Oil Power

Early on in this diet as I was experimenting with different foods, I took the lead from the Fast 800 book.  The recipes quite reasonably are for low-calorie attempts to duplicate pre-diet meals.  Typically, there'll be a trace of high calorie foods.  I tried putting together similar meals myself, until I realised just how high in energy some foods were.  Cheese - especially hard mature cheeses - are often over 400 kcals per 100g.  But they're very flavoursome so I tended to add a little to many meals.  I entirely dispensed with butter.  I would occasionally add nuts - but with energies approaching 700 kcal/100g I could throw in only a few!

But the biggest shock that I avoided entirely, even though it contributes so well to salads, taste-wise: oil.  At nearly 900 kcal/100g olive oil had to be rejected entierly.  Better to add greater quantities of meat or cheese.

But, the astoundingly high energy oil contains gave me an idea.  

In theory, I could sustain myself at my restricted daily energy on just a few millilitres of oil.  I decided that for one of the days of my diet I would do just that.  I would need about 1/2 a cup at lunch then 1/2 cup at dinner time - and that would be it.

So, when I left France via an airport with a specialty French food shop that sold white-truffle infused olive oil I bought a small bottle - 100ml.  That was about 140g.  The energy content was 894 kcal.  Therefore I needed just 39ml twice to satisfy my 700 kcal daily energy.

You could run a car on it

39g: that's a small 1/2 glass

So I measured it out.  I got some sea-salt and multi-grain pepper to add a bit of extra taste.  I took a spoon to help progressively savour the experience.

It didn't take many spoon-fulls to get through a half glass.  The raw oil (well - with white truffles!) is quite okay in fact to actually drink neat.  A little salt and pepper is good.

After the "meal" of course I didn't have any sense of fullness.  However, I did feel sated similarly to the sense following other meals.  Before I'd felt the need to eat - afterwards I didn't.  The sense of the ingestion of the oil had communicated to my body and brain the level of energy I'd consumed somehow.

When it came to the evening, I was not hungrier than prior to previous evening food.  Of course, why would I be?  I'd consumed the same energy.

After a night sleep the largest difference between my "oil diet" and the previous days has been: dehydration.  This has been a feature of the diet overall - this oil only day has increased that.  On waking I had a slight headache and cramp.  So I drank a litre of water.  It would seem that the additional water consumption in my body is in excess of what would be expected just from the reduced water content of the "food" (i.e. the olive oil).  But I can solve that by drinking water.