Let's get cooking

Hit subscribe at the top of the page to follow our journey!

Our first fast 800 dinner was surprisingly good, if a little long awaited as we had eaten nothing since our breakfast/lunch that afternoon. We ate later than we should have, towards 9pm. It is recommended that you should eat your last meal at least three hours before going to bed. According to Dr Michael Mosley, your body does not like to be forced back into action just before you hit the pillow. He backs this theory up with research in his book. On this note, we will aim for earlier meal times going forward.

So what did we cook? Firstly, note the word 'cook' here. When we embarked upon the old 5:2 diet a year earlier, we relied heavily upon M&S Balanced For You ready meals which, in fairness, did offer a reasonable variety, were rather tasty and an overall very easy option. This time, we want to be making the food ourselves, from scratch, as much as possible. I think this will give us a greater appreciation of what is going into our meals, open up more possibilities and allow the diet to be more sustainable going forward. Ready meals are expensive and will never fundamentally change the habits of how we eat (other than make us even more reliant on easy food – which, in most cases, is unhealthy ‘fast food’). Cooking our own food also makes meal times more of an event. There is nothing memorable or significant about putting something in the microwave for 3 minutes, hearing that ding and then taking another 3 minutes to consume the result. We found ourselves actually eating slower, knowing the time and effort that had gone into the preparation. Furthermore, the fast 800 focuses specifically on reducing your intake of carbohydrates, which the M&S meals never accounted for, thus making them unsuitable for this diet. Ross asks me to also mention here that he is actually quite good at cooking. To his credit, he is.

Our first dinner was the Mediterranean Mozzarella Chicken. This tasted wonderfully fresh and, with a full bowl of sauce, felt like a proper portion size! I rejoiced every time I came across a piece of stringy mozzarella, whilst Ross, a devourer of meat, mainly enjoyed the chicken. Whilst our version bore no resemblance to the picture in the recipe, what it lost in aesthetic value, it certainly made up for in taste!

Look at that stringy mozzarella!

So that was day one.

Now to the struggles of day two. 

We both ate as late as possible on day two. Ross, up at 4:30am, ate his first meal at 11am, and I, up at 7:45am, managed to hold off until 1:30pm. I found that keeping busy helped a great deal, which is perhaps why Ross, for the first time ever, is hoping to be called of standby tomorrow so that he has to go to work… 

Our breakfast consisted of smoked salmon, half an avocado and half a lemon for the juice. I found this to be filling enough, although Ross had mentioned that his stomach had been "screaming at him all day." So I guess he didn’t.

Dinner then came at around 6pm, a good amount of time before going to bed. I had gorged myself on two small carrots in the interim and was very much ready for this evening’s feast…

This was a recipe from the fast 800 book consisting of pork loin steaks and a bean mash (nicer than it sounds). 

And that is us until tomorrow.