Douglas Ireland

Tag: calorie counting

  • Kare Burosu at Wagamama, Silverburn

    Soundtrack to this post.

    A black bowl of Kare Burosu, thick udon noodles in a golden curry broth with mushrooms, red chillies, shredded carrot and coriander, with a piece of silken tofu held between chopsticks
    Lifting a piece of silken tofu out of the broth. Kare Burosu at Wagamama, Silverburn, Glasgow, July 2026.
    “Kare Burosu at Wagamama Silverburn” by Douglas Ireland, licensed CC BY 4.0.

    That is me lifting a piece of silken tofu out of a bowl of Kare Burosu at Wagamama in Silverburn, and yes, I am posting a picture of my tea on the internet.

    I do not have much in the way of social media. What I do have is this blog, and it turns out a blog does the job perfectly well. Anyone subscribed by RSS gets this popping up in their reader the same way a photo of somebody’s carbonara appears in a Facebook or Instagram feed. Same picture, same daft caption, no middleman.

    Owning the feed

    The difference is who is holding the steering wheel.

    On the proprietary platforms, you do not get a feed, you get a feed that has been arranged for you. The order is decided by an algorithm, the ads are slotted in between your pals, and the whole thing is tuned to keep you scrolling rather than to show you what you actually asked to see. If you follow somebody, there is no guarantee you will see their posts. If you post something, there is no guarantee your followers will see it.

    RSS is boring by comparison, and boring is the entire point. You subscribe to a site, you get everything that site publishes, in the order it was published, with nothing wedged in between. No ranking, no promoted posts, no “you might also like”. If you get sick of me you unsubscribe and I never find out, which is a much healthier arrangement than a follower count.

    The other bit that matters is the archive. Everything I write lives at my own domain, in files I control, on hosting I pay for. Platforms change their rules, get sold, get shut down, or quietly decide your account is no longer worth keeping. This post will still be here at the same address in ten years because the only person who can take it down is me. That is worth more than reach.

    So yep, this is my Instagram now. Get used to the food photos.

    The scran

    Kare Burosu is a lovely bit of cooking. Thick udon noodles in a golden curry broth, silken tofu, mushrooms, shredded carrot, coriander and a fair scattering of red chillies, and it is plant based from top to bottom. The broth is the star. It has that gentle coconut sweetness underneath and enough spice coming through to make you sit up.

    Nutrition panel for one portion of Kare Burosu showing 706 kcal, with a doughnut chart splitting the calories into 54 per cent carbs, 28 per cent fat and 17 per cent protein, and a table listing 94.8g carbs, 21.9g fat and 30g protein
    The meal logged in Nourish, my own calorie counter. One portion, 706 kcal, 30g of plant based protein.
    “Kare Burosu logged in Nourish” by Douglas Ireland, licensed CC BY 4.0. Nutrition figures are Wagamama’s own published data.

    Regular readers will know I am a recovering food addict. I have written about that properly over in I’ll Start Tomorrow, so I will not go over the whole thing again here, but the short version is that eating out used to be a guessing game I would rather not play.

    This is where Wagamama deserve credit. Their website has the full nutrition for every dish on the menu, so I could sit down knowing exactly what I was ordering and log it properly afterwards in Nourish, my own calorie counter. 706 kcal, 30g of protein, and all of that protein plant based. Thirty grams from a bowl of noodles is not to be sniffed at.

    Restaurants that publish their numbers make life enormously easier for anyone who tracks what they eat, for whatever reason. It costs them nothing and it means people like me can order confidently instead of picking the safest looking thing on the menu and hoping.

    Double spicy

    Kare Burosu is Stephanie’s dish. She has been ordering it for years and she is the reason I had it at all, because I looked at the menu, remembered how good hers always smells, and asked for the same. These last couple of years she has taken to lifting the chillies out before she starts, and last night they came across into my bowl. Her broth ended up pitched where she likes it, mine ended up with double the heat, and we both got the dinner we wanted out of it.

    Reader, I loved it. Nose running, but I loved it.

    A great evening out, a great bowl of noodles, and a picture of it posted somewhere I actually own.

  • I’ll start tomorrow

    Soundtrack to this post.

    About four months ago I was diagnosed with MS. I’m not going to write a big dramatic post about that part, not today anyway, but I’ll be honest about what it did to me in the short term. There was a bit of depression in there, the kind you don’t always admit to at the time, and I dealt with it the way a lot of people do. I ate. Chocolate mostly. Chocolate has always been my vice and for a few weeks it was more or less a food group.

    The problem is that I also have type 2 diabetes, so emotionally eating my way through bars of chocolate was about the worst thing I could be doing, MS or no MS. And I knew it. I knew I needed to eat better and move more. Every single day I told myself the same thing: I’ll start tomorrow. Tomorrow is a very comfortable place to keep your good intentions. Nothing ever actually has to happen there.

    Then about three weeks ago something just snapped in my head. I can’t point to a single moment or some big realisation. I just woke up done with waiting for tomorrow. I started counting my calories that same day and I joined the gym.

    If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ll know I care a lot about privacy, and about choosing what data I hand over to whom. So the obvious tools were out. I wasn’t about to feed every meal into MyFitnessPal or every run into Strava and let them quietly build a picture of my body and my habits. That’s just not for me.

    What I could do was self-host. I set up SparkyFitness for logging my food, which does much the same job as MyFitnessPal but on my own server with my own data staying mine. And I built myself a simple training log for the exercise side. I genuinely enjoyed building it, which is half the appeal. Both have public diaries if you fancy following along:

    [Edit: 20/07/2026] I wasn’t getting on with SparkyFitness. It was quite hard to use on mobile, hard to see, and had loads of features I didn’t use while missing some I wanted. So I made my own version that does exactly what I want with no bloat, called Nourish. The food log and training log are now merged into one at nourish.douglasireland.com/public/douglas-ireland. If you fancy trying Nourish and giving me feedback, it’s at nourish.douglasireland.com.

    On the running side I’ve started Couch to 5K again. If you’ve not come across it, it’s a beginners’ running plan (the NHS version is the one most people in the UK use) that eases you from not running at all up to running 5k. Three sessions a week over nine weeks, starting with short bursts of running in between walking and building up from there. I’m on week 3 as of today.

    To run the plan I use an app called Just Run, which I found on F-Droid. It fits the same rule as everything else here: no ads, no account, no tracking, just a timer that tells you when to run and when to walk. It’s made by a small developer called Jupli and it’s exactly the sort of quiet, does-one-thing-well app I like to give a shout to, so if you’re starting C25K yourself it’s well worth a look.

    Alongside the running I’m keeping my food to around 1800 calories a day.

    I won’t pretend three weeks is long enough to call anything a transformation. But I can honestly say I already feel amazing. Better than I have in a long time, and better than I expected to this soon. Ten years ago I could run a 5k in 23 minutes and I was sitting at a 22.4 BMI. That’s the version of me I’m aiming to get back to. Not to prove anything to anyone, just because I felt good back then and I’d like to feel that way again, MS and diabetes and all.

    If you want to keep an eye on how it’s going, the diaries above update as I do. No login, no tracking, just the numbers.