Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I am only eating food that has been sitting on a plate in my back yard for a month. I hope I do not die!

The camera returns! Now the photos of me on scales can be badly taken, rather than than badly photo-shopped!

68.8kg (151.67 pounds) is 0.4kg less than yesterday. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have gained a kilo today, based on the recent fluctuations:

I've lost exactly 4.5kg since Day 2, for an average of 1.5kg/week.

 I went to a party tonight; it was my friend’s housewarming. I am normally quite a talkative fellow at parties, I enjoy meeting new people, and chatting to strangers isn’t something that worries me.

Despite the fact that I’d had a lovely bowl of rice that morning, and a few slices of bread right before the party, I was still low on energy, and extremely quiet. The few times I tried to be funny, they were resounding failures – a little bit of wit isn’t normally something I have to think about, I can just pick a topic and say something vaguely amusing. Not tonight; if I didn’t mentally check everything that came out of my mouth three or four times, it ended up either horribly unamusing, or sort of creepy.

I found myself being the quiet creepy guy at the party. It was rather unsettling.

I’ve been doing this for 20 days now, and the instinct to reach out and grab some food has almost completely left me, but when I entered the room, the first thing I did was go straight for the table of food:

They even had my current favourite meal, white bread and butter!

Perhaps it’s an instinctual party habit; go straight for the food. Socialisation and food seem to be quite closely linked.

I’ve been thinking, as you might expect, about food quite a lot this month. When I was young, my family didn’t have a lot of money, so the “big treats” was stuff like chocolate that was a bit past its expiration date – chocolate that had white edges, and was a little bit crumbly. Chocolate bars with honeycomb that had started to crystalise.

I didn’t even realise that honeycomb wasn’t meant to be soft and slightly bitter until I was a teenager.

When I hit my teens, we got a bit more money, and suddenly chocolate and other treats were a regular occurance. I moved out when I was 18, and I made enough money to keep going the same way – I’d have a chocolate bar every couple of days, and I’ve always loved the combination of biscuits and tea, so I always had a packet or two of cheap chocolate-chip biscuits in the house.

Last year some time, I realised that my diet consisted almost entirely of meat and biscuits – I was eating chops, sausages, steak, spaghetti bolognaise, and a lot of biscuits, and essentially nothing else. I had started to gain weight in a noticeable way, so I cut biscuits out of my diet (the fact that my income had significantly dropped helped a lot) and started eating a lot more greens.

I’m not saying I was a paragon of health, but biscuits and chocolate dropped off the shopping list entirely.

It wasn’t hard to do – I just didn’t buy them. I wondered, perhaps a bit self-righteously at the time, why Dad was always buying chocolate and biscuits, when he knew that they weren’t good for him or us – he’s a nurse, after all.

Having gone through this month, I can completely understand where he was coming from. I’ve been living on rice and bread and very, very little else, and next month I’m going to be buying chocolate bars and biscuits and everything else that’s delicious and unhealthy. I’m still aware of the unhealthiness, but god damn, you only live once, and I want life to have a bit of flavour.

In related news, I’ve decided to postpone next month’s experiment. More on that tomorrow!

Tomorrow: Daily Post!

(total money spent so far – $24.46. Remainder – $3.54 - enough for three loaves of bread, with 27 cents left over!)