I’ve taken an unplanned break from my monthly challenge (of eating no meat) today. I’m reluctant to break a successful streak, but when it comes to playing with your diet there are always going to be health concerns to keep in mind.

This morning I took the tube to work during rush hour. Usually I’m in late enough in the morning to miss the biggest part of the rush, but on Thursdays I play football before work so I end up on a packed tube with all of the other commuters.

I’ve just started listening to the audiobook of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Haunted”, which is a collection of short stories or a dark and horrific nature. The part I was listening to today was particularly disturbing, to the extent that I won’t even try to give you the gist of it. I started to feel nauseous. At the time I attributed this to the writing being especially evocative, but in retrospect I’m pretty sure it was just a coincidence. This was somewhere between Camden Town and Euston. I switched off the audiobook in favour of some less disturbing music and decided to take a few minutes at Euston to get some air before I switched to the Victoria line to continue my journey.

(Scene missing)

Then I woke up on the floor of a tube carriage with a crowd of people looking over me. Well I can tell you that’s one heck of a disorienting experience. I’ve complained before about Londoners’ ability to ignore each other, especially on the tube, but I take it all back. If you ever want to interact with your fellow Londoners, passing out in front of them is an effective way to get some attention.

I don’t know for sure what caused my impromptu nap. Maybe the book really was that gross. Maybe I’m coming down with something. My guess is it was a lack of blood sugar, or a lack of iron.

I skipped breakfast at home this morning so I could get some more sleep. That’s not at all unusual for me, but since I’ve given up meat I’ve found myself much less able to go for long periods without eating than I normally can. Note to self: no more skipping meals. Lack of iron would be pretty easily explained: it’s hard to avoid iron in meaty foods, but easy to miss otherwise.

I bought a few cookies from a cookie stand in Euston to give my blood sugar a kick, and then took a bus the rest of the way to work to avoid being in a crowded, poorly ventilated tube. I got in in time to get a cooked breakfast, so I had a pile of bacon and sausages and scrambled egg. I’ve been drinking cans of Coke all morning too, as that’s what they give you after you donate blood to stop you from fainting. I’ll get some steak for dinner today just to make completely sure I’ve replaced all the missing nutrients.

Once I feel completely sure I’ve addressed everything that’s wrong, I’ll restart the challenge, with a new awareness of the importance of certain nutrients, and a hard-and-fast no skipping meals rule.

Yesterday I talked about how my monthly challenge for January—giving up alcohol—had gone. I finished by saying that, “next month will have a much tougher challenge.” Now that a day has passed, that “next month” is this month, and the tougher challenge has begun: I have given up eating meat.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from talking about this with friends and colleagues it’s that everyone is sure they know exactly what that means, but many people are wrong. So here are some clarifications:

• Poultry is meat.
• Fish (including shellfish) is meat.
• So are insects, although giving up eating those won’t be a stretch.
• Eggs are not meat.
• Gelatine is not meat.

Those last two are important. I’ve deliberately stated this challenge as not eating meat, as distinct from going vegetarian. I don’t want to spend a month reading ingredients lists looking for gotchas. I just want to push myself into exploring new food options by denying myself the ones I usually tend towards.

One day in, I’m feeling optimistic. There’s a risk in the first days of the month that I’ll forget about the challenge while on auto-pilot at the cafés in work, but if I manage to pay enough attention to stop myself grabbing some meat out of sheer habit I think I’ll manage with this one just fine.

It’s the last day of January and as such it’s the last day of my self-imposed prohibition. At midnight tonight I’ll be “allowed” to drink alcohol again. It’s been an interesting month for me.

The first week or two could nearly have convinced me that the universe was trying to tempt me to failure. I had more impromptu pub outings in the first week of this month than I would expect in a whole month usually. Someone new joins the team at work? Let’s welcome him by going to the pub. Feeling a bit of January blues? Let’s have some fun down the pub. Got half and hour to kill? Pub. (OK, maybe not quite that bad.)

