Dom Davis (The Blog)

This year is the first year I’ve been about for Cromer Carnival which is a week of festivities including the crowning of the Carnival queen ¹ (Saturday), airshow² (yesterday), fireworks (tonight) and fairground (all week). I believe it’s one of the larger carnivals in North Norfolk.

Last night was the big parade. Cromer is closed to traffic and floats, bands, dancers and becostumed people paraded along the streets to throngs of happy, cheering and quite tipsy people. The Zozo and I went out to see this spectacle, eat burgers, hotdogs and doughnuts and generally join in with the revelry.

Being my first carnival I wasn’t sure what to expect but I was very impressed by the quality of the floats and costumes. I was also stunned by the number of young girls in leotards twirling batons. Either they were imported from round the county or Cromer has the highest number of twirlers per capita of anywhere in the world.

Parade over the Zozo and I investigated the fun fair and the Zozo treated me to a few goes shooting prizes with cork guns (she won 3 prizes, I only managed 1) and a go throwing surprisingly light balls at clearly weighted cans. Neither of us won a prize although I managed to cheat and catch the ball on a rebound without anyone seeing giving me a fourth shot. Didn’t help

We went to sleep that night with full bellies, smiles on our faces and the sounds of revelry drifting on the night air. All in all a great evening.

¹ which was more of an afterthought after the long and boring speeches by local dignitaries
² the Red Arrows pitch up and do their thang. I missed that unfortunately

… I am now officially no longer a fat bastard According to the scales at the gym, which I trust, I weigh almost exactly 13 stone¹ with all my gym kit on. This means that, nekkid, I would weight 12 stone²! This is the upper end of my new Happy Weight which means an end to the severe All Salad diet and the beginning of the slightly less severe Some Salad diet. I celebrated with a BBQ, ice cream, bag of chocolate, large fizzy drink and more ice cream³. Hopefully, after all that, the next time I weigh myself I won’t be back in the fat bastard zone and, therefore, back on the all salad diet. All being well in 5 weeks time I’ll be bang on perfect weight and can go on the Very Little Salad diet

¹International and metric readers feel free to use Google to convert stone to lbs/kgs

²Yes, I’m aware there are some units to tack on the end of that figure, but I think they detract from the key headline figure here

³Not all in one day I should point out, and there was a gym trip and two games of squash⁴ to counter it

⁴More on that in a bit

I like Alpen. It’s tasty and it’s got raisins in it which must mean it’s healthy. It’s also got added sugar (as evidenced by the no added sugar version) which may or may not outweigh any raisin based health benefits. Since I’m on a pretty extreme diet (which is going swimmingly, thank you ) I looked at perhaps making my breakfast lower in calories by replacing my Alpen with something else.

First thought was toast. Good old marmite on toast. No, my diet app informs me that this is 300 calories (really?!) and not enough fibre to start my day meaning I’ll be hungry.

Fine, let’s go with no added sugar Alpen. I discovered very quickly that while it looks like normal Alpen it is in fact constructed from little flakes of cardboard cut out and coloured to resemble Alpen but with none of the flavour, save what little taste the raisins can add. Not wishing to be put off I decided to work out what sacrificing taste really gained me. Got to be worth 50 calories at least?

A quick check of the box and we find a portion of Alpen is 146 calories. Compare that to no added sugar which only comes to 141… hang on a minute… 5 calories? I can burn that just smiling about the fact I don’t have to eat the no added sugar crap.

Next up, time to check my portion size compared to the official portion size. According to the box 1 portion is 40 grams. According to my scales 40 grams of Alpen would leave a mouse hungry. Come 10am you’re going to be starving which leads to snacking and before you know it you’ve eaten a whole packet of chocolate biscuits. No, 80 plus grams is much more like a real serving (120 would be better) and that pushes the calorie count up somewhat.

OK, so let’s go the full hog, let’s accept it’s going to taste of cardboard and leave you miserable all day. Let’s eat Special K. Except its diminutive 117 calories comes from a 30g portion. For comparison that’s about the weight of one raisin in my Alpen¹ and if we scale that up to the [now comparatively massive] default Alpen portion it’s nearly 152 calories! For the slow among you: that’s more than my added sugar Alpen.

