(Literally) Cooking with gas

As my 24th birthday approaches (although according to the latest issue of Competitor I've already reached that age!) I was desperately trying to think of a blog post. Having nothing to note in training (weights make my muscles hurt, I'm still not a very good swimmer etc, etc...) I got thinking about what I do with the time I'm not training, eating or sleeping. Whilst this is a very small segment of my life most of the time I have spare is taken up with cooking. One thing I have really enjoyed about having a bit more free time is that I have been able to really improve my culinary repertoire, as well as being able to experiment a little more. This got me thinking about how my diet has changed over the last few years of my life and I was able to break it down into four distinct periods:

1. High Fat/Low Clue - this involved me having 2 meals before 8am, usually Frosties with full cream milk and then a full breakfast sandwich on the way to school. A full breakfast sandwich is exactly what it sounds like, bacon, egg, sausage, mushroom, cheese and extra grease. Lunch was often a battered sausage and chip butty (at a recession busting £1) and each day usually featured at least a pack of fig rolls. (AKA the moob diet.)

2. Low fat/Low Clue - in an attempt to lose weight I simply tried to cut out all fat. I must have been eating less than 10g of fat a day and all I ate was low fat food. Like many people I assumed this was the best way to be healthy not realising that many low fat/"healthy" foods contain a multitude of additives and artificial ingredients to keep the fat down. Equally, I was blissfully ignorant of the importance of good fats. I lost weight but felt like crap.

3. Uber-carb - When I arrived at University my rowing coach gave me various nuggets of advice, some were gold nuggets like HTFU (first time I'd heard this) others were nuggets of a different kind like "you cannot eat too much". This is a lie, you can and I did, moreover it was mostly made up of carbs. Here's a "You are What you Eat" style break down of a typical day:

• 3-5 XL malt loaves
• 8-12 Weetabix
• Pasta and Pesto
• 4+ Sandwiches
• All you can eat ride pudding
• Pasta bonding, an all you can eat pasta buffet which usually culminated in someone being sick.

It now seems odd that we didn't see the flaw in eating literally thousands of calories in our pre-race carbo loading when the race lasted, at most 6 minutes. I sincerely apologise to anyone who used a toilet after me during this 3 year period.

4. Variety is the spice of life - my current philosophy is that, in moderation, most things are OK. I try to keep all foods that have been processed at a minimum and usually read ingredients and avoid buying something if I couldn't make it myself. I do a lot more of my own cooking so I know exactly what is in things and look to hit 10+ servings of fruit everyday. At this stage in the game (pre-Xmas) my diet is far from perfect, but in January I will become strict on my diet and stick with the "help or harm" philosophy: if it isn't going to make me faster, it ain't goin' in my stomach.

To break up this text heavy blog, here are a few of the meals I have enjoyed creating in the recent weeks.

YUMMY!