Well this is the first evening in over a month where I have come straight home after work. I've kind of forgotten what it is I do with myself. My house feels cold and a bit odd. The oddness comes mainly because my Mum was staying a couple of weeks ago and cleaned it to within an inch of its life. I'm too scared to touch anything.
The other reason for weirdness is that I have tried (and largely succeeded) over the last few weeks to change my entire attitude to what I eat and drink. I have finally given up the evil Coca Cola! This is possibly one of my major achievements of the last 25 years. I'm just not entirely sure of what I'm replacing it with as yet. I'm forcing myself to drink water, but don't really like it. The pub drink of choice has now become soda and lime...but I'm not completely sold on that either. At home I have been experimenting with various strange tea and honey combinations.
Tea is entirely alien to me as I've never really enjoyed hot drinks on a regular basis before. Until recently the only reason I have a kettle is for washing dishes. (My house has no running hot water - no, I don't live in the 1850s, I just spend too much in Primark to be able to get the boiler replaced). Yet, I'm getting quite into it. I bought some teaspoons. I have a new favourite mug. I'm starting to get the hang of timing the tea so that it is cool enough to drink by the time I'm actually thirsty. Of course it mostly tastes like warm, gritty puddle...but I'm a grown up dammit! I can train myself to like it. And I shall like it more than the dark, sweet tooth disolving elixir that has rotted me from the inside out for most of my life. Won't I?
As far as food goes, I have taken a leaf out of Chirpy's book and have embraced the Innocent Smoothie. A glass of that and a pint of water before I leave in the morning and I can now eschew the mid morning fruit scone. My concerted effort to eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day has left little room for junk and the revolutionary idea of stopping eating when I'm full means that I had to buy new jeans last week as my other pair kept falling off.
Of course adding a show week where everyone eats just enough to stay alive and many packets of Lockets hasn't hurt my waistline, but the trick is now going to be maintaining it without such major distraction. It turns out that what I do when I'm in the house on my own with nothing in particular to do is eat. And eat. And eat. Luckily I think I have now eaten everything I have in the cupboards, apart from a scraping of peanut butter, a slightly past its best leek and the tin of salmon my mum bought the day I moved into the flat. And about 500 different tea bags.
I'm not that hungry yet.
I promise I won't turn into a blog diet bore. There are too many diet blogs around, and none of them are fun. And anyway, it's not a diet, I have never dieted before in my life and I don't plan to start now. It's an attitude change. An attitude change doesn't involve giving up Ready Salted Crisps. If I did that then it'd be a diet. And utter torture!
