Live Below the Line. Day One: The Snackless Snacker

Today was a really irritating day at work. Not bad, just infuriating.
Normally, when I’m annoyed, I snack.

I love to snack. I am almost always eating when at work; fruit, nuts, vegetable sticks with hummus and a healthy amount of cake. (Just for the record, a healthy amount of cake is a lot of cake.)

Today has felt rather sparse without all of my favourite fruits and veggies to snack on.

Breakfast was a tesco value cereal bar (+£0.12) because I got up late and really suck at breakfast.

I’ve only had 1 cup of coffee today, about mid-morning (+£0.04). I honestly have no idea how I’m still standing up. I can only assume that my caffeine habit has slowly been replacing my blood with coffee for a while now and I’m just running off the reserves.

Lunch was a rather bland pasta dish (pasta +£0.06, 1/4 jar of pasta sauce +£0.11, 100g broccoli +£0.12).
Whilst it was not exactly a bad looking dish, it certainly was not the kind of culinary masterpiece that people who photograph their food usually take so, somewhat understandably, a woman in the staff room did look at me like I was a bit weird…

I normally buy wholewheat pasta because I find white pasta too slimy, but when the healthier, tastier version is two-and-a-half times the price, my usual avoidance of white carbohydrates had to take a back-seat in order for me to remain within budget.
I read online that if you run the cooked pasta under cold water then you wash away the outside layer of starchy goo that makes the pasta stick together. This kind of worked, but it certainly wasn’t very satisfying.

With bland carbohydrate for lunch and a lack of snacks I was hungry again by 4pm and spent the last half-hour of work fantasising about food.
I need to find a way to make tomorrow’s lunch more colourful and interesting or I am going to be the crankiest of cranky-pants by the end of the week.

Dinner was the highlight of my day. Delicious home made lentil stew with value Yorkshire puddings and value tinned potatoes and carrots (+£0.48). Normally when I make this it really fills me up, but after a rather sad lunch quite early in the day this felt as though all it did was take the edge off.

Forgot to take a photo of the finished product… was kind of distracted by food (which is pretty much the story of my life).

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Update: After using a fitness app to track my daily allowances and discovering that my caloric intake was way lower than it should be, I decided to splash-out and have 50g value porridge oats made up with water (+£0.04) and 1 tbsp of value honey (+£0.03).

So today’s total tallies at exactly £1.
I think I’ve learnt enough that I’ll find tomorrow a lot easier. Fingers crossed!

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