Five a Week

I think I could be on the verge of a massive health breakthrough. Since September – and starting my new job – I have been attending college twice a week. Each visit to college involved walking through town; which added up to walking through town a minimum of four times during the week, but often more due to going home and back again for lunch.

A combination of factors has made this journeying detrimental to my health:


1. One of these days was a Tuesday. Tuesday is market day, so there is food everywhere, especially on the bakery stall where you can find the biggest slabs of carrot cake and cookies the size of dinner plates for just 75p!


2. Coffee breaks. At work I have one coffee break a day – two in exceptional circumstances – and I don’t even normally drink coffee because there’s sparkling water on tap in the canteen so I drink that and feel posh AND healthy. On my college days however, a lot of coffee was consumed on those passing through town times, mainly due to friends working in town enticing me with offers of caffeine and cake.


3. End of journey food. Maybe this one is just me, but I often feel the need for a little bit of snacking after a journey, be it running, walking or cycling. With all the to and fro, this added up to a lot of extra – and mostly entirely unnecessary – snacking.


4. Route deviation. Why I do this is completely unfathomable. Whilst I pretend I’m walking a marginally longer way for “extra calories” what I am actually doing is completely torturing myself by walking past all my favourite places such as the Truly Scrumptious Fudge shop, Reeves the Baker, Hotel Chocolat and the plethora of patisseries that line the streets of Salisbury.


5. The Supermarket. Everyone knows that the supermarket is my biggest foe, I can spend hours wandering the aisles, perusing every manner of foodstuff and comparing the saturated fat content of own-brand Jaffa Cakes versus the real thing. I also think it’s some kind of blasphemy to enter the supermarket and leave empty-handed, so these twice-weekly visits often resulted in the purchasing of more unnecessary food.


On the other hand, my days at work tend to be far healthier as I make the most of the aforementioned sparkling water and try to wow my colleagues with my highly imaginative salad lunches. Additionally I never bring money to work so no matter how much I want a KitKat Chunky at 2pm, it’s not going to happen. Food intake is a much more controlled process when I’m not close to shops, supermarkets or my own kitchen.


So as college has now finished and I am in work for a whole five days a week, that makes for a vastly increased percentage weekly time of healthier choices made. In fact, I had to go shopping last night as I hadn’t had any other time to go and because I was on a tighter schedule this meant I went in and just got what I needed with no extra ogling of cheesecakes or checking out what biscuits are on offer.


I do have a confession though. Even with what could have potentially been a PB for a supermarket shop, I still found time to have a quick glance in the bakery section and found that Finest Triple Chocolate Cookies were on offer. I did buy them (one bag, not all of them), but I also managed to only eat one on the way home, whereas usually I would have polished off the whole bag by the time I get to the end of my road. Success!