Day 11 - Starch Solution

Today’s stats:

Yet another late start today as I took the morning off so I could have lunch with my son. He has just started primary school and for the first month (ish), the school allows parents to come and eat with their kids. Because we are working, we have been unable to visit him for lunch and as there are only two days left, I wanted to make sure he at least got the experience. And he did, and he drank all my soda water - but more on that a bit later.

As I’d run out of said soda water, I wanted to pick up some more and at the same time get some breakfast. I mentioned before that subway has a veggie delight sandwich which is McDougall compatible and so after picking up 16 cans of the fizzy stuff, I popped down there to get a sandwich. It came with a free drink, so being good I picked the bottle of water. Interestingly it didn’t take much in the way of will power or effort to avoid picking a nice sweet fizzy drink. I found I just immediately looked for the water, contemplated the fizzy drink, smiled and just took the water. Very painless.

Somehow, despite having the morning off, and having plenty of time, I managed to wait too long to head out to my son’s school. It’s close enough that you can get there with a reasonable fast walk within 20 minutes or so - and I wanted to be a bit early. Not going to happen - I was going to be quite late (turned out none of it mattered but lesson learned). On top of that it was near noon, and so the midday sun was in full force and the temperature was about 34C according to my phone. Not a good time to be late walking somewhere.

Those that know me know that I don’t run, but in this case I had no choice - if I didn’t, I simply wouldn’t make it in time. Unfortunately my choice of footwear was not great for running on concrete pavements, so I had to keep going from a run to walk. But interestingly, it was my feet that wanted me to stop (smacking them into concrete isn’t nice), the rest of me was working fine. No heavy breathing, no muscle or joint pain etc.

Now as I mentioned yesterday I can run a reasonable difference, but definitely today I was in much better shape. In the recovery time was much shorter, mostly I felt I didn’t really need to recover at all. I also felt that I was getting more air in, but that seems likely to be an over activate imagination. Still, it was for sure a lot easier than previously.

In case you’re interested, I made it just in time, and then had to wait ten minutes for them to sort things out, so I needn’t have run at all - but it did help me collect some interesting anecdotal data.

Another dinner meeting

I had the opportunity to meet up with friends again for dinner. This time they’d already pre-ordered bread for me which was really nice. It has some olives in it, but hopefully not any oil in the bread itself. I couldn’t taste it, but I guess it’s not exactly easy to detect. Still, I didn’t eat that much of it because I’d followed the classic rule - before you go out to eat, eat!

I was able to snarfle down a McDougall pot (running low on those now) and was good to go. It definitely helps if you’re not starving when watching other people enjoy their dinners, but to be honest, so far I’ve not really had any cravings for those foods. I don’t know why. I remember that I really liked them and that they tasted good, but I just don’t get the urge to eat them. I’m positive I’ll have some popcorn next time I’m at the cinema, but I wonder, will I even enjoy it?

Another late night, but I didn’t eat much when I got home, just a banana (which was in the fridge so ice cold and a pretty decent ice cream alternative) and a handful of grapes. Nothing too heavy and whilst I was peckish I didn’t feel the need for more. Good stuff!