The art of guestimation

Well hello. This post comes to you from the 9.29 train out of York as I head back to my second week of training in the wilds of Lincolnshire.

Last week I determined to try and guestimate the points in all the canteen meals I was eating. After all, if these periods away are to become more and more of a regular thing I need to have some kind of strategy beyond chomping through two three course meals a day in a sort of glazed eye stupor.

The perfectionist in me (there is one lurking if you look hard enough) hates this. She does not approve of guessing. It is she who makes me weigh out pasta every time I cook it. But hey, it is also she who comes up with the kind of fuzzy logic that dictates that if you go out for lunch you may as well eat five rounds of cheese on toast for dinner because the day has already been blown. So we don't want to listen to her too much.

What was interesting about the process was how it was entirely possible to eat pretty much anything on offer just not everything and not all of the time. Over the Monday to Thursday period, I reckon I consumed all my dailies and around 18 weeklies (out of a possible 49). It helps that I am not much of a breakfast eater during the week, so a piece of fruit and possibly a biscuit was all I was having, leaving plenty of points for later in the day. But still, I ate pizza for lunch one day, and sticky toffee pudding after dinner one night...but it was a single slice of pizza with lots of salad, and it was a small portion of pudding as a one off treat.

Actually, the real problem arose when I got home; I was completely sick of sitting down to cooked meals and so Saturday and Sunday night saw us indulging in a nibble fest of bread, cheese, olives and pate.


Note to self - nibble fests are not easy to count unless you are strong enough to weigh out a single plateful (and where was Miss Perfectionist when I needed her, hey? Helpless in the face of cheese??)

But still, the scales inform me that after a week away from home and a weekend of glorious nibbling my weight has remained the same. That's not bad. This week my plan is to employ the same guestimation techniques foodwise, to try and avoid the pre dinner glass of wine in the bar (175mls will set you back 4 points), and to be a bit more careful at the weekend. Which probably means steering clear of the deli counter.

The above selection comes from
the wonderful Henshelwoods Deli by the way, a York institution and quite rightly so.

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