I spent last Sunday on a mission with Picky. We were scouring Sydney's supermarkets ... for pasta.
Pasta is not something that is normally especially hard to find. Any supermarket worth the name has a fairly decent aisle of the stuff. Sometimes two aisles. If you ask me there's actually too much pasta in your average supermarket. And it's all pretty much the same, only the shape of the stuff differs. Do we really need pasta in the shape of cars, horses and other recent domesticated animals? Probably not.
Anyway, we weren't desperately seeking any old pasta, we were after special pasta. SLIMpasta. Picky had read about it on a blog she follows (I note with interest that she doesn't yet follow this bloody blog, but offer her a blog about SLIMpasta ... and she's hooked!).
SLIMPasta is currently the flavour of the month around these parts. It's big and it's set to get bigger. The blog she was reading listed all the places that sell it. All of them had sold out. It's THAT big.
SLIMpasta is still pasta. But with no carbs, no fat, nothing. It's AirPasta. Invici-Pasta. You think it's there ... but it's not.
'Carb-less carbs' are the latest craze to hit the food world. I freely admit that I'm a bit of a sucker for all these new crazes. It was exactly the same when the whole 'detox-diet' craze hit. It was all for it. I was all over a decent detox diet.
I did the detox that was commonly-known as The Two Fruits Diet.It was the diet of the day. Everyone was doing it. Celebs - A, B & C-grade. Everyone. I think Mick Jagger did it. And he raved about it. I wanted a piece of it too. If Mick could do The Two Fruits Diet, it couldn't be too hard.
On paper The Two Fruit Diet looked easy-peasy. It was built on one easy-to-understand principle;
'Starving yourself is the road to deep & long-lasting happiness'.
Look, I fully understand that this principle has long been discredited. It's been shown to be a right load of old tosh. But, back in the day, in the innocence of my mid-20s, starving yourself - at least in short bursts - was all the rage. It was the in-thing. Everyone was doing it. People were starving all over the place. Especially at the weekends. Basically, when I was 23 and living near London, no-one was eating at the weekends. Saturday and Sunday were food-free zones. And The Two Fruits Diet was the big-mama of weekend starvation diets. If you hadn't done The Two Fruits Diet you weren't fully human. It was as simple as that. Do the diet - starve yourself - feel alive, detox your body.
Or don't and be cursed.
The Two Fruits Diet worked like this; you could select two fruits (hence the name) and you had to live with - and on - them for a whole weekend. From 6pm on Friday evening, to 9am Monday morning.
I suspect you're thinking ... 'that doesn't sound too bad. It sounds bad, but not TOO bad'.
It is & it was.
The thing about the Two Fruits Diet is (was) this. It might sound OK because you could at least eat. It wasn't 'proper' starvation. You could binge on your chosen fruits to your heart's content. Plus, it had variety. It was two fruits, not one.
My two fruits were grapes & pineapples.
We could debate the ins and outs of my two chosen fruits til the cows come home. I didn't pick them at random. I gave them both a good old ponder. My thinking was simple;
Grapes are small, hassle free (no peeling required) and relatively 'filling' (as filling as fruit gets).
Pineapples were a different story. I don't actually like pineapple. I never have. There's a lesson in there somewhere. If you're staring down the barrel of an entire weekend on nothing more than two fruits, don't pick a fruit that you don't like. I picked pineapple because I viewed it as a good, solid, 'meaty' kind of fruit.
It wasn't. It isn't. It was pineapple. Plain and simple.
I walked into my friendly local supermarket at 4pm on the Friday and I bought 12 pineapples and 7kgs of grapes. The checkout chick didn't bat an eyelid. I knew she wanted to. She was doing everything in her power to stop her eyelids batting vigourously. There was a bloke standing in front of her with 12 pineapples, and every available grape in the supermarket. I knew she had questions. She also had bright red streaks in her hair. She was way too cool for fruit-based conversation.
