I blended all my food and ate mush for five days

“New year, new me” fever has seen Instagram positively overflowing with rank looking health juices and proud blender owners cradling their fat blitzers like new born children. 

So, after being inundated with promising hashtags and #TransformationTuesdays, I decided to commit to the blender life myself for a week during the revision period.

Yum

It wasn’t a difficult decision, I positively jumped at the chance at putting my Christmas present to use and dropping a few pounds. But, in hindsight, it wasn’t nearly as fun as social media might suggest and it’s fair to say I wasn’t prepared for the long mushy road ahead.

I’d never been on a diet before, and as the starting day approached, I became pretty anxious about my decision.

My friends were sick of hearing about it– even before it started.The day it did, every meal was blended and squeezed into a bottle which I was forced to take everywhere.

Someone said this ‘looked like baby sick’

I decided to make a blog to keep me on track. I mainly recorded what I ate every day and moaned a bit. It was a variety of drinks and mush, some were good, and some were really really bad.

The first day, I was full of life and vitality, and ready to go with some serious meals. By tea time on the first day I was starving, and continued to be starving until the next morning.

It soon became apparent that it was too time consuming to snack, because of the effort it took to blend everything. Snacking is about eating something quick and easy, and this was neither. Technically I could have bought a yoghurt, but I could hear the diet fanatics in my head cursing the high sugar content, and I knew I wanted to do this properly.

When my friend from home came to stay for the weekend, he was subjected to my constant complaints about the dieting.

We went out for lunch, and refusing to take the easy option and get soup, I ordered the same as my friend – potato wedges. Some would call it a cheat day, but I followed through with my blended promise and mushed them up with a fork.

Soldiering on

As I sat opposite him, watching him devour the bowl of fully formed wedges, I took my fork and set to working mushing them, it was essentially a mass wedge genocide. It was hard to do, and apparently even harder to watch – the staff were looking at me as if I was mad.

The main problem with the mush diet is that everything looks gross, no matter how it tastes.

Every day I had a new, more prominent craving – I was like a hormonal pregnant woman, shouting at my friends – “ALL I WANT IS PIZZA”, “ALL I WANT IS FAJITAS”, “ALL I WANT IS A BAGUETTE WITH A WHOLE BLOCK OF BUTTER”.

Some even deliberately taunted me, waving their carbohydrates in front of my face and savouring every last mouthful.

Please God

I stayed strong and kept going. I bought a bag of dried beans from the fruit and veg shop down the road. About to boil them, I Googled what you’re supposed to do with them, assuming they’re something you can’t really go wrong with.

You can, and it was not fine. I nearly poisoned myself. Turns out you have to soak them for 12 hours and then boil them for a further hour. Perturbed, I did as the instructions said, but they turned out grey. You wouldn’t have fed this to an animal and morale had hit an all time low.

Foul

When the day came and it was finally over, I wasn’t even that bothered about all that food I had been craving, I was just so, unbelievably glad to be able to pick up anything and actually be able to eat it, rather than having to enter into the long blending process.

Despite my complaints, I would probably recommend the mush diet. I became skinnier, probably from the lack of bread and amount of fruit and veg I consumed, and I stopped snacking as much because it was just far too much effort.

Plus when I’d finished, I wasn’t even bothered about eating unhealthy food again, I was just more than happy to be back on solids.