/10 Lidl Braemoor Red Hen Breaded Chicken Nuggets (1kg) £3.25 for 65, £3.25 per kg Cook from frozen: 14 minutes 9 Lynsey says: " Lidl 's nuggets were great value and this was a supersized family bag which is great for the freezer. The meat is 100 per cent chicken breast, though it's from Poland and not UK. "They were well-seasoned, filling and flavoursome. This bag is over £2 cheaper than Bird's Eye and you get 27 extra nuggets for your money." Taste: 4/5 Value: 5/5 Total: 9/10 Tesco Battered Chicken Dippers (450g) £1.49 for 20, £3.31 per kg Cook from frozen: 17 minutes Lynsey says: "These had an usual chemically taste and I wasn't a fan. The meat was very bitty too and I couldn't finish my portion, chucking three out of five in the bin. "They do contain 53 per cent chicken in the ingredients but it's not breast. "There weren't 20 in the bag either- I only got 18. Whilst they are good value, I wouldn't buy these again."
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Ryvita, cottage cheese and aerobics twice a week – I lost 5lb following a 1980s diet
The intro to Jane Fonda 's classic workout starts with impossibly limber people in thong leotards and leg warmers over tights doing moves that make my vagina hurt to look at. I can barely lift my leg to waist height let alone sink effortlessly into the splits. Still, I'd like to look like one of them – all swishy hair, toned limbs and exuberant good health. I'm not the only one: the past couple of years have seen a proliferation of 1980s-themed exercise options, from aerobics classes at trendy London gym chain Frame to the runaway success of Mum Dance, a 1980s-themed dance fitness class that runs in school gymnasiums throughout the country. Which is why I have embarked on a new health mission for the month: to follow a 1980s fitness and diet regimen in a bid to shed a few pounds. And I'm starting with Jane. Fonda released her workout in 1982, having started doing aerobics after fracturing her foot during filming for her movie The China Syndrome. She'd already published Jane Fonda's Workout Book the previous year with an accompanying audio tape with music to pair with the exercises, which became a bestseller. A video was a no-brainer; it became the highest-selling home video of the next few years, selling over 17 million copies worldwide, and is credited with starting the fitness craze among baby boomers. In this country, we had Rosemary Conley, who had founded her own slimming business in 1972, which offered both diet and exercise advice, and whose Hip and Thigh Diet, published in 1988, sold more than two million copies (it was later followed by 1990's Inch Loss Plan, a diet and exercise programme that promised to transform your shape in 28 days). Conley's success, which was predicated on gentle aerobic movement à la Fonda, accompanied by a low-fat diet, followed on from the F-Plan diet by the journalist Audrey Eyton, which first ran as a series in the Daily Express and was published as a book in 1982: allowing 1,500 calories per day, it focused on low fat and high fibre as the way to lose weight and stay healthy. In 1983, the Government introduced national dietary guidelines that recommended reducing overall dietary fat consumption to 30 per cent of total energy intake, and saturated fat to 10 per cent; in 1985, the frozen food brand Findus introduced a new 'Lean Cuisine' range to its UK offerings, in which each ready meal contained under 300 calories. Meat and two veg was out; calorie counting, cottage cheese, baked potatoes (no butter) and bran on everything was in. Still, in the 1980s, obesity was not the general problem that it is today. In Britain in the 1980s, the average weight for men was 73.6kg (11st 8lb) and for women, 62kg (9st 10lb); today, men weigh on average 85.8kg (13st 7lb) and women 72.8kg (11st 6lb), according to the latest data from NHS Digital, collected in 2022. 'It was a different world,' says Conley today when I speak to her, aged 78 and still going strong. 