5:2 diet - the 2014 update

Hmm, so it's almost the end of January and I finally get around to blogging my first, err, blog of the year. Pretty lazy, even by my rather languid standards.

Alright, here's what happened:

Putting my life back together, following an unsuccessful Christmas, I disguised myself as a trio of travelling Italian chefs and worked my passage Southwards, wearing only a series of edible loinclothes, until I reached the Andes, having ceded over a quarter of my bodyweight to the elements along the way...

Perfectly convincing story, yes?

You fucking have it your way then. I'm blogging away now, aren't I?

And I promise you, I will be sharing a bunch of new recipes and reviews over the next couple of months. In the meantime though, I thought I'd respond to some of the correspondence I receive occasionally - specifically, all you chaps and chapesses who ask me how the Intermittent Fasting ('5:2') diet is going.

Not that I actually get a lot of correspondence, mind. More would be welcome. Please write to me, please, please, please...

Souper New Year

I'm sure it's been woefully remiss of me not to have wished everybody a Merry Christmas or indeed a Happy New Year, but here we are already in 2013, and to be honest, this year I'm just glad to have got through it.

It was never going to be a hugely enjoyable Christmas, and being somewhat chronophobic I've never much cared for all this 'New Year' nonsense (although these days it has an altogether different celebratory tone, what with New Years Day being Mrs B-V's birthday).

On the food side, the cheese, rare breed ham and game pie from Borough Market was, as expected, totally fucking awesome, and the excellent Glenmorangie Sauternes cask a very pleasant discovery.
 
But it was a challenge was sticking to the 5:2 diet throughout the festive season, but we managed to average two fasting days each week by making the pattern just slightly less regular than the usual 'every Monday and Thursday'. We've avoided having to do consecutive days too, though there have been a few 'one-gaps' to counterbalance the 'five-gaps' - we're fasting today (Wednesday) and there's another one coming up on Friday.

If anybody has been wondering what we've been eating on the days when we've been restricted to just 600 calories (500 for Mrs B-V) the answer is... mostly soup.

The Fast track

It's day 2 of my 5:2 diet today.

Or maybe it's day 4?

Technically, I could argue that it might be day 7.

Confused? Good. But I know perfectly well what the fuck I'm talking about, which makes me feel superior, and being on a diet is all about feelings of superiority, obviously.

Yes, I've succumbed to the latest fad diet doing the rounds. I know - who'd have thought it? But I'm fully bandwagoned-up and ready to go.

Big news, no?

Is there anything left for me to eat?!?

So, Lent lasted approximately two weeks this year, as opposed to the more traditional 40 days and nights.

I started eating chocolate again, and that was that. Been eating quite a bit over the last few days too - since my monthly Hotel Chocolat Tasting Club selection arrived in the post.

Mind you, they are amongst the best chocolates money – lots of money! – can buy. My willpower and resolve are no match for the cocoa masterpieces crafted by the likes of Kiri Kalenko and Eric Desmet. I broke my Lenten fast with a rum glorious truffle-gianduja hybrid combination. It was worth it. Our Lord would probably have done the same.

Now, I know it’s probably not the best food choice for a newly-diagnosed diabetic and being a food blogger, there’s little point trying to hide things from the various doctors, nurses and dieticians who try telling me what I should and shouldn’t be eating.

I joked with an unsympathetic nurse the other day, ‘I don’t need to keep a food diary - just go and read Ben Viveur’. Well, I say ‘joked’…

The problem is that once you factor in all my ailments, the ‘eat’ list seems to be almost empty, while the ‘don’t eat’ list would fill ten trolleys and scoop the grand prize on Supermarket Sweep.

It’s an absolute minefield of contraindication upon contraindication. Probably with some co-morbidity if we’re doing medical-speak.

See, if I just suffered from, say, gout with no diabetes or high blood pressure or arrhythmia, it would be simple enough – though probably annoying at times – to try and stick to a low purine diet. And if it was just my BP that needed to be kept in check, there would be obvious rules to observe there too.

But having several interrelated conditions – and, not to ignore the big fat elephant in the room – being a bit of a, err, big fat elephant in room, makes it tough to know what I really should be eating. If anything.

