Flashback: it’s 2010 and I’m sat in a Travelodge in Brighton trying to force down a packet of Hoola Hoops and a Muller Rice before I’m done for the evening. It’s 8pm and carb loading hasn’t been everything I’d hoped and dreamed it would be.

That was the eve before my first marathon. I’d been excited at the prospect of carb loading – while it seemed like the whole world was going low-carb, I would be demanding cakes, biscuits, bread, chips. I love eating and for three whole days anything that contained carbohydrates would not be safe from me. Mwah, ha ha!

But I soon discovered that eating is only fun when you’re hungry. When you’re not hungry and you know you need to find another 200 calories before bedtime, it becomes a somewhat sad affair: a bit like a date with someone who’s really attractive but just a little bit dumb and boring. You go through the motions but you’re heart isn’t really in it.

Today marks the start of Carbella 2011 and it didn’t get off to a good start – the local Tesco doesn’t stock Jaffa Cakes. Maybe they couldn’t decide whether they should sit with the cakes or the biscuits and gave up (obviously cakes). But that isn’t going to help me meet my 900 extra calories that I’m reliably informed I need to eat.

To make this an even more impossible task, I’m taking a photo of everything I eat this week, so you can live follow my carb loading, if you so wish and you have nothing better to do, on Flickr . So far I’ve been eating a lot of circular food. Suggestions of triangular and square high-carb foods welcome.