Chocolate; my nemesis

You started it all

I am having a very good “free food” week. As in, I have received much food, for no money. However, the only drawback to this, is that it has been purely chocolate, and I have not had the restraint to stop myself from EATING IT ALL.

Normally, I’m pretty good with eating. I guess I have my own sort of 5:2 diet (5 days of eating well, 2 days of having a bit of a pig-out with booze and pizza, but nothing too much to excess). On some weeks, it’s more of a 4:3. However, this week I have been inundated with chocolate, so it looks more like a 0:7 (or a 1:6 if I’m feeling generous).My problem is, I’m not very good at putting it aside for a rainy day. I’m very good at putting it in my mouth. And consequently it goes down into my digestive tract, and what little nutrients and a lot of fat are absorbed and deposited in all the wrong places on my body. Hence why I don’t buy chocolate for myself. When it gets given to me though, well, that’s another story.

Let’s start off on Sunday… I went on a 11 mile run, came back and have a nap, and then woke up craving chocolate. However, there was no chocolate to be found, so there was nothing I could do about it. So I just ate an apple instead and forgot about it.

However, on Monday… won a free bar of chocolate for knowing more about the kidneys than anyone else did in the class. I’m not talking about your standard Mars or snickers bar, but one of those Cadburys bubbly bars that contain 480kcal. “Well,” I thought to myself, “I was craving chocolate yesterday, and I still probably haven’t made up the calories from the run that I did, so what the hell?” I ate it in a couple of sittings throughout the day, only feeling a little bit bad about it.

However, on Wednesday, a very nice lady knocked on my door and gave me a box of chocolates to share with everyone in the house. They were like the Guylian chocolates, but a knock-off version which tasted pretty much exactly the same. I have a soft spot for Guylian or anything that is seashell shaped and tastes just like the real thing. (The seahorse ones are my favourite) So, over the next couple of days, I found myself thinking about the box of chocolates in the kitchen a little too much to be considered healthy, and kept picking at them until they were all gone. Of course my housemates helped, but I must have eaten at least half of the box. Now that’s pretty bad.
I was sad enough to calculate the additional kcal consumed by myself, through that period of a couple of days. It turned out to be 658. Oops.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means a calorie counter. This blog post is not an accurate representation of what I do on a day-to-day basis. However, when you’re eating foods that have calories on the side, presented to you in such a lovely way with bubbles and numbers etc. you can’t help but notice them. I normally eat a metric shit-tonne of vegetables on a daily basis, and don’t normally count the calories because there is very little to actually count! However, when it comes to the highly calorific chocolatey beast, I just can’t help myself but look in horror at what I am about to consume.

My lovely horse

Anyway, back to Friday. Today. Guylian-esque chocolates all gone. I am free. I think.
I have prepared myself both physically and mentally for a slap-up meal for my Grandad’s birthday, followed by hot chocolate fudge cake for dessert. With extra chocolate sauce. Brilliant. What I had not prepared for, however, was one of the belated Christmas presents from my family (yes, I know that it is near the end of February) being a chocolate orange. With popping candy. I am grateful, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t need this in my life right now. The most chocolate I normally consume on a daily basis is the amount that you find coating a couple of jaffa cakes, not a block of solidified chocolatey deliciousness.
I had a super-light noodle stir fry for dinner to compensate for the gluttony at luncheon, but when I return to my room, all I can hear is my chocolate orange calling out to me. I’ve already succumbed to 3 4 pieces. I would normally go for a run to undo some of the damage, however I am hard-pressed for free time until Sunday’s long run.
For now, I’m just going to have to hide it in the bathroom, or some other place equally unusual, until I forget about it and can gorge upon it on another rainy day.

There is actually not very much chocolate on them

I can already feel my lunch settling upon my thighs

What is my life.

Buzzfeed, why are you taking over my life?

We’ve all seen this before.

A friend (or acquaintance) on facebook has posted one of those annoying buzzfeed quizzes again. Why would I need to take a quiz (which will probably not give an accurate answer anyway, nor actually contain any options that I can fully relate to) to validate my life? And yet I find myself a few minutes later, despite the fact that I have spent many seconds of my precious time debating whether I should actually do the quiz, taking said quiz. I now know that if I were a food, I would be sushi, I should really belong back in the ’90s and I would be sent to the deepest depths of Dante’s ninth circle of hell. Nice.

