Patagonia

Although I’d be lying if I told you that that’s how I came up with the idea, as if I’d slept on my back and opened my eyes to a perfectly formed idea written on the ceiling in lipstick, size 50 font. I say lipstick as it’s about the only thing Helen manages to keep in a safe given how lucrative such an item is to our resident four-year old and her two-year old nemesis. It sure as hell wasn’t written in pen or Texta because such implements evaporate within moments of being bought into the house.

I’ve been tinkering with food experiments for a few years now, likely because of my age, 43, where midlife is close enough to smell its breath. Like other 40-somethings who think, gee, how do I maximise this body for another round of doing whatever the hell I want, before it’s too late, I decided to embark on something critical. I can no longer, for example, just eat what’s in front of me, which for a long time was all I did, then run into town to go for another run with a friend.

Based on the Internet, it seems I have two midlife options: food or ice baths. I would note at this point, a good chunk of you readers might suggest religion, stretching, a red car, hot yoga, or an affair, which would certainly shake up my day to day, but given the size of our fridge (a caravan fridge) an aversion to my listed things, and being happily married, I choose food. In this instance, I’m salivating over the size, potential, weight and one-ness of the pumpkin.

Pumpkin, unlike other foods, has no identity issues; thick skinned, plus-sized, flagrant with the use of orange, and happy to sit under the kitchen sink for a few seasons without a care in the world. And unlike other food staples that are actually a collection of many, like the mob-mentality of grains, pumpkin is one entity.

I actually kicked off my food change-up enterprise a few years ago with beans – tinned beans – for 40 days. One-hundred-and-ninety-one tins at an average of 4.75 tins a day, totalling around 85,000 actual legumes. My task was to keep eating one thing until I’d consumed the equivalent of my bodyweight, therefore infusing beans with every cell of my body. I’m not sure of the science here, but that was my thinking. In much the same way Forest leaked when he needed to leak and ate when he was hungry, I was shocked at how easy life was when you take out choices related to food. Much can be said about the remarkable nature of food on our day to day, which we all know, but I felt it was a relatively abstract stream of knowledge unless I went all in, beans or bust, keeping it simple. I’d elaborate on my eating of only beans but my film The Human Bean does a much better job.

So here I am, at the start line of another calorie deficient, lopsided, scientifically flawed experiment where I set off with the idea of being clubbed over the head with some kind of insight into how my body and mind work, based on what I feed it. This, my moral comrades, is what happened when I set off with a friend’s blue bike loaded up with one giant piece of fruit, a 1960s picnic set, and a spare pair of undies*.

*This is untrue.