Buffet paradise: Pay it forward on an all-inclusive holiday

Two words will send a shiver up your spine if you’re on a diet or expect to be on one as you plan your holiday abroad next year. All-Inclusive. Just writing those four syllables is enough to send your muffin-top a quiver.

Nevertheless, my husband and I have just sampled our first ever all-inclusive holiday on the beautiful Greek island of Corfu. We weren't, as Irish Times contributor Richard Pine might argue, all-inclusive "inmates" who barely left the confines of our hotel.

We regularly stepped out of our prison scrubs and broke for the perimeter fence, taking €50 with us to help stave off a Grexit. The public buses in Corfu are regular and cheap (about €1.80 single for a 15km trip) and help you make a quick get-away when you want to break free.

The decision to go all-inclusive came about after a trip to the Red Sea in Egypt several years ago. We would watch with envy as fellow guests flashed their all-inclusive bangles to get anything from a coffee to an ice-cream or that most basic of holiday requirements – a glass of drinking water. By contrast we had to leave the hotel every day and trek across a busy, dusty main road to the nearest shop, paying double the average for a couple of litres of water.

Fast-forward to September 2015 and our first sun holiday in five years. We chose a four-star hotel on Corfu’s east coast overlooking the Ionian Sea. It cost the euro equivalent of about £820 sterling per person for 14 nights, flying from Belfast.

Some floors in our sprawling six-storey hotel had been modernised in recent years but others were dated – but then who doesn’t love a Formica and leatherette-clad games room straight out of Albania circa 1980?

Many of the TripAdvisor reviews said our chosen hotel was very clean and offered great food. We found this to be accurate. Nevertheless a daily housekeeping service is wasted on some (namely me), because I would tidy up the room before I let the cleaning woman in to do her job.

If discipline and self-sacrifice are not your forte, you have to find ways of ensuring weight gain stays to a minimum on an all-inclusive holiday. Stick to the Mediterranean diet – the local dishes are by far the best anyway. Even on themed nights such as Asian or Mexican, vegetarian or fish options are always available.

The chefs at our hotel had a thousand ways of presenting aubergine, each more delicious than the next. The salad bar was large and fresh – big bowls of lettuce, finely sliced red onion, shredded cabbage, grated carrot, creamy tzatziki, taramasalata, olives, pickled vegetables, capers and juicy plum tomatoes that were so savoury they were almost a meal in themselves.

The Greek salad, simply ‘salad’ there of course, was prepared with the crumbliest, melt-in-your-mouth feta cheese. Luckily for us, the chips and some other fried foods weren’t great, and were easy to ignore. You won’t really want many fry-ups either in the sweltering morning heat.

Best to limit your intake of buttery croissants and pain au chocolat. But yoghurt, water melon, light cereal, crusty wholemeal toast or even a bowl of oats and honey were all breakfast options for the health-conscious guest at our hotel.

If you’ve shunned the hot, claustrophobic elevator in favour of climbing six flights of stairs to the roof-top pool; if you have undertaken an aqua-fit session, or an hour’s snorkelling with the fish in the Ionian Sea, you may or may not want lunch. When you’re staying all-inclusive, you know the next meal is never far away, so you won’t worry about missing the odd one.

Meanwhile, if you’re wary of all the alcohol that’s literally on-tap, take smaller quantities or even occasionally water your drinks down. You’ve paid up, so take your poison any way you choose.

Almost anything goes when you’re all-inclusive – just don’t discover the delight that is cappuccino topped with vanilla ice-cream. As for desserts … well that’s between you and your jeans.

By far the most pleasantly surprising thing about all-inclusive is getting a holiday free from money.

Lock your wallet in the safety deposit box and you won’t have to look at cash again until day-release comes around, Perhaps you’ll spend an afternoon exploring historic Corfu town, or watching the Republic of Ireland beat Georgia the hard way, in a pub in the nearby village of Moraitika.