And I don’t think my diet was really all that unhealthy to start off with – I avoid processed, instant and junk foods and always get plenty of fresh vegetables into my cooking. People don't think it to look at me, but I know for a fact my diet is healthier than that of people I know who are about half my weight and my cholesterol level is actually relatively low for a fatso.

Atkins is dead

A widely-held view these days is eating lots of carbohydratesisn’t brilliant unless you’re a pro athlete or some kind of narcissistic gym tosser. Or possibly a recovering anorexic. Carbs raise blood sugar levels and turn to fat in the body which isn’t something most people want to happen.

This is particularly true for diabetics – apparently a baked potato is the single worst thing to eat, worse even than pure sugar, because it turns quickly into glucose and opens a veritable sweetshop in your veins within seconds.

Carbohydrates are absorbed less quickly, however, and are therefore less likely to spike you’re blood sugar if they are eaten with fat, making chocolate and croissants seem like a healthier alternative, in a way. And a pain au chocolat would be even better, presumably...

I've never completely accepted the scientific classification of carbs anyway. I can just about buy the idea that chips, rice, bread and pasta are all the same type of food, but never that beer and chocolate are also both members of the family.

But, if we accept that having too much is bad, and lots of mine are going to come from beer, the alternative is eating a higher proportion of protein… only eating lots of protein is said to be bad for gout. Too much meat, seafood or mushrooms can trigger an attack – though I’ve never particularly noticed a correlation between my diet and the throbbing bastard pain that occasionally immobilises my joints. 

Mind you, I didn’t have any symptoms of diabetes either, even when stuffing my face with potatoes.

Fresh fruit, traditionally promoted as ‘healthy’, is very high in natural sugar which is bad from a diabetic perspective. Bananas are the most carby fruit of all, making them particularly bad, except that they also happen to be the best foodstuff for potassium, of which I’m trying to eat more because that can have a positive effect on the irregular heartbeat… What to do, what to do?

I’ve been told to avoid caffeine, because it could make my irregular heartbeat even less regular or something, but there are theories that caffeine stimulates the metabolism and promotes activity, which leads to weight loss, which is meant to be good for your heart.

Super? Yes! Food? Yes! Superfood?

So is oily fish, apparently, only that’s very bad for uric acid levels, which causes gout. And the oiliest fish, the anchovy, is also the saltiest and high sodium is bad for my blood pressure. We’ve come full circle.

Acai berries or pigskin?

A theory doing the rounds in the last year or two is that pork scratchings are some kind of superfood. No, really. Pretty much zero carbohydrate, and most of the fat – of which there is undeniably rather a lot in your average pigskin – is the ‘good’ type of fat rather than the bad, saturated kind.

But scratchings, delicious as they are, are also very high in salt, and the only time I’d want to eat them is while drinking lots of beer, something else I should probably cut down on.

Pound-for-pound they’re also somewhat calorific, which means I won’t lose weight, and being overweight makes me more likely to suffer from things like, ooh, I don’t know, diabetes, gout, high blood pressure… Full circle agian.

So, I’ve concluded that almost all foods are bad for something and good for something else, which will probably pretty much even itself out, so I’m tempted to carry on more or less as before but without any 'good for nothing' foods, if indeed there are any.

*Waves to the doctors, nurses and dieticians reading*

Not that I was really eating 'good for nothing' foods in large quantities anyway. As least not since I was a teenager. Oh welly-woo...

Trying to stop my heart breaking - a Valentine's tale

Having largely avoided going to the doctors for many years, events all seem to have caught up with me in recent weeks, and the conclusions drawn from a spate of visits to various clinical facilities for myriad assessments and blood tests has concluded that I suffer from high blood pressure and Type II diabetes. (In addition to the various gouty, asthmatic, arrythmic ailments that befouled me.)

Great.

Diabetes and high blood pressure are strange beasts, in that you don't necessarily 'suffer' from them (I have no discernable symptoms) but having them can make it a whole lot more likely one will suffer from things that are properly hurty - blindness, stroke, heart attack, heart failure etc.

(You'll have realised by now that this seasonal blogpipe has relatively little to do with love, but then St Valentine himself suffered from cardio-vascular problems and excess glucose, so it's topical. OK, maybe he didn't. I'm ill. Indulge me.)