… 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
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.
My new job is 15 minutes walk from the station in Norwich which, unlike London, puts it a little out of the way. I couldn’t even tell you where the nearest Starbucks is, Pret has to be over 10 minutes walk and I don’t even know if Eat exists outside of London. While there are analogs closer we’re still looking at a 5 minute walk before you get to a news agent and sandwich vending establishments.
There is, of course, the ubiquitous Sandwich Man, which I think is now mandated by European legislation offices over a certain size, who comes at 11ish and apparently we have access to a canteen over the road that supplies overpriced, badly cooked food to another company and is quite happy to rip off employees from surrounding places which I’ve been warned off.
I discovered all this on my first day, choosing the sandwich man (prawn in maryrose sauce bap, crisps) and being quite impressed with his fayre.
Tuesday I brought a packed lunch. Cheaper and much better for me, plus the paucity of snack vending establishments nearby means I can’t easily supliment my lunch with crap and defeat the object.
Wednesday was a team lunch so we went out for food, Thursday and Friday I was off.
Monday there was no bread (we’d been away and not got round to shopping) so I had a tuna and red onion sarnie with crisps from the sandwich man.
Today I made my lunch, put it in my shiny new lunch box and promptly left it in the kitchen. Sandwich man again for me then. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll get into the habit of packing my lunch and actually remember to bring it. As it is tomorrows lunch will be today’s lunch rescued out of the fridge (if I remember :S )
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.