Loadin’ up and takin’ off

Diary of a Home Bird
Ciara Galvin

AS you read this I’ll be making my way back to Irish shores from Dubai, hopefully tanned, and no doubt a stone heavier.
You have to go all out when you’re on your holidays, don’t you? Eat to your heart’s content, abandon physical exercise and just chill out. Usually though, in preparation for this, one does the hard slog of shedding those extra few pounds, using said ‘physical exercise’ and by curtailing your eating.  
Me though? Nah. Why bother? (Currently munching on chocolate biscuit cake from The Mayo News canteen as I type this). Of course I’m not blaming the lack of discipline on myself though. No, I blame my family and friends.
For one, living with your parents is not conducive to losing weight. I effectively have squatters’ rights, so I’m pretty much stealing out of their fridge, and when the female roomie is doing the shop I think it would be a little cheeky to demand Greek yoghurt and sweet potatoes as extras to her list. Plus, when you get the daily text of what’s on the menu for that evening, you definitely don’t reply with ‘Is that Paleo friendly?’.
There’s so much temptation around the homestead. A month or so before of my trip to Dubai, I came home with a trolley load of clean goodness. And what did I come home to? A big Victoria sponge the roomies had picked up earlier that day in Galway.
If ever there was a situation that exemplified the devil and angel on one’s shoulders, it was this. The male roomie had cut off a slice the size of Leitrim, and the remaining mound was screaming, ‘Eat me! Who even wants a beach body?’.
You’ll be glad to hear that I resisted temptation and cooked up a healthy salmon salad, but I must say that was probably the only time since I actually booked the holiday that I made the healthy choice.
Six weeks out from having to show my marshmallow-like physique to beach goers in Dubai I was determined to tone up. Alas, each week would start the same: a purchase of green tea and avocados, swiftly followed by a binge of carbs. Basically, I’ve been carb loading, chocolate loading, gin loading. You got a condiment or an unhealthy pastry to load? I’ll load it.
As the days ticked by I scrambled to kickstart an exercise regime. I downloaded a running app, and ran twice, of course expecting toned abs to miraculously appear. Everyday since then a message shines up on my screen from the app: ‘Do you time to run’. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact I downloaded a running app and used it twice in six weeks, or the fact that I downloaded an app that can’t structure proper sentences.
Like any athlete in training, I’ve really taken to increasing my calorie intake. In fact, two weeks ago, having feasted at an Italian restaurant with one of my travel companions, we decided to pop into a Mexican restaurant on the way home (two hours later) for something ‘snacky’. The walk to the car was a struggle.
Kate Moss once famously said, ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’, but my question for Mossy would be, ‘Have you ever had a curry cheese chips after a feed of beer?’.

In her fortnightly Diary of a Home Bird column, Ciara Galvin reveals the trials and tribulations of a twenty-something year old trying to get used to living away from her parents.