Write about anything you’d like.  Somewhere in your post, include the sentence, “I heard the car door slam, and immediately looked at the clock.”

At the weekends I often take little B around to see my parents. This is good for two main reasons; they get to spend time with their grandson and I get a few precious moments of peace and quiet! They’ll play games, feed him chocolate biscuits despite my protestations and generally keep him entertained while I get to drink a cup of tea and read a magazine.

I don’t often really pay much attention to what I read in my mum’s magazines, but yesterday was different. I was reading an article about a woman who’d tried every diet under the sun in an attempt to lose weight but she hadn’t lost any until she started training to be a nutritionist. She started to notice when she ate particular foods, especially the sugar laden ones. This really struck a chord with me. In school staff rooms up and down the country there are teachers who get to break time and think ‘ooooh, that class were hard work, I’ll just have a biscuit before I face the next lot’. This then gets repeated at lunchtime and at the end of the day when you’re thinking ‘I’ll just have a biscuit before I start my marking’. Just having ‘one’ at odd times of the day adds up to be quite a few by the end of the week and, because everyone else is doing it, you do the same. I then started to think about all the bits of food I pick at as I prepare meals or once I start working again in the evenings and it really begins to add up and it’s all empty calories. It’s not as if I’m in a job that’s physically demanding. Emotionally and mentally demanding yes, and I think it’s the former that drives me towards to comfort food; the ‘rewards’ for getting through another tough day.

So I’ve made a decision. I’m going to record what I eat. The time, place and what I was doing. I’m not going to record it here mainly because that would be dull for anyone reading this and it would be a bit too Bridget Jones for my liking! I made the decision that I would start afresh in the morning and keep the record in my memo section on my phone (as it’s generally within fairly easy reach throughout the day).

I think I’ll find that, although I menu plan so the main course of our evening meal is always recorded, I will scare myself by how much other stuff I eat and hopefully find myself making more conscious decisions about what I eat.

After a horrendous night with little B last night; I heard a car door slam outside and immediately looked at the clock and was thankful that he’d let us sleep in until 8am. Can’t use the ‘I’ve had for hours of sleep, I need something to keep me going’ excuse today!