Me. In food form.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love sushi. And yes, I would have loved to have actually been grown-up enough to enjoy the nineties (not saying that I didn’t enjoy them, just my memories of them are pretty hazy from being, you know, small). And Lord knows which circle of hell that I’m going to, it was all made up by Dante and I don’t think that it’s real anyway. However, why is my spare time being used like this? Shouldn’t I be doing something more productive in this time? (hah) Or at least pretending to? And to top it all off, who on earth is making all of these? Are they just being turned out by some quiz making machine?

Google describes Buzzfeed as a “social news and entertainment website”. On the front page today, we have eye-catching headlines such as “29 mind-blowing ways you can eat chips” (really?) and “21 sexy ways you can eat spam”.  There are many other equally fascinating stories, but I just happened to pick the two random ones that jumped out at me the most. (The fact that they’re food-related is completely coincidental. They’re not all food related.) As you scroll down the page, “quiz” and “omg” fill the corners of randomly selected article pictures, if you feel quizzically or “omg-ly” inclined. There are just so many articles shouting out at me that it hurts. Who on earth could look at this sort of thing all day? The ratio of pictures to text is far too inclined towards pictures for my personal taste, and it’s giving me a headache.

wat

I understand that it’s a way of getting quick, amusing “facts” that may impress your friends for all of, say, two seconds. However, the way that it presents itself as a headline-grabbing, picture/gif-orientated site brings into question the validity of some of those facts. And the fact that there are so many copycat sites around as well, pretty much imitating what this does. I am sick of clicking links on facebook to something that is either from buzzfeed, or from some buzzfeed-esque site. They must be making millions in ad revenue from people like me accidentally clicking on one of those links (having been linked by friends) thinking that I would be stumbling upon informative articles, but instead have to wait a good 10 minutes for a page full of gifs to load. Yeh, there are a lot of articles where many can say “I can relate to that!” However, is there a way to do it that isn’t so garish? Or stupid?

I don’t know about you, but I like my facts in a form that requires a little bit of mental input to process. I find it makes me remember them a bit more. Maybe if they did it in a way that requires a little more reading, requiring them to do a little more legwork behind their articles, it would appeal to me more.

Or maybe I should find some new friends on facebook. Hah.

tldr; buzzfeed articles are too stupid. But very clever for making money from this stupidity. This angers me. People are stupid

Neglect!

I must admit that I have neglected this here a bit too much lately, despite the fact that I started out with the best intentions to keep it up. I have just been going through a bad and busy phase of my life, so it feels like I haven’t had time to share anything on here. Well, I probably have had the time, I just didn’t feel up to it.

Along with that, a few other things have taken a slide. I don’t think I’ve been on a long run since mid-January, seeing as I have been going home most weekends to see friends and work things out, and carrying an extra pair of running shoes and set of clothes back was the last thing on my mind. However, I have had the most liberating run today (I don’t know why), but I guess familiar tunes and an unfamiliar route was great in helping me take my mind off things.

I think that it’s amazing (not really in a good sense) how your emotions can affect you so much. I am not condoning obsessive thought processes in any way whatsoever; it’s just crazy how thinking about things over and over again (and having no control over these thoughts) can completely debilitate you and alienate you from the rest of life. Yeh, you might go to the gym and do everything looking like you’re normal, but inside no one can see your inner anguish. Or maybe they can – it just depends on how well your face is good at hiding things (or giving it away). Trying to juggle that with concentrating on things is difficult, especially when you’re trying to learn something new that requires your full attention.

I’m not sure how close I am to making it through, but this week I have certainly been feeling more positive about things, following some blunt advice from a friend. Soon I will be back to focusing on the positives again, but maybe I should learn from this that the negatives do need a bit more attention from time to time, instead of ignoring them/bottling them up until they all explode at once.

 

Anyhoo, that’s all for now!

Oh, and I’ve found that intervals and weight training have been the best things for keeping my fitness ticking over during this rough patch. I want to come out at the end of 2014 faster and stronger than before 🙂