My Next Challenge – Eat Mostly Food I’ve Grown Myself

Slightly overlapping with my 30 cafes in 30 days challenge, I’m starting up a new 28 day challenge, the overlap and slightly shorter duration is necessitated by the logistical impossibility of eating garden grown food while on holiday in London with Steph.  Since I’ve only just started growing my own food I need to be fairly lax in my definitions, so here are my rules for ‘food I’ve grown myself’:

1. Food that I’ve actually grown myself
2. Foods that I’ve foraged
3. Food that I am growing myself this year, but have not cropped yet, like apples, pears and potatoes
4. Food that I’m going to grow myself next year, but didn’t have space for this year, including cucumber and carrots

This means that I will mostly be eating:

1. Salad vegetables: tomatoes, cucumber, red and green lettuce, radish and tops, beetroot and tops, dandelions and edible flowers
2. Leafy greens: curly and royal kale, red and green cabbage, brussels sprouts and tops, runner beans
3. Tubers: carrot and potatoes
4. Berries: strawberries, cherries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries
5. Other fruits: apples and pears

This isn’t a complete balanced diet though so I will be supplementing it with some meat, fish, eggs.  I’m restricting myself to only ‘paleo’ or ‘whole’ foods and further restricting myself to a quantity less than the calories that I’ve burnt through walking, in practice this means about 400 calories a day, enough for a burger or a serving of bacon and eggs.

I’m also allowing myself the odd treat, the most important of which will be dark chocolate rice cakes, I like to eat one of these after each green smoothie (I find they really help with digestion).  So I’m allowing myself three of these a day, provided I ‘earn’ the calories that they contain by cycling.

On days when I do a lot of exercise I will need a little more to eat and this is likely to be a bowl of granola with nuts, seeds and coconut flakes, sweetened with half a dried pear.

This is going to be quite a challenge, especially following hot on the heals of eating out in a cafe every day, still it should be very healthy and will help me shed a few excess pounds in the process.

I’m writing this post in Caffe Nero in Hull, nestled into one of the excellent, single row of window seats that run along the whole length of the place.  I’ve just walked here along the bank of the Humber after starting the day at the country park cafe in Filey.