Initially I tried to keep a rough count of the number of drinks I would have had had I been drinking. By the 10th day the total was worryingly high, averaging more than two drinks a day. To be fair to myself this was almost certainly an over-estimate. One night of heavy drinking is rarely followed by another, but a healthy person can withstand several nights of heavy non-drinking in a row.

Things have calmed down in the weeks since. I’ve mostly been not drinking wine at home, with the occassional non-glass of wine at a restaurant at the weekend. It has certainly made dining out a little more affordable.

In the first weeks I lost a bit of weight. By midway through the month I’d dropped all of the weight I gained over Christmas and in the weeks leading up to it. About 4kg in total. I’ve hovered around that same weight in the last couple of weeks though, which probably means that I took the drop in calories due to not drinking as an excuse to over-indulge in other things.

I didn’t struggle with this challenge. Even while sitting in a pub surrounded by people drinking it took very little for me to stick to my resolve and order a Coke. That’s notably different from how I felt about giving up caffeine for a month last summer, which was a struggle some of the time.

I have to own up though: I did have two slight infractions this month. The first was early on when visiting friends for dinner. Everyone else was drinking Champagne cocktails, so I was drinking my fruit juice from a flute to join in. Two of the glasses got mixed up and I took a small sip of what I thought was my drink before the taste gave away its true identity.

The second infraction was in Gerry’s Wine and Spirits, the finest liquor store in all of London, where we went last Saturday to restock some of our cocktail ingredients. They had, as they often do, a promotional stand offering tastings of one of their drinks. In this case it was a vodka. Since I was shopping rather than at a pub or restaurant I wasn’t expecting to be offered a drink. My guard was down. I took a sip of the vodka before I realized what I had done.

Between those two errors I must have consumed about a tenth of a unit of alcohol. Somewhat less than my usual monthly intake, I reckon.

So, not too difficult a challenge in all. I flexed my willpower a bit, but not to extremes. I lost some weight, but countered that effect through extra snacking. I saved some money, but was forced to eat Italian food with no red wine accompaniment. Most importantly, I started my year of monthly resolutions with a success. Next month will have a much tougher challenge.

Another year, another attempt to reinvigorate my blogging.

Even by my standards I’ve managed to produce an impressively long list of resolutions for this year. I know this is against the best advice of those who study the factors that allow us to keep our resolutions. But this time around I’ve decided to try to give myself the best chance of succeeding by just making so many resolutions that I’m bound to live up to one of them, if only by accident. There’s also the significant factor that I’ve had quite a bit of time off this last week, and so I’ve had all the time in the world to think of things it would be nice to try to do in 2012.

Besides, a half hour into the year it’s going quite well so far, so I may as well be optimistic about the rest of it.

A resolution that I expect to be among the most interesting to try to keep is one that I actually started on during 2011. It is to create a shorter-term resolution for each of the 12 months of the year. This is a slight variation on Matt Cutts’s 30-day challenges. I’ve changed it from 30-day periods to using calendar months mostly so that I can do something a little more daunting in February and only have to keep it up for 29 days (the leap year has unfortunately halved the effectiveness of this scheme).

But that’s a month away. I’d be getting ahead of myself if I revealed already what I hope to do then.

January, on the other hand, is literally on top of us. This month’s challenge is an echo of one I completed in June last year. Back then I went 30 days without caffeine. This time around it’s going to be alcohol. I expect to face a bit of skepticism when telling people about this endeavor. Most of my friends will be familiar with my claims of “giving up alcohol”, a phenomenon that seems to correlate strongly with late nights out and mysterious morning illnesses. So it’s worth pointing out two important facts: correlation does not imply causation; and I made the decision to cut out alcohol this month in state of complete sobriety and un-hungover-ness.

I put my celebratory wine glass down as the clock ticked towards 00:00, and I won’t be picking it back up until February.