I know this refers to a variety of pea but I was reflecting on apples. For years I have been in the habit of eating all but the stalk of pears but leaving a core with apples. There was no particular logic; it was just what I did.

However, I have recently been watching my calorie intake a bit. Technically I have been using what has been called the 5:2 diet, where you eat fairly normally (as long as that isn’t too far off the recommended daily levels) and then drop to a much lower intake on two separate days of the week. For men the nominal targets are 2,500 kcal / 600 kcal and for women they 2,000 kcal / 500 kcal. In practise, it has turned into more of a 6:1 approach but I have also been careful not to overeat on the other days and have successfully dropped the best part of a stone over the past couple of months.

It does mean that I am even less inclined to waste food than before and so I have found myself consuming whole apples, greedily crunching down to the pips. I am safely back in the right section of the BMI chart rather than bordering on overweight although my aim is to keep going gently down until I am a little below the halfway point of the healthy category (allowing some leeway for the odd celebration or two). I think I will definitely keep up eating whole apples and also enjoying other ways of savouring every morsel of controlled amounts of food rather than less carefully gorging on larger quantities.