Monday 28th January 2008

Frankly, I couldn't have found a better day to start a new eating regime if I'd tried.  Two a.m. this morning and what happens? I wake up with a throbbing pain in my left cheek, and subsequent investigations seem to suggest I've broken a tooth. Great eh?

So, since my eating processes are presently somewhat interrupted, I did not have fruit for breakfast - I had a slice of dry toast to mop up the remnants of the pain killers before they wrecked my stomach lining. (Sorry this is turning unnecessarily medical...)  However by lunchtime, I was up to a bit of salad, which promptly had me heading back to the paracetamol.  You'll be pleased to hear that this evenings' meal was avocado, and a large slice of melon. Nevertheless in the interim I have eaten a few, frankly, unsuitable things - the last of my sweet biscuits, and a single bar of treat sized chocolate. I'm keeping those around, because every dieter needs her treat. Call it a reward for being good, call it a sin, call it what you like but if it wasn't there, I'd binge on something else unsuitable. In fact, I'd probably go buy it.

So my plan for tomorrow. Breakfast and snacks will be the fruit I packed for today - plums and grapes, possibly with the addition of a little melon. Lunch will be an egg sandwich from the shop down the road. I go there for lunch quite often, and I think I'm probably the only one of my colleagues that does. Why? Because it reminds me of the place I went to get my lunch when I was a sweet young thing working in Hudson's Bookshop in Birmingham. Every day I'd go there and get an egg sandwich and bag of cheese and onion crisps. I enjoyed it!  I'm afraid that I have a complex history with sandwiches. My father was the chief sandwich maker in the house, and he enjoyed mixing it around - he'd put complex flavour mixes together into them, years before anyone else thought of doing that kind of thing. If I tell you that when he made bacon and eggs he'd fry up half a banana for everyone, you'll get the idea. So I used to pick bits out, and nibble at the edges - frankly anything to get a mouthful of a single flavour. I don't like mixing flavours together, unless I've cooked them together. Curry, Spag Bol, that kind of thing - it blends into a real single flavour. A sandwich doesn't blend at all well, until it's all chewed up.  So I like a single flavour sandwich, and egg is one of my favourites. Not egg mayonnaise, not egg salad, just egg, with a little salt. It's not a fattening thing, god knows the spread they use is pretty scraped and I get the wholemeal bread so I don't think that's a problem. I'll skip the crisps, and have fruit for a snack.

Dinner - well I'm back to my original idea, pasta in some form or other. I'll let you know!