weird body stuff

I had a very odd moment on Tuesday where I suddenly felt extremely dizzy.

I don't specifically know what brought it on, but the last time I had this feeling it was because I was hungry and I certainly ate a banana and felt better, but that could have been coincidence.

I've actually been examining my diet at I've been slightly puzzled that I haven't been loosing weight. See, while I'm not on a properly controlled diet I have basically been living off of salad and strawberries and yet there's been no shrinkage of my waistline.

The thing I discovered was that bread is incredibly high in calories. See, a while back I got a bread maker with the intention of using it to bake fresh bread regularly that I would primarily use for sandwiches at work. Bread is one of the things I find most difficult to manage properly as a bachelor.

I hate stale bread, but it's horribly inconvenient to buy bread every day. Plus it's difficult to buy bread in sensible portions for a single person - loafs are too big and go stale before I finish them and rolls tend to be sold in packs that are either too small or too big.

The perfect solution I thought was therefore to get the bread maker and make bread when I needed it. The problem has been that even the smallest loaf it has a recipe that is actually quite big (and it takes 3 hours to run through). Plus, because it's home-made bread it goes stale really quickly, which means I've ended up baking a new loaf most weekdays, having half for sandwiches and then eating the rest along with my salad in the evening.

Well, as noted, my research revealed that bread is actually incredibly energy dense. So that small loaf I was making turned out to have more than 1,200 calories in terms of flour alone. When you add in the extra bits you need to make bread, like milk, it's probably more like 1,300 calories, which means that one small loaf is more than half of the daily total calorie allocation for an adult man.

So it's no wonder my weight hasn't been dropping - where I thought by having the salad I was bringing my calorie intake way below that 2,500 in fact I was probably only bringing it in line with it. In other words, previously, I'd been eating more than that 2,500, hence why my waistline has steadily crept up.

So I therefore resolved to come up with a solution, because this current situation is daft. And that solution has been to substitute the bread with something else that's a lot less calorie intensive, but is still quite filling.

I'm actually too embarrassed to say what it is, especially as I'm still experimenting. The weird thing, though, is that even though I hadn't actually started the proper substitution until mid-week I seem to have started feeling hungry like I was on a diet already. I mean, I've been feeling ravenously hungry almost continuously since the weekend, and it's not like I've been doing any exercise or anything.

Hence, I believe, the feeling dizzy. It's like it's totally psychosomatic - because I'm thinking about cutting down the calories, my body has decided to start behaving like it's on a starvation diet already and making me hungry, which is just bizarre.