Days 6 and 7

At this point, realizing that the diet was nearly over I actually ate very little. I cooked scrambled eggs with bacon bits and spinach (both explained sufficiently earlier) on Day 6.

On Day 7 I just did another roast, this time with a gammon joint. I found that if I made the baking area of the joint smaller, (in this case by making a small foil tray) I could turn parsnips, potatoes and carrots halfway through cooking and thus have lovely fried vegetables. It would have worked better with a normal joint though, as the gammon juices were extremely salty.

That evening, having reasoned that as I finished eating at 10pm the previous week, I could start eating normally again at 11pm. I did this with great gusto, consuming a third of a pizza and half a bag of popcorn in short order. 

Fife diet, aftermath

So, I'm no longer on the diet. It feels strange to have culinary freedom again.

So my thoughts on the diet:

The Fife diet had several glaring holes in it, sugar of some form was necessary, and butter, milk and bread would have been incredibly useful. Maybe you can get these from Fife, but it sure ain't easy. Also I think it would have been a lot nicer if we had allowed ourselves spices (as I believe the originator of the diet does).

The beer and wine situation was frankly a bit odd. Drinks made outside Fifeshire, like Fraoch (Alloa) and Cairn o' Mohr (Perthshire) are on it, but other drinks made in similar places such as Carlsberg and Smirnoff (both Alloa) are not, despite both being equally organic* (i.e. they're not) and none of them actually being sourced from Fife. I appreciate that the first two go along with the spirit of supporting local producers, but then local people work in the Carlsberg factory, too.

What these restrictions meant was that anything I drank had to be very expensive, and had to have a Ye Olde Scottish feel, which got annoying after a while. Can't I also drink some nice ale locally sourced from Yorkshire, or at least anywhere in Scotland if we're going to bend the rules like that? It'd be cheaper, and less dull.

There were definite up-sides to the diet. Although restrictive, I didn't find I missed my normal diet of takeaways and crap beer at all. The Fife diet was bland, and I started to really hate some aspects of it (the bloody potatoes), but the food wasn't crap, as I find many of the cheaper takeaway options are. I started to feel healthier, drank less, and didn't snack, except on oatcakes. I also found that the lack of strong flavour made me feel less like gorging myself on the stuff when I came home after a few beers. The diet really focussed on content over flavour, which is the opposite of what I normally eat.

So, that's all. I don't think I'll be staying on the Fife diet, but maybe I'll start shopping for more locally sourced stuff, (but not potatoes, for a while at least).



*Thanks akicif for that lead