Dom Davis (The Blog)

Apparently you will never be so tired as when you have a baby. The night time feeds, the disturbed sleep patterns and the complete upheaval of your life consigns you to the ranks of the walking dead as you survive on what little sleep you can grab. We know this. We are as prepared as we can be, after all, forewarned is forearmed.

It does beg the question, however, why does no one mention the lack of sleep before the pregnancy? Everyone, and I do mean everyone, regardless of if they’ve had children or not, is quite happy to bang on at great length about how we should be retesting up now because soon we won’t be getting any sleep at all. But not a single solitary soul has mentioned that, actually, due to discomfort and bladder related issues, a full nights sleep for my wife became a thing of the past some months ago. Something which also has an [admittedly lesser] impact on my sleep.

The Zozo is exhausted and she’s not even started yet. I crawl out of bed in the mornings and actually pray for the baby to be coming because it means I an take 2 weeks off work and attempt to make some sort of a inroads in catching up on my sleep.

Methinks that next time the expense to me and inconvenience to work can both go hang. I’ll be taking a nice large chunk of holiday before the birth and then taking my 2 weeks paternity after the birth. Work will just have to cope with me being out an extra two weeks. Since that isn’t an option this time round they’ll just have to cope with me being tired and grumpy.

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.