Just a quick note on the cost of eating as it has been mentioned. I am a student living with my gf, and previous to starting this diet we would eat our way through £50 of food from 1 weekly shop. I’m a bit tight, so this included little snacking and booze, mostly healthy meals cooked from raw ingredients (normal amounts of carbs, veg, protein), a few luxuries such as fruit juices, nice coffee, all good quality meat cuts. Everything cooked from scratch. Eating well I would say.

iDave has said this shouldn’t cost any more, and for most people what is typically spent on junk and processed food, this would be true, and it just costs more time to prepare. For us, our weekly food bill has gone up to around £60 (done twice now, so reliable), plus perhaps £10 top-up of fresh veg midweek. This has gone up because of more portions of meat, and I tend to buy quality meat. So with the increased frequency of eating meat (now at lunch and sometimes breakfast, where I would have had some pasta, or a sandwich), cost has increased. Carbs (dried pasta, potatoes, rice etc) are a cheap way of filling yourself up, and so replacing with meat is fairly expensive. I am going to try and bring cost down now by consuming more beans/protein to fill myself up, and buying cheaper meat (not worse quality though), such as buying whole chickens and filleting myself (2 chicken breasts at £3-4 when a whole corn fed free range is £5!!!)

Day off has gone quite well, missed ribena now that I have it, but during the week it didn’t bother me sticking to water. Lots of sweet things have been nice, but rather than craving them (which i expected) i’ve just been eating them purely because I am allowed.

RE tomatoes, I’ve been having them. Not sure about the technicalities of fitting in with the diet, pretty sure they have been discussed in other iDave threads (have a look for them as they have lots of good recipes) and suggested they are fine.

RE rice with curries, as has been mentioned, give the curry some substance with lentils/beans etc, and forget about the rice. Works quite well. If you must substitute it with something, try lots of cabbage.

I found ‘gram’ flour today, which is ground chickpea flour apparently. Not sure if that would fit with the aim of the plan. Chickpeas allowed, normal flour not, due to GI/sugar content, but also perhaps because in the processing of making it flour, you are reducing the complexity of the sugars making it easier for the body to digest, increasing the GI? If so does this make ground chickpea flour also high GI? If anybody has an answer to that I would be curious to know.

I got the button liner baggies last year. £12 for shorts and liner and I preferred the liner to the dhb ones from wiggle, so well worth it. Baggies not bad, comfy and durable material, button popped off (use belt now). Wish they were doing them again, I was going to buy a few for commuting in!

Review? Good bad points you’ve discovered so far? How is the rear hub.
(Trying my hardest not to buy something like this for commuting to my summer job)

If i remember correctly it was muted the cheat day helps to pick up things you may have reduced through the changed diet. For example without any milk, a typical calcium intake may be reduced, although there may be other foods which have plenty in. Perhaps some vitamins and minerals, although if you’re eating vegetables all the time on the diet then that shouldn’t be an issue. I would imagine the psych aspect is pretty important, it is to me anyway. mmm, ribena :)

You’ve set the bar high there iDave! I’ve got 2 slices of toast with my bramble jelly i made in the summer, a whole baguette with brie and bacon and boursin, washed down with a milkshake, then for dinner carbonara, followed by beers and mini-eggs from easter, and if I can stomach it, some of my mum’s cake. My stomach won’t know what hit it!

Day off tomorrow! I have quite the feast planned, I already know what all three meals are going to be, muchos nommagos. It does make it easier knowing you only have x days until that reward. And I hope hope everything will taste all the better for it too.

Leftovers for dinner tonight, all the extras from the week defrosted. Curry, chilli, and another curry with a big pile of cabbage/broccoli and carrot in the middle.

My parents used to use raisins with great success

Tarka Dal type curry for me tonight. Loads of red lentils, chicken, onion, garlic, tomatoes, garam massala, other spices (I just chucked stuff in without paying much attention frankly, any schwartz jars with an orange top are fair game for my curries!) served up with cabbage and a side of green lentils as my gf wasn’t sure about them. Blurdy loverly.

