Cutlery

It’s nice to have a goal – it keeps you feeling productive, and even if you’re not really making progress towards reaching it, at least you can tell yourself you’re trying, so it’s pleasing for all us mid-achievers out there. For me, it’s exercise – I’ve flirted with getting fit in between pregnancies and newborns for four years now. The unfortunate thing is, as soon as I hit a goal I have been studiously working towards – running 5K for example – I quickly lose interest in ever doing it again. I was delighted when I got pregnant with Dory, as I was about to hit 10k on my runs, and subsequently get bored, so it let me have a breather from pushing it. So handy, these babies. I enjoyed starting from the beginning again after Dory. And after Pearl. And so it goes . .

With my fitness goal, it unfortunately had to include other things – like not stuffing your face. You’d think there’d be nothing to put you off inhaling Nutella as much as knowing you’d have to run for six hours to burn it off, but it doesn’t really faze me, unfortunately. I’m hard like that. What does work, though, until you accidentally ‘forget’ to update it, is the FitnessPal app, which works like WeightWatchers I suppose in that you must input everything you eat. I don’t do it to count calories, but more to make me stop and think before I roam around the kitchen, grabbing a handful of cereal here, a fistful of praline chocolate truffles there (please stop buying these Mundane Daddy!).

Not that it’s put a stop to me taking the kids leftovers into the kitchen and shout that I’m clearing up, I’ll be one minute, through a mouth crammed full of cold beans / spat out fish fingers / potatoes mixed with Petit Filous. I know me, and I am self-aware enough to accept this abhorrent and disgusting behaviour will never end. It just won’t. However, because I also can’t lie to myself, it now means I crouch over said leftovers desperately searching for some description in my FitnessPal app that even vaguely corresponds to what I’ve just done, usually while still chewing it. It takes too long to input the whole abominable truth one by one (a smidgen of rice, one and a half bites of a sausage, a tiny bit of malt loaf that was rejected as it has gone hard) so I’ve created a category just for times like these. It now means any parent, who is disgusting enough to shove their face with food the dog won’t eat, but honest enough to tell their app/mate all about it, can do so in seconds. Just search ‘Kids leftovers’ – oh, and ignore the breezily optimistic 250 calories I assigned to it.If you’re feeling really honest, you can up your portion sizes to increase them. But since I still haven’t recovored from the one time I increased it by three and hit a shocking 750, I tend to leave it a delicate one. Honest, yes. Martyr? No. And as always, when it comes to anything parenting related – ignorance is bliss.