I’m a bit too ashamed to say anything so have some food photos
Another day of no crisps. A lightbulb went on over my head when I saw we had salty popcorn and I decided it wasn’t crisps but, aside from that, all good so far.
Did a great workout today, courtesy of someone called Kirby – there are all these online workout videos I can access through a work thing, and I figure my unknowing exercise gurus would like to be name-dropped. If I’m wrong, and they don’t like being name-dropped, I’ll change their names to an animal beginning with the same letter. Kirby can be Kangaroo because I can imagine her doing some wicked kickboxing moves.
I joined a Facebook group called ‘Vegan Supermarket Finds UK’ in the hope of being able to find some good protein sources. I was upfront that I’m not vegan (I’m mostly vegan because I’m allergic to dairy and I think meat is too chewy) and they were welcoming. Now I’m getting a load of posts on my Facebook showing me the cookies, chocolate Baileys liqueur equivalent, biscuits, and apple pies they found… and that’s just within a few hours. Occasionally someone raves over a veggie burger but the dessert joy is STRONG. I don’t blame them one bit. Vegan dessert likelihood has tended to be low, especially in restaurants. Not so helpful for a me who gave up eating sugary things last month and who wants to stick with it.
I’ve been doing better today – it’s helped that work has been really busy. Too busy to exercise yet but I might walk repeatedly round the block for half an hour or something. It’s that or an online exercise video (from ‘The Other Room’ Virtual Gym) by someone called Trevor, and it looks like quite a difficult workout and I don’t want to have to carry an irrational and permanent hatred for him for all time so I may skip it and just do the walk.
Having eaten a ton yesterday so as to avoid crisp-cravings, and having found I was practically comatose by the end of the day, I’ve stuck to FOOD AT MEAL TIMES. I think I’ll need to prepare lunch in advance on weekdays because, although I work from home, I don’t have a ton of time to eat… If I’m preparing as well then I have even less time to eat. I am reminded now of a friend/ex relating to me about how she bought a yellow dish rack to help sort the washing up and she was looking at it and thinking “Has it come to this?” i.e. ‘This stuff is just so BANAL and BORING; what happened to my grand and exciting life?! I just bought a dish rack!”
Yes, I am a person who needs to prepare food in advance sometimes. It’s called being an adult.
Doing all this is already starting to change how I look at food. When I’m looking in the fridge and the cupboards, I’m wondering what food has all of the health in it rather than what food is going to be very quick to prepare or what food can best sort my craving out.
I think I’ll leave it there for today and come back tomorrow with another banal update about what it’s like to not eat crisps on a weekend. I hope anyone reading this has a lovely weekend, even if it’s 2024 by the time you read this and it’s a Tuesday. Have a great weekend!
Started the day with exercise – the whole ‘change your routine’ thing. A lovely gentle work out, following a workout video, including throwing balls and failing to catch them because I have no coordination. Then there was breakfast, and then lunch, all with plenty of protein and veg, including my 1 Brazil nut a day to get enough Selenium, and a feeling of having a stuffy nose leading to a 3-minute hypochondriac worry about whether I might be allergic to Brazil nuts (what else contains Selenium in such quantities? Selenium pills… nothing else bwa ha haaa!)
It’s now about 4pm and I’m having a quick break and drinking the water I used to cook the broccoli in. I’m going to get vitamins into me any darn way I can, thank you! Would look nicer in a champagne glass – I’m drinking it out of a Pyrex jug. My life is all glamour.
No more food till evening meal. I’m too full to be able to contemplate eating anything else right now. And, at crisp danger time (post-work but pre-evening meal), I will go for a walk but not bring money or any other means of purchasing anything with me. Will update this again before I go to bed.
Some time later…
It’s just possible that I’ve overcompensated and that I’m too full up with veg but I could not eat another thing. Proper meals and a ton of veg and salad with everything. But do I miss crisps today? No.
Now being hit with the realisation that there is only about an hour left before it’s Crisptober. Have I adequately prepared? Is eating 3 bags of crisps today sufficient preparation for not eating any for (at least) a month?
It’s OK. I have a plan…
- I’m going to do PROPER MEALS that are nice and that will fill me up.
- I’ve got healthier snacks on standby – nuts, fruit, soya yogurt, salady veg
- I’ve got a list of my reasons for doing this, which I will look at to stay motivated
- I’m going to start some exercising to help replace some endorphins in a healthy way (one of my friends tried to persuade me that running is a snack so maybe I won’t let him know I’m doing that)
What could possibly go wrong?
My beloved one might forget and bring a bag of crisps home for me. In which case I plan to point and scream like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I could break down and wail that I need a fix. That’s a bit dramatic though
Ok goodnight! I’d say wish me luck but nobody is reading this yet.
Not been on here (WordPress) for a while and it took me a while to find how to do the things I want to do. I don’t want a load of clickable options for how to divide this post up into ‘blocks’, that’s too confusing! I’m old. I just want to be able to put HTML tags in *grumble grumble*.
I’m back because a sexy menace has come back into my life. It was absent at the start of the lockdown in March and was indeed absent for most of it, but then the dentist advised me if I gave up sugar then I wouldn’t have all these problems and I took him at his word (even though he tried to backpedal a bit at my next appointment) and found, without eating chocolate and ice lollies etc. I had the sudden raging cravings for all the carbs and then into my life walks these feckers …and I’m busy and rushed with work and I grab hold of them and nosh them down.
