Day 35 - Starch Solution

Today’s stats:

Well, not a good start for today. I mentioned yesterday that it had been a long day and I’d gotten to bed late. Well, it had been pretty tiring but alas I had to be up early again for the next set of uni lectures. The alarm went off at 7am (at least I think it was 7am) but alas when I next looked at my watch it was 8:15. Ever so slight difference.

This had the side effect of ruining my carefully orchestrated breakfast plans. Specifically the night before with about 30 seconds to spare (actually negative 30 because I’m not sure I was supposed to go in anyway) I was able to get into the supermarket and amazingly, found some soy milk that didn’t contain either milk solids or oil. Even more surprising, it tastes really good. I was very excited about having this with my breakfast today.

Alas, that was not to be. I was able to weigh myself on the scales but that was basically it before having to quickly get dressed and rush out the door. This meant no breakfast and by the time I got to the train I had a headache. Joyous.

My plan was to get some coffee down my neck because I’ve found that a bit of caffeine and sugar to be highly effective for clearing headaches before they become migraines (something I sadly seem to be vulnerable to). Unfortunately every single coffee shop was closed and so I ended up with having to decide between nothing or lucozade. I picked the lucozade.

I should point out that I actually had a great deal of discussion with myself before picking it up because I want to avoid any slippery slopes. I’ve talked about those before, but it’s very easy for one a week to become one a day and then suddenly you’re back where you started. That’s something I want to avoid especially as lucozade was part of my own particular problem. However, lucozade does deal with my headaches very easily.

So I decided to get it. I’m treating it like a medicine, which is actually how it always used to be in the UK. No one there drinks lucozade as a sports drink, you drink it when you’re not well. In Hong Kong it’s a very common energy drink alongside the likes of Red Bull etc.

Anyway, what I’ve found, and this is true for both beer and lucozade, is that they taste very thick. This is likely due to me drinking mostly water for the past month, but it has definitely changed my tastes and the sort of “mouth feel” that I’m used to. In particular for lucozade, the taste really isn’t that great anymore. This suggests that it was previously more of a habit or low grade addiction that really enjoying the drink. I have no real interest in buying more of it, and I’m still really happy with soda water which still gives me my fix of bubbles.

The good news is that despite the taste being pretty weird, the lucozade had the desired effect. The headache cleared within about 10 minutes, and despite feeling a bit “iffy”, I’m feeling a lot better. Of course that’s the caffeine kicking in, something I also try to avoid, but I think treating this stuff as medicine - which is what I’m trying to do - is not a terrible thing.

Just need to make sure it doesn’t make a daily comeback :)

By the time I actually got home (I had some errands to run), it was gone past 2pm and I was very very hungry. I invested in a large sandwich from subway which definitely filled me up. I was also super tired from the late night yesterday and so around 4pm I crashed out and didn’t wake up until around 7:30pm.

Dinner was the usual, but was a reduced amount. That was fine as I wasn’t really all that hungry anyway (more peckish than anything) so I was happy with that. I didn’t get to sleep again until well after midnight, but as I was working on important stuff, I can’t complain too much about that, and besides I wasn’t really all that tired until then…