'We walked to school, we were much more active, we didn't drink as much – you only had a drink when you went out or if you were celebrating something special.' Nevertheless, the national guidelines combined with new diet and fitness trends pioneered by the likes of Conley meant that eating healthily in the 1980s became about regulating one's calorific intake and restricting 'bad' foods such as fat of any kind. The majority of the diets I researched restricted milk, for example, to a maximum of half a pint of skimmed milk per day, plus a little unsweetened orange juice; alcoholic drinks were restricted to a single small glass of wine or sherry per day. The emphasis was on beauty, rather than strength: 'We want to really look a lot slimmer,' wrote Conley; Fonda explained that we should do her exercises to avoid ending up with a 'scooped posture' as it looks 'less attractive'. At its worst, most faddy end were the crash diets that became all about one thing (and usually had adherents piling the pounds straight back on as soon as they stopped): the Cabbage Soup diet (where you only ate low-calorie cabbage soup for a week); the Cambridge diet, which involved replacing meals with shakes, soups and bars, and the Beverly Hills diet, a 35-day diet that required you to eat only fruit for the first 10 days, in a specific order. I wasn't prepared to subject my family to the consequences of a cabbage-based diet and I'm not sure my own intestines would have coped with the Beverly Hills option. Instead, I devised my own 1980s diet plan that was a combination of Conley and the F-Plan, and accompanied it with aerobic exercises from all over the place. Here's what the 1980s taught me. Eat smaller portions One of the most noticeable things about eating from the decade when The Police were still topping the charts is how much less an average plateful was. Although Conley's Hip and Thigh diet stipulates unlimited vegetables, including potatoes, with any of her main meals, overall portion sizes are much, much smaller: both Conley and the F-Plan, for example, allow only 25g of something like Bran Flakes or porridge for breakfast, and a fish pie recipe for four uses only 700g of cod. The average dinner plate, meanwhile, was typically around 10in in diameter in the 1980s – noticeably smaller than the average plate size today, which is between 11-12in. I don't try to stick to the F-Plan's 1,500 calories a day – it leaves my energy levels too low to concentrate on work or wrangle my children – but leaving aside the calorie restrictions, eating smaller portions is something I will definitely take with me from my sojourn into the 1980s. Cut down on fat (although not the good kind) Switching to a 'healthy eating' diet of the 1980s makes me realise just how much fat I generally incorporate into my diet: Greek yogurt with seeds for breakfast; olive oil in my salad dressing at lunch; butter on my toast in the afternoon; vegetables stir-fried in more oil or butter on my baked potatoes at dinner. By contrast, on my 1980s diet I'm having skimmed milk on my cereal at breakfast, eating low-fat cottage cheese at lunch and stir frying my mince for a chilli con carne using just a little bit of water at dinner time. By the end of my 1980s stint although I've lost my taste for pastries, cakes, ice cream and pies, I'm also craving yogurt, avocado on toast and peanut butter. 'The focus on having no fat in the diet isn't so good,' says nutritionist Dr Federica Amati, author of Every Body Should Know This: The Science of Eating for a Lifetime of Health. 'We now know that healthy fats are essential – things like olive oil, nuts and seeds are really necessary for good health.' 'These days we know that having some unsaturated fats and a little bit of oil is not bad for you,' admits Conley. 'You don't need to worry if you're eating Greek yogurt or salmon or an avocado – these are healthy foods.' Conley also admits some responsibility for the proliferation of 'low-fat' convenience foods that exploded in the 1980s and generally now have sugar added in place of the fat – not great for overall health. A 2015 paper published in the online journal Open Heart found that the fat dietary recommendations 'lacked any solid trial evidence'. Focus on fibre 'If you follow a high-fibre diet you will find that you feel more satisfied on fewer calories. And more of the calories that go into your mouth will, to put it bluntly, go straight through and down the lavatory,' wrote Audrey Eyton in the introduction to her The Complete F-Plan Diet. Eyton drew on emerging medical research that suggested that a Western diet rich in refined carbohydrates was causing all sorts of health problems and that by contrast, those in developing countries who ate foods high in dietary fibre avoided things like bowel and heart disease and diabetes. It should not just be 'health food cranks' who bought wholemeal brown bread, Eyton insisted, but all of us: in fact, we should all be eating between 25g and 50g of fibre a day to fill up, stay healthy and lose weight. It's true that Eyton's 'Fibre Filler' breakfast – a blend of Bran Flakes, bran, All Bran, almonds, dried prunes, apricots and sultanas – is remarkably filling given my small portion sizes, although her breakfast advice is basically