Today was my third day of work with the ExtraCare Charitable Trust shop in Earlestown. In a nutshell, it's a voluntary job as a shop assistant, and I get to do everything from sorting clothes, to steaming them to make them look presentable, to storing them, to sticking them on the shop floor, to running the till... and there's probably more that I can't remember.

It's my Monday, Wednesday and Friday thing. Nine to five - and I believe I'm the only person who stays until the very minute the shop closes, other than the manager and deputy manager - and I bloody love it.

The work? Knackering, both physically and mentally. Carrying stuff to and fro all day gives you one hell of a workout. You haul huge plastic binbags full of clothes out of the stock room into the sorting room, spend an hour on your feet going through everything, tagging and hanging what's worth selling and binning what isn't. Then you haul them all into the steamer/kitchen area and spend a further hour steaming all the creases out of everything. Then, you have to haul it all upstairs, usually making several trips, to the storage rooms on the second floor. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sound tiring to you? It bloody well is. And it's flipping fantastic.

You see, it keeps you on your feet. There's always something to do. You're always moving about, carrying things, so you get a bit of exercise. And it's a challenge to the mind in some ways because of the complex sorting and pricing systems they've got going there. With clothes, you have to scrutinise them carefully for the slightest blemish. Marked ones get 'ragged', but the charity still receives money for scrapped clothing (50p per kilo).

For good clothes, you need to find a size, figure out whether it's been 'rotated' (sent in from another shop who's failed to sell it), and write all this down, along with the sort code (there's a different number for ladies' tops, ladies' trousers, menswear, kids' clothes, books, etc). Then you have to remember which hanger to use, remember to put a size cube on the hanger and actually tag the item. There's a lot to memorise, and when the process becomes second nature, things can be forgotten.

It's the same with running the till. There's this huge process you have to go through, and if you make a mistake, the till screams - quite literally - at you. If you press the 'cash total' button too early, for instance, it beeps loudly. And the method's slightly different when people pay via. card. I learned this the hard way the other day when I inadvertently created an anomaly in the shop's books - which Dawn the manager had to rectify with a call to the Head Office. Er - oops. Sorry, Dawn!

There's always something to do. We get loads of bags of donations every day, so there's those to be sorted. If not, there's tidying to be done in the stock room, on the shop floor - anywhere in the shop, really! Or, if you're a nutter like me who loves making tea/coffee for people, there's that to be done.

So, it keeps me busy, it hones my organisational skills, keeps me mentally alert, teaches me to socialise... and then there's the 25% discount and first pickings of anything that comes into the shop! Huzzah!

Speaking of which, I brought three more lovely items home today, all clothing. Two tops and a hat.

( In which Kelza goes on a ramble about what we all know is the main reason why she loves her job... )

I forgot to mention that I've recently gone to war a bit on my diet. I've cut coffee out almost entirely now - and the one time I did cave and have a cup, I did so with sweeteners in lieu of my traditional four sugars. I'm now drinking mostly tea - without milk - with two sweeteners. As a result, my sugar and fat intake has gone down, and after getting over the initial post-NaNo caffeine withdrawals, I've started to feel a lot better.

Every morning, I've woken myself up with two chocolate Weetabix and a glass of pure fruit juice. Weetabix is packed with wholegrain and it's low in salt and fat, and a glass of pure fruit juice counts as one of your five a day. Cartons of said juice are really quite cheap from my local supermarket - between 60 and 80 pence, and one carton will last me three days.

For dinner, I usually have sandwiches. My problem here is I tend to go overboard on the margarine and cheese - so despite having tomatoes and lettuce on there, I'm taking in more fat than is probably sensible. Plus the cheese and margarine get used up stupidly quick. This is a problem that can be solved with moderation.

The killer, I think, is teatime. In our house, it's always been Dad who cooks the meals at teatime. And it's always been chips, with pizza or lasagne or pizza or processed meat rubbish or pizza. But this is the only thing my siblings, the buggers, will eat. Okay, so Nathan eats curry and spaghetti bolognese as well... but Ashley is the fussiest eater ever, in that he will only eat chips and pizza. Yet he is stick thin.

So, a lot of my fat intake happens at teatime, when Dad cooks fast foods. This needs to change, and that change needs to happen with Dad. Or with me; I could always start cooking my own tea. See, if Dad were to change his ways, then Nathan and Ashley would have to as well... and like I said, Ashley's a fussy eater. So the change probably has to be with me. Perhaps if I scoured the Internet for some cheap, healthy recipes...

There are two reasons for my sudden war on my diet. One: I don't want to get into my forties and then poof! I have a lifelong health condition because of my years of eating rubbish. Two: I want to lose weight, because I'm a size sixteen and there's no way I should be that big. I'm not huge, but I should be size fourteen at least, in jeans/trousers/whatever. Size twelve in tops, because I'm a odd-looking pear-shaped being from outer space.

One of the things I attribute my weight gain over the years to is the fact that Dad got a new car - which became The Toreador - when I was in Year 11, thus removing the need to walk to school like I had done every day for four years previous. I was pretty thin in Year 11; I could fit size 12 jeans, and that was after all the funny growing things had stopped happening.

What I need to do is start walking again, daily, just like I used to, come rain or shine. It doesn't matter if I just walk aimlessly - it won't be aimless, really; it's for the purpose of getting back in shape. At the same time, I can always take my camera out with me, snapping around Newton and all that. I still haven't used a single exposure of my colour film.

You do not need to starve yourself to diet successfully. Starving yourself, if anything, can increase the problem tenfold. Dieting is about targeting the problem areas with what you eat and your exercise regime, and then addressing those problems appropriately. And this is what I'm going to do.