I love junk TV. It’s been too long since I watched Gillian Mckeith making some morbidly obese person cry or Dr Christian introducing two people with polar opposite eating disorders to each other and making them swap diets. My favourite part of these types of show is when some minimum wage researcher is dispatched to the local Budgens to buy all the food that these people eat in a week and arrange it on a table or in a plastic tube. It always makes me wonder.
But wonder no more. As you’ve no doubt seen on yesterday’s post – I decided to spend a week taking a photo of everything I ate and drank (except water) for a whole week and assemble the resulting JPEGs on my own virtual table.
What did I learn from keeping a photo food diary last week? Well, firstly that remembering to take a picture of everything you eat before you shuv it in your face is a right pain in the ass. There were a couple of occasions when it was easier to not eat a biscuit than to get my phone out to take a picture of it first. Notably, in a meeting at work – I didn’t want to be labelled the office loon for taking a photo of a custard cream.
You may recall I went to a VIP post-race reception last week (that’s the two bottles of Peroni and the glass of Pimms). I weighed up the effort vs return of having to take a picture of every canapé before I ate it – but luckily for me they were serving the best types of canapés: a bowl of chicken curry with a spoon and nann bread. Result. So I only had to sneak off to the corner for a discreet picture twice.

But also I learnt:
1) I ate out a lot last week.
2) I drink a lot of tea.
3) I ate Thai fishcakes twice without noticing.
4) I don’t snack much.
5) I’ve been lying to most medical professionals when they ask me how many units of alcohol I drink a week.
6) I don’t eat much fruit.

Obviously all Earth-shattering discoveries. But I did buy some grapes this morning as a result.