Day 6 - The Cabbage Soup Diet

Rigamoon

Ikea is a painful process at the best of times … it’s hell on a Saturday when you’re so hungry that the soulless furniture looks delicious.   We went on a flat trip and to be fair to Bitchney and Mr Carbs were very patient with mine and Bruno’s horrendously stroppy moods.  As a reward we allowed ourselves a pot of 10 small meatballs, heaven for five minutes, today is another meat day after all.  Not strictly allowed, but at this point, we didn’t care.

A quick meeting with a friend and then home for a bowl of soup before assembling some furniture and arranging books in colour order.  Then dinner of chicken and … wait for it … steamed kale.  Quite delicious compared to the monotony of cabbage and co. 

My problem at this point in the diet is threefold: firstly I’m more bored than yesterday, secondly i can’t face anymore cabbage soup and although tomorrow is the last day, it doesn’t feel like any sort of consolation, and thirdly, I don’t even think I’ve lost any weight.  I’m tired, devoid of energy and inspiration.  I miss Gwyneth.

Bruno

“I’m not making any more cabbage soup. I don’t care if we run out.”

Today I want the soup about as much as the parents of a newborn baby want pictures of their child e-mailed to everyone on the Sex Offenders List, alongside details of fixed abode, times it might be likely to be alone and a road map to Belgium.

Yesterday’s meat raffle was another sly trick. This morning I feel hungover, which I hardly think possible on six glasses of water and a mug of green tea. It can only be the emotion of losing a loved one after an all-too-brief affair. I’m being unfair as usual. We are permitted to eat more beef today, but we feel somehow wrong with that suggestion. It’s a diet, not a theme park, after all. The meatball breakfast hardly helped.

Eating like this has made me absurdly lethargic and utterly dismissive. I’m like the friend you didn’t really want to hang out with again after their lobotomy. I have the attention-span of a 5-year old with ADD at a convention for colourful objects that make a lot of noise. I’ve not showered in two days, though not for want of trying. I grab a towel, begin to undress, start reading a book and before I know it I’m back in bed with another mug of herbal tea, texting someone I haven’t seen in five years. I’m no nutritionist, but I imagine the body needs fuel much like a steam-train. If you throw coal onto the fire sporadically, then it stands to reason that the engine’s output will follow suit. That may explain why I feel like Kate Bush at midday and Laura Bush by mid-afternoon.

We opt for skinless, fatless (sometimes called “flavourless”) chicken for supper, and it is excellent, in all it’s baked robustness. Mountains of green leaves make up the support act, and we even dared add a lemon to the exclusive ingredients (that sly old face-distorter really knows how to loosen a crowd of prudes). Like yesterday however, this semi-replete sensation leaves without warning, and I am once again eyeing the soup like a delinquent teenager would his parents, after running away from home only to be returned two days later; “I don’t like you, but I need you and for now you’re all I’ve got.”

Luckily, by now I am well-accustomed to sleeping in a foetal position so as to minimise the pangs of hunger that shoot through my body. Given my non-existent energy-levels, the understated shivering is the most exercise I’ve been getting all week.