Living Below the Line - Some Final Thoughts…

So, this morning we all celebrated by having a fry-up at 7.45am. After 5 days of eating vegetables, pulses and pasta, it was brilliant to be able to eat something with more taste! I was so looking forward to eating that when the food sat in front of me I gobbled it down within just a couple of minutes. I developed a proper food-baby in front of me. However, now it is the afternoon, and I've not actually had to eat anything else so far today, and I doubt I will until tea. So, maybe the reduced portions have done me some good. I just need to learn to not be so greedy I think.

I woke up very early this morning (too excited about the cooked breakfast I think) and started thinking. I could now buy food for a day that costs £1. What other things could I buy for a pound (or thereabouts)? Here's a few interesting things...

• You can get a three-stop-hop on the buses here in Bristol

• You can buy Help! by The Beatles on iTunes

• You can buy 2 first class stamps and have a little change left over (get some penny sweets in!)

• You can buy some posh and very tasty cookies from Tesco (only if they're on offer though…)

• You can buy a lottery ticket, with a 14,000,000 to 1 chance of winning large amounts of money

• You can buy a fluorescent tube

• You could call Nepal for 5 minutes or send 10 texts there

• You could subscribe to The Times online for 24 hours

• Or you could feed yourself

It seems to me that in this world today we don't really realise how much £1 can actually do. It can actually make the difference between eating or not, even in this country. Maybe, I'll make one less bus journey a week, buy one less track from iTunes, not eat so many Tesco/Sainsburys/Coop cookies. Then with that money put it to something that can actually make a difference.

£1 a day = £365 a year. That would make a HUGE difference.

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 5

It's amazing how not hungry you get when you're busy. Today, I had to go into uni early to re-write the presentation for WREC. I sat there concentrating so hard, that by the time I noticed the time it was 12.30.

Lunch was chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti. It tasted good, the chapattis were fantastic, but still a bit dry.

Lunch - Chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti

This afternoon I did a run through of the presentation to my research group. It went quite well, most comments were quite positive and constructive. I went home and showered, just felt really dirty, before getting the last night's tea ready. It was cheese (with some pasta and other bits). That was really exciting.

The cheese

The food was the best we had all week. What a shame it had to be on Friday…

Tea - Cheese with pasta and vegetables in a tomato sauce

I am very happy to be finishing the challenge, looking forward to some cake and the fry up tomorrow morning. Now I just have to work out how to follow this week up…

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 4

Today was hard. Not only did my presentation for my first ever conference get ripped apart - probably quite rightly - by my supervisors which means I'm gong to have to spend all of tomorrow re-doing it (ARGH!) but the snacking pangs are coming on stronger and stronger. I'm getting more and more grumpy and looking forward to the weekend, when this will be all over.

And then that thought makes me feel sad and very very humble. Why? Because, as I said at the beginning, I am just playing at this. It is not my real life, eating a small amount of food and trying to get by, it's just a game for me, a choice that I have made, a challenge I've given myself. However, for 1.4 billion people who live in extreme poverty, they don't have the chance to eat more on Saturday. Or Sunday. Or maybe ever. I feel very thankful for everything I've got and the opportunities that are afforded to me.

However, any tinge of guilt will probably not be felt during the cooked breakfast I'm planning for Saturday morning!

Today's food was a repeat of Tuesdays. Breakfast was porridge again, today i cooked it at uni, and hoped that it wouldn't boil over. But it did. Which meant I had to clean out the microwave at uni (a rather disgusting job) and had less than planned porridge.

Breakfast - Porridge (boiled over once again)

Lunch was leek and potato soup with chapatti. I thought it tasted a lot better than Tuesdays, but then it may have been because I was really hungry, not being able to eat until 3pm.

Lunch - Very tasty Leek and Potato Soup (Note the black chapatti from very burnt flour…)

The afternoon, spent modifying my presentation was almost too much. I left my office late, and rushed back to get some tea. However on the way home I started to get a headache, and then feel slightly light headed, so walked a bit slower. Tea was fried rice with vegetables, not as good as Tuesdays, but definitely hit the spot.