So what have we learned? Well for starters we’ll be sticking with Alpen for breakfast, and double portions at that ( even occasional forays into Coco Pops won’t hurt provided I don’t do the whole megaportion thing) and when they say “can help slimming as part of a calorie controlled diet” we need to remember that anything (even lard) will make you lose weight as part of the calorie controlled diet. It’s the calorie controlled bit that’s key.

Meanwhile I look for other areas to save on calories. It’s got to be one of the: amount of carrots I eat; the amount of fruit I eat; or all the kebabs. I suspect it’s the carrots.

¹OK, maybe not, but you get the idea.

So those of you who were paying attention will remember I left things off with the arrival of a monster gummy bear. Said gummy bear was, over a period of about 2 weeks, cut up into small pieces and summarily devoured. While I did have assistance from colleagues and The Zozo I did eat the lions share of The Beast and It Was Gooood .

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud and activities such as eating roughly 100g of gummy a day, large lunches and tasty fattening dinners meant I got a bit bigger. The result: where I was taking in a box of gummy to eat every day for a snack I’m now taking a box of carrot. Same amount of food, same colour but one just doesn’t hit the spot like the other.

It’s no secret that I love gummy [sic] bears. The Zozo once even bought me a mug emblazoned with images of gummy bears and sporting the legend “Doms Gummy Bear Mug” [hence my choice of spelling for gummy]. The coup-de-grace was the fact the mug contained 1/2Lb (225g) of gummy bears. On other occasions gummy bears have been purchased for me on their own as simple presents, one that always goes down well with me. The other day, in celebration of our 19th monthaversary The Zozo bought me an orange gummy bear. Yes, you read that right. A gummy bear. Singular.

Now, before we start casting aspersions on The Zozos choice of gift I should point out something. While the picture above is a picture of a lone, orange gummy bear it’s not the one The Zozo bought me. It’s actually one I bought. The Zozos gummy bear isn’t in that picture. Bear with me here.

So by zooming out a little we start to see something next to the gummy bear I bought. If you bear in mind that my gummy bear is a bog standard orange Haribo Gummy Bear you might start to question what’s next to it.

Yes, The Zozo bought me the Mother Of All Gummy Bears. This beast is 24cm long, weighs 5lbs (2.3Kg), contains 12,500 calories, is 1,400 times larger than the normal gummy bear and is the largest gummy bear you can buy in the UK (if not the world). Eating it involves a chopping board; a large, sharp knife; and quite a few sittings. I’ve even carved a chunk into a bits and placed them in a container to take into work… and I’ve not even finished the legs off yet. I’m in gummy heaven

So todays little escapade meant that by the time The Zozo and I got home the supermarkets had closed. Given I had intended to go shopping during the day it meant there wasn’t any food in the house for our valentines meal so takeaway was the only option. Valentines day dinner was a nice romantic candle lit kebab and chips for two in front of the fire. On reflection we did feel that it needed garlic bread to make it a truly magical meal

Morrisons are currently running a promotion on Belgian buns selling two packs for £1.50 (normally it’s 1 pack for £1). Given there are two buns per pack this effectively means that one bun is entirely free. I think you’ll agree that this is not an offer that can easily be walked away from so I was forced to place two packs into my basket.

The problem we have, or at least I have, if you could call it a problem, is that The Zozo doesn’t like raisins (doesn’t like fish either – but what can you do?) and to head home with 4 delicious buns which she couldn’t eat would be enough to have me sleeping on the sofa. Putting the buns back was not an option so instead I bought 4 Tiramisu (her favourite desert) for her to eat thus rendering everything fair.

So far so good, but it didn’t take into my account my complete inability to leave any kind of nice food uneaten which resulted in my trying to consume my body weight in Belgian buns. Not great for ones figure… or digestive tract. Still, I’ve been good… ish (for a given value of good) and there is still one packet of two, rather large, buns left for consumption tomorrow. The plan is to eat one for pudding after lunch and one for pudding after dinner. I suspect they wont last that long though. So much for the diet.