Porridge: hunger buster

 

I’ve spent the last month having porridge for breakfast. The oat-based food stuff is cheap, efficient (takes up the space of a cereal box but provides about 20 times as many meals) and staves off hunger ‘til lunch, something cereal- I’m increasingly finding- does not. This can be particularly distracting if you’re on certain medications, as I am. Mirtazapine gives you a rabid, insatiable hunger.

I started on 5th June, then updated the following week, the 12^th. I decided to continue for the whole month.

My weight is pretty much the same, around 88kg. Hunger hasn’t been so much an issue in the past month, although I’m still probably overeating. Making porridge is a little more time consuming in the morning, making it and eating it, and it’s incredibly dull food which needs spicing up with fruit and suchlike, but it’s effective in seeing you through ‘til lunch. If you’re going to mix fruit in, put it in cold at the end of the cooking. The sugar can scald at high temperatures.

Oats also suit cold smoothies, mixed with banana and milk. You might also want to add other fruit like blueberries, strawberries, or savoury additions like peanut butter. Oats will thicken the mixture and fill you for longer, but as it’s cold, give it time for the oats to absorb some milk before drinking.

At the gym: I’ve started recording dumbbell press, like bench press but with two separate dumbbells. This requires some control that a bar would otherwise give you- raising and lowering them in synchrony is an extra challenge, hence only going from 2X 28kg to 30kg. Extra-wide chin-ups- with palms facing each other about a metre apart- went from 7 reps to 9. Everything else, I got close, but not close enough.

I’ll continue with porridge and see if I can bring my weight down.