Not always those specific feckers, sometimes it’s Pop Chips or regular crisps, but you get the point. Crisps. They’re a sexy menace… bad for the teeth, dehydrating, and use up hunger capacity that I could be devoting to actual real food. Furthermore they release sugar pretty darn quick and, while I’m never going to be a person who won’t eat vegetables because they’ve got carbohydrates in, there is something positive about avoiding rapid glucose highs – not only does my mouth hurt less often since I stopped eating sugary stuff, but I’m CALMER. Seriously, things that lessen the chance of me feeling ‘on-edge’ are good things. The period of deep mourning at not being able to have vegan Cornettos has passed and I trust the feeling of not being able to have crisps will too.
Crisps don’t feel like a grown-up food. I can’t imagine Neil DeGrasse Tyson eating crisps (I found a picture of him eating chicken and with what looks like way too many hot sauce bottles to choose from) but not crisps. Whereas Trump filled the White House with crisps* and that’s a good enough reason for me not to go near them ever, even if they were healthy.
* This might not be true – I haven’t checked. It is believable though.
An important thing coming up at my work is Stoptober– where a load of people commit to not smoking during October. There’s also ‘Go Sober for October‘ – where people avoid alcohol.
I gave up both of those sexy menaces already and now no longer view them as attractive or as things I want to do. This is what I want to do with crisps!
Stoptober and Microbes
The 2 things that are going to help me to do this are therefore
- Stoptober! – People are giving up smoking for a month – I’m going to give up crisps for a month. I find it useful to tag along and do challenges at the same time as other people are doing them. I gave up Minecraft for a month last year because it was Lent… and I don’t even believe in God
- Microbes! – When we crave specific foods, it might be our body’s microbes that are craving them. I learned this on an NHS course about prediabetes. Microbes are living beings inside us and they regulate neurotransmitters/hormones by signalling the brain to call for what they want. We can increase the number of microbes that like a certain type of food by eating more of that type of food. I’ll find other food that’s nice and eat that so I get more microbes for it. I don’t know what will happen to the crisp-liking microbes but I think they’re likely to slam their bedroom doors and have a sulk. Imagine the cupcake-carrying microbe in the picture below… and someone took the cake away. It’s sulking now and playing music that its parents dislike at full volume.
There are 3 days to go (not counting today) before Crisptober so that’s 3 days to get ready. I’ve done this before and I can do it again, except I need to follow the ‘not one crunch’ rule because as soon as I start thinking I can sneak in a poppadom, or that crisps made out of beetroot don’t count, I’m back off the wagon.
There is a special place I will put any crisps that are purchased for me or handed to me – we’ve just bought a new bin!
And I won’t be linking anybody to this site until I’m a few days in and showing myself that I can do it. I think I may find I have some subscribers from when I was using this blog more often but not sure, so a few people may see this in advance of that. Apologies if so, well only apologies if I fail miserably at the first hurdle or something.
Love and peace to all xxx
Hello lovely people!
| This is raspberries blended into soya yogurt. And then with milled Chia seeds on top. My apologies that it’s blurry! After I had tipped a load of chia onto my breakfast, I noticed that on the back of the packet it said “Don’t eat more than 15g of chia per day” and I didn’t know why OR how many grams of chia there were, so I tried to skim some off, which is why it looks messy. I am still alive.  |
| This is Quorn chilli with a load of veg and with Polenta chips and a bit of mayo. Polenta is fine cornmeal, and turning it from powdery stuff in a packet to the form you can see below takes some time that I won’t be getting back.
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| Desperate for something sweet, I had a banana. I did not take a photograph of the banana – it was shy. |
| I stopped counting calories because I found I was eating more when I did that. I might replace them with a report on how much exercise I’m doing… when I do some! |
Soya yogurt, almonds, small orange thing that’s likely either a satsuma or a tangerine… someone at work gave it to me so I’m not sure |
Wholemeal bread roll with yeast extract and dairy-free spread, lettuce, corn, green beans, kidney beans, carrots, spring onion – dressed with lemon juice and oil |
Teriyaki salmon, rice noodles and some broccoli, carrots, onions, garlic. I only ate one of these bowls, the other was for the lovely husband. I am surprised that the calories for this are so low whereas the calories for the meal I had at lunch are so high |
Taste comparison between and Oreo cookie and a Bourbon biscuit. Both have the same idea going on i.e. creamy stuff between layers of crumbly cookie stuff. The Bourbon is more creamy but has less taste. US cookie 1: UK cookie NIL |
| Wholemeal roll with tomato tofu pâté filling – too tired to take a photo and upload it – 259 calories |
| Total for the day = 1,213 |
Black De-caf, banana, grapes, soya yogurt, rye bread, spread, yeast extract |
Home -made curry with Quorn, which I am informed America doesn’t have ??? |
Lemon and ginger tea, bourbon biscuit, rye bread, tomato tofu pâté, white-cheddar flavour Quinoa puffs |
No added sugar jelly and a few grapes |
| Extra Quinoa puffs (not pictured) = 156 calories – they appear to be addictive |
| Total for the day = 1,266 |
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| Added some toast because just over 1,000 calories isn’t enough |
trishoak 
