Day 18
Disillusioned.
Fed up.
Almost at the point of....
...and still I continue. Why? I ask myself, but then I remember that I have lost just over half a stone; a feat unequalled ever before. I don't like this diet, it bungs me up worse than a champagne cork, I'm SEVERELY missin' me beer.... but I have, when all is considered, lost over half a stone.
This week has been.... 'interesting'. I was missing bread more than I could ever have imagined and, having cooked a full-blown French 3-course lunch for eight people twice during the last 7 days, and given each lot of a choice of five French cheeses each time; I was feeling a bit deprived - and very bored with the limited range of things I could eat. However, things were to look up.
A bit.
I baked the Dukan bread that is listed on the 'My Dukan Diet' website (http://www.mydukandiet.com/). Well, 'baked' is not a realistic descriptor of the process. 'Bunged' is more of an accurate description. Bung an egg, an egg white, 3 tablespoons of fat-free fromage frais (almost as bad to say as free-fahsand fevvers on a frushes froat...), 2 tablespoons of oat bran (now there's a surprise!), 1 tablespoon of wheat bran (a change of bran is as good as a rest) and some dried yeast into a bowl and mix it up (and make it nice.... rather unlikely with those ingredients), then bung it into a microwaveable bowl and finally bung it into the microwave for 4 minutes. The recipe said nothing about letting it rise, so I only gave it about 15 minutes to do anything it might - and it did nothing - so I bunged it into the microwave.
After 4 minutes it looked precisely the same as when it went in. I gave it another 4. Then another 2. The top looked a bit like bread (but not much) and when turned out the underside wasn't cooked. Back it went for another 2. Then another 2. That was 14 minutes and it hadn't risen at all. I thought that it would be best used for stopping planes running away when parked at Heathrow, but I was wrong. It still had a certain sogginess to the underside, but, in fact, sliced as thinly as possible, it made passable bread. Heavy, dark, dense bread, but bread nonetheless. We had Quark on it instead of butter (ooooooh, butter.... how I long for butter!) and it would be unfair for me to say that it wasn't ok. Don't get me wrong here, it wasn't anywhere near good, but it was ok. Next time I do it I will start the yeast culture off in a cup, with water and a few grains of sugar to feed the dried yeast, adding the culture to the other ingredients when starting to froth, and then I'll leave it to prove for a hour of so in a warm place. I'll also BAKE it in the oven in a baking-parchment-lined tin. It actually has the potential to be reasonable bread.
Bouyed up by my success (limited though it was) with Dukan bread I turned my attention to the Dukan Oat Bran Cookies. Having missed biscuits, not that I actually eat very many at any normal time, I wanted to have something with a biscuit-like texture. 3 table spoons of oat bran (of course), baking powder, an egg, a little sweetener and 2 tablespoons of fat-free yogurt made the mixture which I blobbed onto baking parchment at regular and well-spaced intervals. Into a pre-heated oven at 180C for 15 minutes. Set the timer and go away to write another article on France. Beep-beep..... open the oven door to discover something akin to a doormat. Edible doormat, but doormat. These blobs had spread to join together leaving little spaces in this layer of brown goo. Undercooked brown goo. I set the timer for another 10 minutes as the mixture was simply not cooked.
I made myself a cuppa and tickled the puppy's tum for a short time, then it was beep-time again. Out it came, looking even more doormat-like than before. The sheet of 'stuff' was put onto a cooling rack to cool off and crisp up - as cookies do. But these didn't.
They, or rather 'it' was edible if pulled apart and consumed. No way was this doormat like cookies could ever be expected to appear, but it did the biz; it stopped me wanting biscuits.
Today, during the break in the middle of the French class that I teach on a Friday morning, Jan brought out normal biscuits with the coffee. Boy, did they look good.
I was strong.
I didn't even reach for one.
I sulked instead.
My current sulking is mostly due to the fact that although there is obviously a redistribution of body fat happening - my beer gut is deminishing noticeably - I am not actually losing weight at the moment. Yesterday morning (Thurs) I was 18 stone 7; a pound heavier than I was on Monday. That's not encouraging. Dukan says that we can eat as much as we like of the permitted foods, but I think that this theory may be wrong. I think that, to get me started again with the weight loss, I will have to be very careful not to get too close to the fridge between mealtimes.
Jan just did a nice pud of sweet Dukan pancakes and fat-free Onken yogurt. We're permitted an amount of the flavoured ones as well as the natural, so that was welcome.
So, well into the cruise phase, I am looking forward to trying Dukan Mash (see 'I am the Dukan fat-Buster' for an exceptionally interesting and entertaining blog from a highly skilled blogger). Saturday we are eating at a the house of a couple of friends, and they are going to try to keep within the Dukan limitations for us. I wonder if I can keep my hands off the wine for the night.... I somehow doubt that I will be THAT strong. We'll see. Sunday is PP and then Monday (PV) is the Dukan mash with something; probably haddock, and a few veg. On Monday a friend arrives to stay for a few days. He is the one who lost 4 stone in three months with Dukan. It's all his friggin' fault! We'll no doubt get a chapter-and-verse-update on his progress, and we'll be able to see what sort of problems that he has overcome in his quest to be less of a person. He started in September and by Xmas he looked so much better for it.
I just hope that we do too - eventually.
Onwards and upwards..... or downwards if we're talking about weight and inches.
C
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