Living Below the Line - Day 2

Today has been a bit tricky. I was back in to work, and struggled to resist the mid-afternoon trip to the chocolate machine. I did though!

I woke up shortly after 5am. My stomach was rumbling. Not a good sign. I went into uni as early as I could to stave off any temptation in eating early. I returned from uni at 11am to meet Mel who is off to Nepal (JEALOUS!) and to have some breakfast - porridge again. This morning's porridge was a bit of a disaster. After yesterday's slightly stodgy effort - all my fault for guessing the wrong amount of water - today I added too much water and it boiled over. Dope. Half of the porridge was in the microwave, which left me even more hungry.

Breakfast - Porridge that boiled over (it wasn't really that green!)

Lunch was made yesterday, so to my office I took one pint of potato and leek soup. After giving it a taste test yesterday, it was fairly boring and bland - no vegetable stock - so I wasn't necessarily enthralled by the prospect of eating it. But with the chapatti it actually tasted very good.

Lunch - Potato and Leek soup with Chapatti

In the afternoon, my will was tested quite hard. I felt the hunger starting to kick in, especially as the work I was doing at the time, writing a presentation for a conference next week, got into the really nit-picking phase of making sure that everything looked the same. I felt the call of the chocolate machine. Then, I headed into Bristol to meet up with my housegroup from Church for a round of crazy golf. On the way through the city centre I passed hundreds of fast food restaurants selling all kinds of greasy and horrible but amazing smelling foods. Kebab shops, KFC, McDonalds, they were all there. When I reached the crazy golf course, Hannah was there with tea. She had promised me it was the best meal we'd had so far - fried rice with vegetables. And I have to admit, she probably was right.

Tea - Fried Rice with Vegetables (I was so hungry I ate some of it before remembering to photograph it…)

This is turning out to be more tricky than I thought. It's not the hunger. I've dealt with hunger before - my calorie counting days of my early twenties are still in recent memory. It's not the blandness of the food. My learning-to-cook-for-myself years of 18-23 were a series of bland meal after bland meal, the only excitement being a takeaway when I could afford it. It's not the lack of caffeine. I despise tea and coffee, so my caffeine intake is fairly small anyway. The biggest problem is the temptation, trying to resist when I know there's money in my pocket that would get rid of the feeling immediately.

Let's see how tomorrow goes…

SAM