Just set up the wii with wii fit in my digs, so can track weight over a long period by weighing every day and it should give us a graph of weightloss (hopefully a bit of loss). Should be a bit more empirical than ‘oh I feel a bit better’. My weight is the lowest it has ever been since about 14, being 22 now, at 13 stone 3, so very happy with that considering I’m a fairly broad and strong person at 6”2′. Now aiming to reduce body fat on this diet a bit, and the gf is trying to do the same, but starting from a slightly less fit position.

Good breakfast ideas up above, stuck to mostly eggs/bacon so far, but will be looking to have more complex meals like proper bits of meat/vegetables. Not started on beans yet but they are to come in the next food shop this weekend.

Surely if some are maintaining their rate of weight loss then it can’t be purely water, otherwise they would be dehydrated and cease to exist? I don’t understand the mechanisms (engineering is much simpler!) but successive maintained weight loss suggests something more than water is being lost. It has been mentioned before that perhaps a reduction in starchy sugar rich high GI foot stuffs in your digestive system could reduce the amount of water contained in your digestive system, which isn’t hydrating you anyway.

For any nonsense in this post I apologise, alcohol in moderation is good but with my girlfriend only drinking one glass, it would be rude to not finish the bottle wouldn’t it? I’m sure *hic* that red wine goes off within 2 hours of opening :D

mmm, steak, dribble

On it as of yesterday morning. Very hard to be revising/working in my flat when it is still full of inadvisable food stuffs, and boredom is frequent.

85kg.
Not there yet.
Not there yet.
85kg.
100% so far. :lol:

Still not sure on how to do beans, I’ve tried cooking dried beans/split peas before and they always ended up rubbish, hard and tasteless. Bought tinned beans for now to try, and then will experiment with dried again when I go food shopping. I am liking the different meals though, having tuna steaks tonight then sirloin tomorrow, its all tasty stuff! Just lunchtimes not sure what to eat. Yesterday I had a tin of tuna.

Ditto. Trying to revise and do work for my exams etc, and really struggling. Anybody got any tips?

It didn’t claim to be spaceward bound anywhere, and there are planes in the video. Agreed with spooky re lens.

Yeah I’m feeling a little bruised as it is at the moment, and struggling to use my stomach muscles to lift my legs, lie down etc. sounds like it will be a while then :-(

oh how I wish:

Kodak ESP3250 here, very happy with it, both scanner and printing.

That is slightly outside the scope of what you can/would want to achieve from the digs of a london university! Although, it is fantastic. I’m assuming the hydraulic power is coming from a reservoir or pump on the tractor?

Water ram pump looks like a good one to try, and quite feasible. I wonder what you could do with the pressure head from a 4th story room. That potato cannon is an example of an inter-family competition we always have when meeting up. In the past we’ve had rockets, water rockets, spud guns, french bangers (destruction competition!), balloon power races etc etc.

Any more for any more?

Really tempted to post an image off the web here, but don’t want to ruin it for anybody who fancies putting the effort in and doing it properly.

What’s sourdough then? If it’s like yeast that sounds like a huge amount compared to flour!

I’m assuming you’re using a tin as those loaves look lovely and square! What size loaf tin for good sandwich sized bread?

Any oven temp tips? I normally whack it at full, then when the bread goes in turn it down to 200 odd.

He keeps slipping back to welsh!

Failing that stick it in the post and I’ll eat it on Tuesday :lol:

Do it. You spent time earning that 30p, don’t let it go to waste. And pies were made to protect the meat.

TJ with quite a statement there. Cycling has a lower head injury rate than walking? In some rare circumstances perhaps, but that’s quite an opinion there, and in the majority of circumstances I would suggest not true. As you regularly say, where is your evidence research and or statistics based upon this?

My opinion is pro choice, but kids (say under 15) must be made to, as they are not old enough to fully comprehend the risk and so make a proper judgement, as factors such as looking cool etc are more important than safety, which is a skewed decision method.

Bread always looks so different when you see other peoples. I made a basic dough yesterday with 1kg bread flour, dried yeast, water, salt, sugar and some olive oil. slightly ambitious trying to fit it into one bowl!

Which was divided into two, with one poppy seed normal loaf,

and one parmesan and onion loaf (Lush!)

Does anybody know how to make free form loafs stay taller? It’s risen nicely, with good air bubbles inside and is nice and light, but just not into a loaf shaped object really.

