Day 23 - Starch Solution

Today’s stats:

Breakfast today was a little bit different as I had something I’ve never had before (and didn’t do a good job of making for the first time either). Yesterday I went to the local health food shop to try and replace my McDougall supplies and to get in some more breakfast oats. Unfortunately they seemed to have little in the way of anything I need any more which is a big pity. They do still stock some delicious and relatively healthy vegan ice cream. It’s very rich though so it’s not something you’d want on a regular basis for sure, but I doubt having it now and again won’t be too troublesome.

In any case the only cereal that I could really find that caught my eye was a box of quinoa flakes. I’ve read about it in a number of places but I’ve never actually had it until today. To make it you mix the flakes with boiling water and then stick it in the microwave for a couple of minutes - where it grows to about double the size. In my case I put in way too much quinoa for the water and size of the bowl so I ended up with something more akin to mash potato. I did add a couple of sugar packets to it, which I know is not ideal, but it did make it taste a lot better and so, rather than avoiding these foods and picking up a sausage and egg McMuffin, I’ll instead be eating more quinoa.

Of course tomorrow I’ll try it with less flakes and more water and depending how that goes, the next day I’ll try it with one sugar. One sugar I’m comfortable with, two seems a little excessive, but whatever works I guess.

Today’s weight is back up and I think the trend is still the best predictor. It has shown steady weight loss over the last three weeks and although it stalled at a single point (must have picked a bad time to hop on the scales that day), it has always been on a downward trajectory. I’ve not yet had a day where my weight has been above the trend which is surprising and interesting all in one go.

I’ll try to get the charts tomorrow and compare a traditional line chart plotting the weight, to the trend chart. Even though it’s the same data, I think it provides a very difficult feel for what’s going on. I suspect one will be all over the place and one will show the steady happy decline. Guess we’ll find out at some point :)

Lunch was predictably the same as last night. I still enjoy my potatoes. This is pretty interesting because most people (myself included) would expect that you would get very bored very quickly eating this way. Now the Starch Solution provides for a whole range of tasty dishes and Mary McDougall has a wide range of recipes freely available for people to use. That said, there’s no reason why if you have a favourite healthy dish that you can’t simply eat it over and over again.

In my case I’m not the one doing the cooking, so I’m grateful to get what I get. My food is currently being cooked separately to everyone elses, with no added salt or oil (apart from some soy sauce when creating one type of the potato I like). And because I only eat vegetables and there’s not a huge selection here, I end up with basically the same dish day in and day out.

As was noticed when Kon did the potato diet, at the end of the experiment the participants had no real desire for change - they were quite happy with their potato based diet. So far I can report similar feedback from my experience - the food is tasty and simple and it keeps me full. I have no particular cravings for anything else. So far at least, I’m pretty happy with everything.

Around 3pm I started getting a little peckish and I started yawning my head off. Even my eyes started to sting a little. It sounds like I’m pretty tired but I got a decent amount of sleep and didn’t feel particularly grim this morning. I was tempted to grab a coffee (no milk of course) because it was just getting ridiculous. In the end I decided to have some more mashed potato (one bag makes two snack sized bowls) and that seemed to help a little with the tiredness. Still, it didn’t kick the yawning.

Dinner was similar to lunch, although this time it was large grapes which still had seeds in them. Those are just a pain to eat and almost not worth the trouble! :)