Who came up with the idea of all you can eat buffets

Now when I was a kid you went to a restaurant, where they proceeded to serve you up a nice but plain plate of food, which you then ate, leaving room for pudding without having to roll home. If we were really lucky we might get to go to a carvery, but having as much veg as you can eat is not that big a thrill to a child.

I am not moaning about the range of food now available, especially as my all time favourite is heading out to the local thai restaurant, yum yum mixed starter yes please. However there do now seem to be  a plague of all you can eat buffets places.

We should have some kind of loyalty card for the number of times we have visited the local Chinese buffet over the years. However today we took our lad to his Dyslexia appointment in Reading, after the assessment we offered him the choice of where to eat, kind of assuming that the lure of Macdonalds would be too much for him to resist. Macdonalds is bad enough, its certainly the enemy of my diet ( especially considering I don't even like their food, and just eat because the kids are).

Today he dragged us to the place that must be the arch enemy of my weight loss, the lunchtime Pizza Hut Buffet. You just have to order a bottomless fizzy drink, its the law, equally you just have to go for the buffet option, otherwise you seem just a little bit mental. An all you can eat buffet of hot and cold pasta, garlic bread, various pizzas, salad and more is not going to help anyone to reduce the size of their gut.

So after eating some salad ( good me), I still managed to eat a fair few slices of pizza. Here are the factors that I am counting in my favour ( to demonstrate that I am not a complete waste of space):

- some salad with no dressing
- only thin based pizza ( although this was because I don't actually like thick bases)
- no pepperoni topped pizzas
- no garlic bread
- hot chilli pizza ( I am sure hot food is meant to help your body speed up the digestion)
- ham and pineapple pizza, surely the pineapple must count as one of your 5 a day.

Will have to have some salad for tea to make me feel a little less like a hippo.