'D' day

I'm trying hard not to think of it as food deprivation, but yesterday's breakfast was the pits. I know there are probably plenty of people out there who make their porridge with water rather than milk, but I'm not one of them – or, at least, I never have been. And for good reason, I decided at about 8.30 yesterday morning. Although I'd jazzed it up (at the suggestion of The Food Doctor's Everyday Diet book, of which more later) with slices of green apple, a sprinkling of chopped almonds and a spoon of 0% fat Greek yoghurt, my bowl of porridge was depressing. Not only was the porridge pretty flavourless, the sharp, watery character of both the yoghurt and the apples seemed at odds with its texture. And don't even mention the way it looked. (Scrambled brains, springs to mind...) Not, I decided, an experiment to be repeated.

To make matters worse, a number of diet books recommend you remove coffee from your diet. It's not that I drink a lot of coffee – I don't – but I have really problems kick-starting my day without that initial hit of caffeine. I can function alright, but I find myself feeling a tad irritable and headachy (addicted, me?) – by the time I got to the supermarket in the afternoon, I found myself snapping at a man who'd lost control of his trolley and had driven it into the back of my legs and the woman with the screaming brats got very short shrift. Furthermore, Mark and I had been jonesing for a coffee machine for ages and, just before Christmas, we went out and bought a Nespresso cube thingy (I don't know if you've ever used one before, but they're magic – no mess or fuss with the grounds, just these neat little pods that you slip into the machine. The coffee itself isn't up to Bar Italia standards, but it's pretty darned good). So, there it was, our coffee machine, in all its pristine newness, winking at me from the kitchen worktop. Damn.

After the breakfast debacle, the food bit got easier. I snacked on the other half of the apple mid-morning, then lunched on a ladleful of leftover lentils (which I sprinkled with a bit of balsamic vinegar for added zip) and a slice of cold roast pork (from which I removed all the fat). My afternoon snack was a thin slice of multigrain bread with a smear of sugar-free peanut butter on it. So far, so OK. I didn't feel starvingly hungry – although planning my food is taking up a fair bit of time and energy. I'm hoping it will all become second nature over the course of the next few weeks.

Where I really let myself down was with the water. I know you're meant to drink a litre and a half to two litres of water every day, but I'm just not a big water drinker. Never have been. Besides – I don't want to have to keep running to the loo every half an hour. Still, most of the advice I've had so far is that I need to try and get through as much liquid as possible. Not sure why – I'll have to check it out and report back.

Dinner was, IMHO, a bit of a triumph. I got one of those packs of stir-fry veg from the supermarket (this particular one had spinach leaves, a bit of baby sweetcorn, strips of courgettes and spring onions) and jazzed it up with some ginger cut into matchsticks, sliced garlic, a sliced chilli and a couple of sticks of lemongrass. I stir-fried all this with some slices of chicken breast (the trick, I've found, is to separate out the veg that's going to take longest to cook and chuck them into the wok way ahead of the leaves and fast-cooking veg, otherwise you either end up with raw onions or very limp spinach), then moistened it with a bit of Chinese cooking wine and a sprinkling of fish sauce, then served it all on some brown rice. I suspect I'm going to be cooking a lot of Asian-inspired meals over the next few months as they tend to be low in fat and sugary carbs.