So the last week brought a few new firsts of 2013. My first diet, my first attempt at making life easier and my first snow day. All of these things have made me feel more positive about my 23rd year of existing, even if that does mean that I'll have to start a dissertation and make some scary life choices.
My first diet, or indeed any diet, is often controversial. Any of my long standing friends will tell you how often I start a new fad like only eating green food or not eating carbohydrates after midday or substituting food with cigarettes and alcohol. Within hours, days or a week I've usually said "Sod it, I can have a cake right?", eaten a packet of Mr Kipling slices, realised what I've done and fallen into a deep depression, complete with a chocolate or carbohydrate filled binge. This time, it should be different. This is a calorie counter (something I've not done before) and I'm matching it with exercise alongside my best friend. Together, I'm almost certain we can make this work, and have our bikini bodies by the time we go in holiday. We're doing the 5:2 Diet, which comprises of 5 days of normal eating and consuming your daily 2,000 calories (feed days), and then 2 days of giving your body a break with a consumption of 500 calories (fast days). It's not as unhealthy as you'd think, and it's remarkably easy to fill your feed days with the things you like! The fast days are a problem, but a good staple is a jacket potato which contains a mere 116 calories (based on an average weight of 175g). We've also found it helpful to drink a lot of water; healthy and bloating! By using an online calorie and exercise calculator, we have found it much easier to keep a track of what we're eating. If you'd like to use the website we have found (which I definitely recommend for any sort of calorie controlled diet) you can find it here. Two useful websites for recipes include Lavender and Lovage and BBC Good Food from which we have drawn lots of inspiration.
(UPDATE: This post has been in process for 6 days, with a variety of edits. As I write this, we've stuck to the plan for the whole 6 days and have included quite a lot of physical exercise which has helped us to create an almost complete week of the plan. Neither of us have cheated on our fast days.)
So we move onto another controversial life plan - actually making my life easier. I'm usually terrible at sticking to regimes that I make for myself, because I love sleeping so much and I really do lack motivation for most things in life. Whether or not it has been affected by the diet I am currently following (see above paragraph) I don't know, but in the last few days I have managed to get up at a reasonable time, achieve several tasks, attend lectures and rehearsals, do homework and extra reading, catch up with friends and exercise. This is positively anathema for last semester's Pickle, but clearly this year something is going right. In fact, I've felt better in the last week than I have in a long time, and I hope it continues.
A small occurrence which doesn't require much discussion was the barn dance I attended last night. It was good fun, I didn't drink (as it was a fast day) and I discovered that if you line dance for 50 minutes you burn a fantastic 357 calories. Lovely.
Finally, we visit today's snow day. After being told that 10cm of snow was expected, we all began praying like mad that we wouldn't have to go into uni for our most hated lecture (yes it's true, some things never change and my hatred of Role of the Actor is included in this). At 2am, no snow had fallen, and with heavy hearts we trudged up to our beds to try and get some sleep before being challenged into doing some stupid activity for three hours. Imagine our excitement when, upon waking at 8am to start getting ready, our garden was covered in a pristine, shimmering blanket of beautiful deep white snow. Naturally we went back to bed and got up again at midday, to venture to Sainsburys for emergency supplies: a tin of baked beans, salt and vinegar Snackajacks, two boxes of wine (one red, one white), a bottle of wine for our housemate's girlfriend and lots of Options hot chocolate sachets. Kicking through the snow was fantastic fun, and Tess and I managed not to slip over once! Then once we got home we changed into lots of layers, rolled about in the snow for a couple of hours, made a snow cat and a snow Dalek, and got back inside to sip hot chocolate and watch TV. We loved our day, and we made a big happy face for the camera.
"If we stand really far back from the camera, it might look like someone else took this..."
So there we have it, my faithful readers. Another bunch of firsts to put in the memory box of my life and look back on in years to come. So let's raise a glass of (already calorie accounted for) wine to another good year.
Background Blog: Something I've done a lot of today.
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