Original night of the living dead (1968?). Proper zombie classic.
Zombieland – pure funnies.
I am legend – quite liiked it myself, although not everyones cup of tea

Toothpaste. Might work? :D

£50 a year good value? Really?
I bought a hope vision 2 18 months ago for £150, I would hope it would last at least another 18 months!

Trout appears to be offering a DIY kit, not sure if you could add batteries/charger and get a unit for £150, but you might be able to? That’s where my money would be going probably.

If you want a complete unit, the spokeshirts as above? Supposed to be good service and a good product by the reviews on here.

Summary: right place, right time, several times, screwed up, and yet still managed to get away with it.

Met ‘misses right’ in freshers week. got drunk and walked her and her friend home. Didn’t see her until a couple of months later when mutual friends met up, and we got on really well. And then bollocked it up in a nightclub when I blew her off to see somebody else (drink a factor again). Rumours got around about that night which didn’t help. Thought ‘misses right’ wasn’t interested (man can’t read signs apparently), so proceeded to have a casual relationship with someone else as i was bored. News got back to ‘misses right’, and she was upset, asked my best mate about it, and he said words to the effect of ‘you’re better than him’. Which was correct. Then somebody else told me of her interest in me. That night went round and ended the casual relationship, and spent the next few weeks wooing the ‘misses right’.

After that a very messy break up from a pre university relationship and all the associated gubbins, with claims of me being a father, really shouldn’t have survived that. I’m rambling now

3 years, 1month, and 1 week later, we live in a flat on campus as I finish my degree, and she’s the best thing that’s happened to me. Absolute fluke that I’ve managed to keep hold of her, and I’m extremely grateful. Even if she doesn’t like bikes :)

Forks, no bike until I get my hands on them in April. Running has become boring now. :(

My internet browser cache was massive. Bearing in mind the on board memory isn’t that big, deleting it made a big difference.

completely agree. I’ve got a hardtail in my lounge, under the sofa so the uni inspectors don’t see it. Lovely bike, every time i ride it it reminds me how much fun it is (charge duster, 100mm rebas on front, 27 gears). Just its too nice to keep in the bike shed with all the apollos and shit that gets bashed about, so I only use it when going somewhere further afield which will benefit from suspension and gears.

My go to bike is my IO kept in the bike shed, doesn’t get cleaned, just maintained when necessary to keep the drivetrain running sweet, and is great fun on boring trails around here. Unfortunately my forks developed a crack, so its in bits in the flat for now, but hopefully receiving some on-one rigids tomorrow to get it all back together shortly, woo!

aw crap. back to first year of my degree to relearn everything. doh!

Honestly for the hassle I’d get a proper chain tensioner.

The reason they bend is you are supposed to tighten up the axle tight enough, so that no load is put on them when in use, they are there for alignment only. I found this out myself by bending the drive side one.

I replaced it with a surly tuggnut. Admittedly expensive, but it does then give you the biggest bottle opener in the world. And looks cool. And works really well, and actually allows you to tighten against it, as its a strong design (like any other chain tugg really, they’re clamped in place and hard to break I’d imagine).

jon1973 has it.

the checkback is:
if n=-11,
2(n)+4=(n)-7
2(-11)+4=(-11)-7
-22+4=-11-7
-18=-18

And the other part is trial and error, but its quite obvious looking at it that A and D can’t possibly be equal if n is the same in both.

Agreed, its a great album and all I’m listening to this week. Listened to their back catalogue before ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, and can’t believe they weren’t picked up earlier.

Its moving around slightly as if it were hand held though!

Here’s mine:

I thought of the origami boat too! But didn’t get round to it.

I agree, can’t actually tell from the outside alone without taking paint off. However, the balance of probabilities suggests because of it’s location that it’s the metal. If it were somewhere else then I would be stripping some paint off to investigate further.

Last night had half a packet of sainsburys basics custard creams dipped in a tin of custard. Is there any better way to eat them?

My gf is just going through the same thing. I think that because her last passport photo was when she was 15 or so, and she’s now 22, the 4th bulletpoint on this page: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Passports/Applicationinformation/DG_174151
must come in, as she looks quite different now as to 7 years ago. Ultimately getting it signed shouldn’t do any harm to the application, and you must know somebody who can sign it for free, so what’s there to lose?