I’m aware that What-Did-You-Eat Wednesday is not really a thing, but things don’t become things until people try to make them things – you know?

Anyway, in lieu of the column that was printed in The Clifton Courier last week, I’ve decided to instead give you a detail illustrative documentation of what I ingested today.

Why? I felt like drawing, but mostly because I anticipate that I’ll be in no state to write an anything coherent whatsoever on Sunday, as I’ve signed up to a fun run tat morning. The real kicker is that I also decided to go to a ball on Saturday night; a decision made with the kind of deluded self-confidence that comes with a few after-work drinks on a Friday night. And so, I’ve decided to give you a dose of my printed column on Sunday – a pledge that is of course reliant on my being able to muster the strength to copy and paste some text into WordPress on Sunday.

Stay tuned.

Until then, please enjoy this gastric recount of my day.

Breakfast

I know I have written about my boiled egg breakfast before, but I’ve had to give that up. My housemate’s room is right by the kitchen and I feel this breakfast would be far too loud at 5.43am.

So I’ve made the switch to one of my favourite foods: bran.

I get a handful of All Bran and chuck it into a bowl. I usually go for one of the two red bowls in the collection is mismatched bowls in the cabinet, as it makes me feel like I’m one of those fancy weight-conscious career women in a Special K ad.

Then I grab some walnuts and crush them into said glamour bowl, crushing them into smaller pieces with my bare hands. I like to think of this nut crushing as a metaphor for my status as a ball-busting career woman. I use full fat milk after making the switch from low-fat when I realised that low-fat milk did actually just taste like white, milk-flavoured water – like if there was such thing as a milk cordial and it had been watered-down, that’s what low-fat milk tastes like. Then I chuck in some strawberries and a big old dollop of Greek yogurt and enjoy five minutes of fibre in the dark silence of an apartment before the sun is fully up.

Lunch

This was something I’d whipped up the night before. It sounds quite healthy when you list the ingredients: eggplant, kale, brown rice, skinless chicken breast, artichoke and beetroot hummus. But when you consider that everything has been cooked in about a litre of oil, the clean eating tag starts to disappear, like a serviette going translucent when  used to wipe grease off my face.

Afternoon tea

Because of said ball on Saturday night, I have been trying to keep a relatively healthy eating schedule in the hope I’ll lose a few cheeky kilos in 3.5 days. But this cake was a lemon meringue cake. I find it hard to justify saying no to a lemon meringue cake, but I wanted to have abs you could grate cheese on for Saturday.

So I compromised: I scraped the lemony goo and meringue off the cake and left the carbs layer of cake untouched.

Essentially, I just had fruit and egg whites for a snack.

Dinner

Not only am I trying to be healthy, but I’ve got about two days left until pay day so I’m super stingy on the dollar front too. This means I’m in use-everything-in-the-fridge mode.

As such, tonight’s dinner was the dregs of my artichoke, the leftover chicken, a bit of eggplant and two tiny carrots, eaten to make myself feel like I’ve eaten a salad.

And this approach wasn’t too bad, it was a fast, reasonably tasty dinner and I was surprised by an extra cube of feta that was in the dregs of my artichoke oil – which was comprised of the artichoke juices and the leftover oil from some Danish feta I bought a while ago.

Dessert

I didn’t need to have a piece of avocado toast, but I impulse-bought an avo the other day and the bastard was ready to roll. I had to capitalise on its primo green flesh while I had the chance.