Tea - Fried Rice and Vegetables

So, tomorrow is the last day. I'll be sad to stop - I'm sure the weight I want to lose for the summer would just fall off with this sort of diet - but I feel that if I went on for too much longer I'd burn up in a ball of wrath…

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 3

Halfway through the week today. It's not been as hard as yesterday was, I haven't had to battle as much with temptation until after lunch when there were a load of trays of free food from a meeting. That was a bit tough.

Breakfast was porridge again, and once again it tried to empty itself all over the microwave, but I just about managed to save it, and scraped it all back into the bowl.

Breakfast - Porridge

I spent most of the morning working on my turbine rig in uni (see here) adding a few extra functionalities to it, to allow it to more completely cover the speed range I'm interested in. This meant wiring up a switch to allow it to short circuit the generator and open circuit the generator. This allowed me to distract myself from the thought of food until lunchtime. Lunch, again, was chickpea and cauliflower, with chapattis (I forgot to take a photo, so here's the one from Monday).

Lunch - Chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti

The afternoon did drag a bit more. I was writing notes to accompany my presentation for the World Renewable Energy Congress Conference next week. Then, later on in the afternoon I attended some undergraduate presentations on low carbon technologies. Some were good, some were not so, but all gave something to think about. Tea was jacket potato and vegetables in tomato sauce, which had a strange after-taste to it, but not in a completely bad way.

Tea - Jacket potato with vegetables in tomato sauce

After tea, I cooked some chapatti with Hannah for tomorrow's lunch. We're just over half way through now and I'm getting in to it a bit more. I am hungry, and struggling a little with temptation - a piece of cake would be great now - but overall it's going OK. Tomorrow is another day though!

SAM

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

Living Below the Line - Day 1

This morning we made the chapatti for lunch before cooking the porridge. The chapatti proved to be quite tricky, especially rolling out, as our cottage didn't have a rolling pin, so instead I used a glass. Most of them cooked OK, and some puffed up slightly. I had forgot what the water to porridge ratio should be, and so had a guess, which turned out to be wrong. After 2 minutes in the microwave, the porridge had the consistency of a flapjack. However, Hannah managed to save it, adding more water and by the time it came to eating it porridge came out satisfactorily.

Breakfast - Porridge (made with water not milk)

We left our holiday cottage and headed into Abergavenny for a cycle along the Brecon-Monmouth Canal before heading back to Bristol for lunch. It was quite dry but I enjoyed it, very much like some of the khaja I eat whilst in Nepal.

Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry with Chapatti

After lunch Hannah, I and Becky prepared some of the food for the rest of the week. I made 36 chapatti (some for the next couple of days) whilst the girls made the leek and potato soup for tomorrow, which I now have a pint of in my fridge. Tea was to be jacket potato and vegetables in a tomato sauce. The jacket potatoes were disappointingly small, but the vegetables made up for it and had a good amount of taste to it, made even more so when we added some garlic (an extra 1/2 a clove per person, about 1p).

Tea - Jacket Potato With vegetables in a Tomato Sauce

Day one is over now. It was surprising how much we talked about food, considering it's something that we can't have any more. I am in need of a little chocolate though…

SAM

Living Below the Line - The Day Before…

So, tomorrow starts the living below the line challenge. I'm quite glad it's here as I've been thinking about it for a while now and really want to get going.

I'm really glad I won't be the only one doing this, it's always fun to have others going through the same pain and misery as you. When Hannah said she would do it, I was really happy, when she said she had managed to convince her family to do it as well I was amazed. So, we're all going to be surviving on £1 a day each for food, trying to battle hungriness, temptation and grumpiness together.

I'm on holiday in the Black Mountains at the moment, going back home tomorrow, so will have to eat the low cost breakfast (porridge) and lunch (chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti) here.

We still had a stack of food left last night so instead of going out, as we had planned, we stayed in and ate the remaining food. It seemed slightly silly if we were going to be trying to live frugally for a week if we started by throwing away a load of food. So, we had a mish mash of salad, boiled potatoes, crisps and cake. It was very good although I seemed to eat a surprisingly large amount of salad leaves...

I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Who know's what will happen!

SAM