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How to lose weight: the Food Fascist and I

Thu, 4 August, 2016

I thought I’d picked a good time to try and introduce a dietary regimen - a desperate effort to lose a couple of pounds to you and me. The kitchen-building-demolition-dust-everywhere project going strong, I have hardly any decent food at home since we don’t want to stock up with the view of the whole current kitchen soon needing to be packed up into a few boxes and go live in the sitting room. We’re eating out the freezer, the fridge and the cupboards in anticipation of the cooker being disconnected and us going over to takeaways full steam. And so there isn’t much cheese or chocolate around.

I still cook at the moment; mainly things that can be eaten just with a fork or with fingers - see last week’s musings about eating on the sofa. But I don’t bake and I don’t even make bread. Supermarket pastries don’t entice me that much; I’m loyal to myself there - my cakes are the best.

The circumstances seem to be favourable, except the first days brought negative results thanks to my ingenuity in finding stuff to nibble in the house and my intermittent amnesia of the diet. Dried blueberries - went on the first day. Dried cranberries that should only be used for granola and cookies - gone on the second. I drew a line somehow at raisins, it seemed slightly obscene to gobble raisins straight out of a 500g bag. What little cheese is left I keep in the fridge to stop me reaching for it because everyone knows cheese at fridge temperature is disgusting. But hey - I bet not many people know that a few seconds in the microwave renders it palatable, in fact - yummy! Desiccated coconut? Yes, with a spoon, alternated with rather ancient set honey. Half a jar of almond butter is no more. I am a pig.

So in order to augment my willpower I have now started logging my meals and much else besides in a food diary app. I call it The Food Fascist, the harsh disciplinarian in calories calculation, the dictator telling me in no uncertain terms that I have no more food left to consume for the day, and it’s only 2pm.

It works. I am a geek enough to be fascinated by calorie counting, making lists of what I’ve eaten, weighing out the blueberries I’m going to have and painstakingly recording all the ingredients for a stir-fry to find that it will be only 300 calories, including duck. Yesssss! *air-punch*

There are various apps available and I don’t want to endorse any; I’ve used MyFitnessPal in the past and the current Food Fascist is MyNetDiary. It’s pretty good although its food database is somewhat one-dimensional - clearly those things are mainly used by ready meals and fast food habitués… Though on the other hand I couldn’t find chips! Unbelievable or what? Nah - it was telling me something, like whether I ought to eat chips...

Triple cooked chips - definitely a no-no!

So what do I eat? Here we go, in app-speak: breakfast - egg whole cooked scrambled, natural pure coconut water ½ cup; lunch - corn cob grilled butter (contributed) [wtf?] 1 ear; dinner - cornichon (contributed), fish tuna fresh bluefin raw, onions sweet raw, extra virgin olive oil, radishes raw*. Well done me, no?

*the last entry constitutes tuna tartare, or poke - the most delishhh way of preparing tuna

 

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