Yawn

I think that tonight I shall be going to bed a little earlier than I did last night. Or rather I shall go to bed at about the same time and not bother reading for so long!

The past couple of weeks I have been turning in before midnight – one night I was in bed by 9.30 which is almost unheard of, but I was so tired it couldn’t be helped.

For the past few years I have –let’s face it – kidded myself that I don’t need much sleep. If that was ever true, it’s not true now. I still don’t need as much sleep as some people seem to, but frankly, since I have been getting more than four and a half hours each night during the week and trying to make up the deficit with Saturday morning lie-ins, I have felt rather better. I don’t feel like dozing off in the afternoon, for one thing (though the lack of carbohydrates also means that I don’t face the dreaded carb coma, either). No, I have found that by going to bed between 11.30 and midnight (with the exception possibly of a Friday night) and getting about 7 hours sleep suits me rather better.

Last night I read until about 1.20 so got a maximum of five and a half hours of the old dreamless and now I am feeling tired. Not as tired as in times past, put more so than of late (I want to write ‘tireder’ but there is, amazingly, no such word). So tonight I shall watch Secret Society on the telly box at ten o’clock and then turn in shortly after eleven. I may read for half an hour but then that’s it. I am aiming to get back to the seven hour sleep and I don’t care who knows it.

FOOD!

Bizarrely, on the lunchtime front at least, my low-carb diet is working out rather cheaper than when I was buying crisps and sandwiches and so forth.

The big problem I have been having has been in finding some kind of variety in the things I eat. I mean I like cheese – scratch that, I love cheese – but honestly, even that palls if you eat it like it’s going out of fashion. I haven’t reached the point yet with the curdy delicacy that I never want to see it again (Heaven forbid), but it could happen. I have decided after a rather longer foray with cocktail sausages, that I need a good few months away from them. The last lot I had, I literally choked about half of them down and then ditched the remainder quite unceremoniously.

This is not as bad, I might add, as my aversion to liver. I used to love liver, many years ago. Preferably fried with onions. Then, in what I like to think of as probably the worst year of my life (for more reasons than just this), my then landlady discovered that I liked liver and onions and served it for every meal thenceforth for nearly a year. About four years ago, I accidentally ordered some in a café instead of the breakfast I intended. It confirmed to me that thirty years was not enough to overturn my aversion.

Anyway, finding variety is problematic. The amount of foodstuffs that depend upon sugar and carbohydrates is truly astounding and considering the continuing and growing scares over diabetes and such, I find it all quite incomprehensible. The demonisation (a word that doesn’t exist, apparently) of fat has a lot to answer for.

And let’s NOT get started on salt.

Having dispensed with the humble cocktail sausage from diet for the foreseeable future, I have to be careful not to overdo it with the chicken-based products. So far I have found enough variety (peri-peri, Moroccan, chilli etc etc) that it hasn’t become a problem and the past few days I have been supplementing with Greek salads. But it would be nice to get my hands on some other salad alternative that isn’t filled to the brim with rice or pasta. I am a long way away from being fed up with Greek salad, but why push it?

Right now though, at this precise moment, I could REALLY go for a Mars Bar and sod the lot of it.