to eat commercially available, processed cereals supplemented with bran, which I'm not sure is the optimal choice for health. All the 1980s health gurus also seem to have a remarkable reliance on Ryvita, and only Ryvita, as an acceptable vehicle for cottage cheese or tuna at lunchtime (I got used to it, although without anything on top it is dry in the extreme). Nevertheless 'the focus on fibre and on filling up on fibre to help maintain a healthy weight is really good and something that has been lost', says Dr Amati – who points out that the recommended daily dietary fibre intake for adults in the UK is 30g, and that most of us don't get nearly as much as that. I'd probably be better off eating porridge for breakfast, however, or sticking with yogurt and adding seeds and fruit for fibre – 'relying on fibre-enriched packaged foods [like breakfast cereals] is not as good as eating lentils and pulses and seeds and nuts'. Move more One of the things I enjoy most about my 1980s experiment is the exercise, which is basically regular, gentle aerobics and calisthenics. 'Are you ready for the workout?' becomes my mental daily Fonda mantra. 'Very few people were qualified [to teach aerobics] at that stage, so you basically moved to music,' says Conley (who qualified as an aerobics instructor in 1991). The first time I do Jane Fonda's workout on my sitting room floor via AppleTV, about 15 minutes into it I start to understand why Fonda and her pals look so good. The woman is a machine: she can do multiple sit-ups while still looking into the camera and chatting quite happily away; the same with leg raises, jumping jacks, high kicks and more abdominal exercises – and she has the breath to do encouraging shouts and whoops along the way (everyone in Fonda's workout video is highly enthusiastic, letting out cries of excitement every few minutes). The class is fast-paced and energetic, but not difficult to keep up with – a gentle burn as opposed to the usual heart-racing HIIT (high-intensity interval training) classes I'm used to. I feel pleasantly stretched at the end of it, and the next day I can definitely feel the ache in my hips. It's the same with Conley's daily exercise programme in the Inch Loss Plan, which I alternate with Fonda's workouts: the exercises are all gentle, incorporating things like stretching, sideways jogging, an 'arm and bust uplift', a 'waist whittler' and an 'outer thigh streamliner', but I ache the next day and definitely notice a toning over time, as well as improved posture. Above all, the exercises are easy to incorporate into my daily life and don't require hours of sweating at the gym. I'm not sure I'll give up my strength training sessions or weekly 'erging' on the rowing machine in the gym, but I definitely plan to continue incorporating the daily exercises into my routine. Don't snack Although the F-Plan diet book includes a 'Snack-Eaters F-Plan', which allows for five small meals a day, generally the advice from the 1980s diet queens is to stick to breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a decent amount of time between meals to aid digestion. Used to grabbing a latte mid-morning, or a handful of nuts or a piece of toast in the afternoon, it feels odd at first to have these long gaps, but after a short while I really start to appreciate them – not only do I find my focus is clearer but it means I'm hungrier for my next meal and enjoy it more. Not grazing on chocolate on the sofa in the evening, meanwhile, means I sleep better and wake up with more energy. Definitely something I'm going to stick with. Conclusion A confession: I don't manage to stick rigidly to a 1980s regimen for the entire month. That said, I'm pleasantly surprised to have lost 5lb by the end of it, and to generally be sleeping better and feeling less stressed. The relentless focus on calorie counting that all the 1980s diets advocate feels outdated and frankly unsustainable long term: as Dr Amati points out, 'restrictive dieting actually increases the risk of low mood and depression – you need to have adequate portions'. Neither will I continue to cut out all fat from my diet, and have already reintroduced yogurt, regular cheese on top of cottage cheese (which I actually love), nuts, avocados and olive oil – although I've noticed I'm less bothered about butter and have practically lost all appetite for biscuits and cakes by following the 1980s regimen. I'm going to keep on leaving proper gaps between meals however, as well as eat more fibre – I've even started to enjoy Ryvita. As for the aerobics, I'm a proper convert. Yes Jane, I am ready for the workout.