At home I lined up my 'meals' in rows on the kitchen bench. Grapes at the front, pineapples at the back. It was 5pm. The Two Fruits Diets started at 6pm. I had an hour. Plenty of time to have a beer and a block of chocolate. But I didn't. I really wanted to dive into my detox. So I had a handful of grapes.
By 9pm I was starving. And I was cursing my rejection of that beer and chocolate way back at 5pm. I was also cursing my choice of fruits. I was sick to death of grapes. I desperately wanted a banana. I'd have killed for a banana. Killing for a banana at 9pm on the Friday evening wasn't a good sign.
The Two Fruits Diet allowed you to drink water on top of your two fruits. So I drank buckets of the stuff.
I was up most of the night taking trips to the toilet. Each time I got back into bed, I realised I needed to go again. And then I realised I was starving. Trudging back and forth to the toilet burns calories. I was burning 6 or 7 grapes-worth each trip. I'd eaten around 200 grapes. By the morning I was so hungry that I woke up chewing my pillow. It tasted of grapes.
For breakfast I sliced open my first pineapple. That was when I realised that I didn't like pineapple. I had expected it to be meaty. I had hoped that it would be the fruit equivalent of a big plate of sausages and crispy bacon. It wasn't. It was the fruit equivalent of pineapple.
By mid-morning on the Saturday I was famished. Ravenous. And delirious. I couldn't stomach another grape, and my only other option were the 11 pineapples I had left. I was a broken man. I had a glass of water and scuttled to the toilet to pee ... and cry.
That was when the real doubts started to creep in. And the questioning. Why am I doing this? Man cannot live on bread alone. Yes he bloody well can. It's grapes and pineapples alone that man cannot live on. Not this man anyway. I was hungry, tired and tetchy. And thin. I'd wasted away overnight. I could see my ribs. All of them. I hadn't realised how many ribs humans have until I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I was all skin and bones. And ribs.
I walked back into the kitchen and faced down my nemesis. My nemeses. All 11 of them. And the grapes. There was a good 5kgs of those on the kitchen bench. They didn't blink. I did. I couldn't do it. I was beaten. And not only beaten. The Two Fruits Diet had chewed me up and spat me out.
I persevered.
I sat huddled on the sofa wrapped in a blanket in front of the TV with a bowl of grapes and pineapple pieces for company and sustenance. At bang on 3pm I noticed my bowl was empty. I crawled to the kitchen. I was down to my last 8 pineapples. The kitchen was a war zone. There were bits of pineapple everywhere. It was a pineapple disaster area. The thought of 8 more pineapples and 3 more kilos of grapes was more than I could bear. I was as weak as a kitten. I needed help.
I was faced with a stark choice; give up or go on.
I gave up.
I had to. I couldn't go on. I was starving.
I can't stand all that motivational tosh about not quitting and pushing through against all the odds. Stuff that. My view on quitting is simple; if you're going to quit do it properly. I'm not a half-hearted quitter. When I quit, I really quit. I called The Haweli, my local Indian eatery, and booked a table. For 6pm. The Haweli only opened at 6pm. I was waiting outside. I had chicken jalfrazi, pilau rice, a garlic nan bread and a stack of poppadums. And I rounded it off with a bowl of kulfi, the lovely indian-style ice cream. The waiter asked if I wanted pineapple fritters with my kulfi. I did not. I haven't eaten pineapple since.
Fad diets can suck you in. They can also chew you up and spit you out. They're not sustainable. Sometimes they're not sustainable for a weekend.
The SLIMpasta? It was a bit disappointing really. It tasted just like pasta but without that nice 'carby' taste that pasta is famous for.
To compensate we smothered it in a creamy sauce with mushrooms and bacon. That helped on the taste front. But not, I suspect, on the SLIMfront. Kinda sums the whole subject up if you ask me.
Pip pip
I commend you for even STARTING a 'nutrition plan' that is based on two fruits......along with being famished, you were surely crapping thru the eye of a needle! Nice post mate, BTW, is SLIMpasta gluten free?
ReplyDelete