My first evening of fasting was possibly the most challenging part of the day. As it gets later in the day, my human brain gets sleepy and shuts down and hands over to the chimp part, Thatcher, to ‘drive’. This is why most of my poor eating decisions are made after 9pm at night when I’m back home. I can have been as holy as a nutritional guru all day – eating nothing but quinoa and raw veg salads and chia with avocado but when chimpy takes over for the evening, and someone else in my proximity says ‘Let’s get ice cream’, all those good efforts of the day usually go straight out the window and I go ‘Yeah yeah yeah’. Before I know it, I’m in a sugar coma with a chocolate moustache and wondering why I’m still a size 18 dress size. (disclaimer, I’ve been doing pretty well the last few months as I came to recognise this – solution: I try to go to bed early if I can to drug the chimp into submission before my human brain completely exits the picture). 
Somebody else’s dinner that I didn’t get to eat
So, as we got past our last meal of the day, the broth, and Nay warned me the evening would be hard because of the snack attack urges, we ummed and aahed about going for a walk, watching a DVD or just going to bed early to circumnavigate the hungry chimps in the building. As the yearning for cheese and biscuits with marmite (salty, fatty, crunchy things) grew stronger and stronger and I could feel Thatcher looking out behind my eyes, scouring the table tops and surfaces in Nay’s flat with her X ray vision for signs of food, I knew I needed to get to bed. Nay’s cravings were more saintly – she wanted apple slices with a Tahini dip. But then she’s been out here with these people for over a year now so she probably doesn’t even remember what cheese tastes like. So enforced bedtime it was, before either one of us dug up her courgette plants from the balcony and ate them, mud and all.
