The day of extreme hunger, in pictures

Except I was so hungry for the first half of the day, I forgot to take any, so I'm going to try and distract you from that fact with this picture of my lunch at the weekend while I was ill and everyone else was out sunning themselves... Pretty isn't it? Reduced fat houmous, a food doctor seeded pitta, and a babyleaf, red pepper and strawberry salad with balsamic dressing. And water, of course. I'm enjoying the fact the better weather is here, it's making me feel much more inclined to get my cold food freak on, and lots of lovely munchy salads, it's just too cold for that kind of thing here usually!

So yes, food for yesterday...

Breakfast was a bowl of natural (no added sugar or salt) muesli bulked out with summer fruits, with skimmed milk, low fat greek yoghurt, honey and flaxseed. Use your imagination, but basically, cold pink porridge!

Unfortunately, I was having the hunger day from hell yesterday and this did absolutely nothing to satiate me, so by the time I got to work I was straight out the door again to the shop to buy eggs... And Men's Fitness magazine, much to the amusement of the boy behind the counter. Anyway, I digress...

I then munched my way through a 2 egg puff done in the microwave on a wholemeal roll with a wee splodge of brown sauce, thinking the protein and fat in the eggs should sort me out. Also unpictured because it was eaten, no, inhaled, so quickly. And it did the job for about an hour, when I became hungry again. Desperately tried to ignore it this time until a sensible hour as two breakfasts should be enough for anybody!

By lunch, I could quite happily have given up on good food completely and snarfed my way through the entire chip shop next door, but I was a good girl and had the lunch I'd brought with me instead...

Unfortunately, it's not much to look at! This is a bowl of chilli couscous, spinach, babyleaf salad, and toasted seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, soya nuts) which were added for the protein and the crunch factor. Believe me when I say it tasted much better than it looks! This was also inhaled at a furious pace but at last, we seemed to be filling up the beast...

I swear my legs were hollow yesterday or something because nothing felt like enough food.
By 3pm, I was hungry AGAIN. I know, shocking. You just wouldn't expect it from me would you...

The only thing I had left by this point was this ingenious little snackpot that I pinched the idea of from another blogger, but now I can't remember who it was, so thankyou, mystery smart person!

Why bother with two pots to wash up when you can get away with just the one, throw your houmous in the bottom, through your veg sticks in on top, and it's vaguely reminiscent of those pots of biscuits you used to get years ago with the chocolate dip on the side!

I think my houmous had gone off by this point though, didn't taste very nice, but being the piggy I am, I still ate it. And as I hadn't 'quite' thought through the logistics of how thick my pepper needed to be to not bend under pressure, I managed to make quite a mess too. I swear weening babies makes less mess than me eating!

This was just enough to tide me over to getting out of work, but by the time I was home, I was ravenous again. Luckily the hubs was also hungry early so dinner went straight on. And as it's the end of the month, it was very much a case of 'what can we make with the leftovers then'. I think it worked out pretty successfully actually, and though involving more processed food, frozen and packet mixes and so on, there was no nasties in the ingredient lists so I've no qualms about eating them. I try and avoid unneccesarily processed food when I can, but sometimes convenience wins out, so I do look for the things with the smallest ingredient list and least things I can't pronounce, it seems to work out okay!

So potluck dictated we dined on a meal of (very flat looking) nut roast, roast mediterranean vegetables bulked out with more pepper and a punnet of mushrooms since there was plenty of oil in the frozen mix to take it, all on a bed of baby spinach.

As random meals go, this was really really nice! The nutroast was a bit too crumbly but that's because it was a shallow wide dish we cooked it in, if we'd done it in a loaf pan like we should have done it would have held together better. And the hot veggies on cold leaves was a lovely combo too.

In fact, I have this exact meal for my lunch today from the leftovers, though it's all cold and the leaves are wilted now, so don't know how it'll taste... But that's another story, isn't it!

So, yesterday was a rest day from exercise, but we still cleaned the house and went out to play some pool with friends so it wasn't a lethargic day by any means. Dancing round the pool table to Michael Bolton can work up quite an appetite too! Somehow I managed to keep the monster at bay (maybe my legs were filled up by this point, at long last?) so I stuck to water and all was well in the land of Katkins.

I'm definitely still not getting as much protein as I'd like, so now I've been paid I'm going to have to get some more soya protein (unless anyone can recommend a good non-whey alternative) and get that back into my daily diary. I do feel weaker than a fortnight ago, it's amazing how quickly we can lose what we work so hard for, isn't it...