Diet Day 009

Diet Day 9 - Friday 10 Jan 2020

I'm still 85 kilos, and have been for a couple of days now. It's not long enough that I would call it plateauing, but it is frustrating. If I get stuck at this weight for very many more days, that will definitely start to count as a plateau.

I'm not going to overreact and lower my calories budget, though, because I know from experience that 1,600 will bring weight loss for me if I just just stick with it, and I am determined to do that.

Breakfast today was toast (120 calories) with hummus on it (50 calories) and diet coke (pretty much zero calories), so that left a calorie budget of 1,430 for the rest of the day. That’s plenty, and hummus is very pleasantly filling, which gives me a great chance of hitting that target of 1,600 calories.

After a long gap of hours and hours I only ate again in the evening, in a pattern that is turning into a habit for this diet and is working well so I see no need to break it. I had risis e bisi, a classic dish from Venice that comes in many variations. Risi e bisi means rice and peas, which makes it perfect for vegans, like I try to be, but it is also common to throw in some chunks of meat, like ham. It’s supposed to be slightly soupy, so it’s okay to add a tad more water before serving if the rice has dried out. All in all, my portion was a nice, filling 500 calories. I put some Parmesan cheese on top (40 calories) and I had a small glass of beer with it (60 calories), which left 800 calories in my budget for the rest of the day.

I usually have bread with anything the slightest bit soupy, like risi e bisi, to dip, but with all the calories I was already having with the rice and peas in I decided to break the habit of a lifetime and not have any dipping bread.

For desert I had two chocolate chip cookies (200calories), and these, by the way, are from the same packet that I had a couple of cookies out of yesterday. When I'm not dieting, there is no way a pack of cookies gets to the end of the day without being eaten. It would be lucky to last an hour. The pack has nine biscuits in it, so that is getting in for a thousand calories, and I will eat a pack like that as a snack when I'm not dieting.

That left 600 calories, and I had a coffee, at quite a late hour, but coffee doesn't keep me up (60 calories) and toast with hummus (170 calories), that’s 230 calories in total. Deducted from 600 that left me 370 calories to go before bedtime, when the reset of the giant calorie counter in the sky comes.

I then just kept right on snacking, and had another chocolate biscuit at 100 calories, which lowered my budget to 270. Then a handful of crisps (chips in US English) at 100 calories and yet another cookie at 100 calories. I do like cookies.

That left 70 more calories before I burst through my limit for the day, and I didn't want to do that, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t spend those last 70 calories. That was exactly the calories in a single slice of toast with a thin layer of spread. So that's what I had. I had exactly enough calories left in my budget, so why not spend them?

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