It started during my walk from the car park to the office. As I marched towards another day at work, my nostrils were filled by the smell of baking Subway bread wafting towards me. This is nothing unusual as it is pretty hard to avoid when your building is directly opposite a franchise, but today it registered on my hunger scale and got my taste buds jumping.
Throughout the morning, food was on my mind. Several trips to the water dispenser did nothing to appease my insatiable desire to eat something. Anything. At one point I even consulted the office diary to see if any of my colleagues were celebrating a birthday; my department having an unhealthy tradition of going overboard with cake to honour special occasions. In an office of 30 or so people, that is a pretty regular conveyor belt of sugary badness to feast upon, and I was visualising Krispy Kreme, chocolate cake, rocky road bites, the works. You can imagine my disappointment that nobody in the room was born on 9 January.
It really didn't help matters either when my Twitter feed filled up with tweets concerning a competition to win a Nando's voucher.
My lunch break offered an opportunity to escape my desk. I needed to head off-site to pick up some bran flakes having finished off the packet for my breakfast, so I donned my jacket, took a deep breath and waddled like an Olympic 50km walker past that sandwich shop as quickly as I could.
Now if I had been thinking clearly, I probably would have listened to my gurgling stomach and eaten my uninspiring ham and pickle sandwich before I went to the supermarket. I didn't and so for the first time since the diet began I found myself hungry in a store full of every imaginable type of food and only my willpower to stop me from investing in something I would later regret. The problem was I had ventured to a shop I wasn't completely familiar with and in my slightly confused efforts to find the cereal aisle I found myself staring at the head of Medusa.
There directly in front of me was the rotisserie. The first taste was with the eye. The second taste was with the smell. The inner carnivorous caveman in me started snarling. I was like a bull staring down the matador and wouldn't have been surprised if some startled old lady glared in amazement at a salivating 32 year male dragging his foot backwards in imaginary dirt. All I was thinking was meat. MEAT! My eyes were glued to a small rack of ribs. Had I seen them in a different frame of mind, I'd have recognised them as the gristle and fat that any normal person would, but in this frenzied state of mind, they looked like this.
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| What a mighty fine rack |
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| The price of success |
I headed back to the office, ate my sandwich and sanity was restored for the afternoon. Temptation was avoided for the rest of the day, and my will power just about remained intact. A small victory on what I hope will be a long road to success.
Having found myself temporarily reduced to a hungry dog eyeing up a juicy bone, maybe Diane Abbott had a point about banning unhealthy food outlets to protect those without self-restraint after all.
Today will be another day, another set of challenges. Hopefully without borderline lunacy.
