The Quickest of Shopping Trips

My ill-fated attempt to buy a post-workout snack started at 17:59 exactly.  I’d ran out of Kate Percy’s delicious Go Bites that I’ve been using as fuel for the last month or so.  Boo hiss!  Without a natural nutrition bar to turn to I decided to give protein bars another go.

How I made it up the motorway with enough time to spare to stop off was a miracle in itself!  The shutter of my local health shop was already half down when I entered.  I flew into the shop, asked the shop assistant whether she was still serving then rushed to find the protein section.  I picked up two bars that I knew I liked, although expensive, and one that I hadn’t tried before.  It couldn’t be that bad, could it?  I didn’t have time to ponder so decided to take the risk.

Bargain Hunting

I always hold back when buying protein bars until I reach the front of the shop.  There is always a discount bucket with the items nobody else wants.  Perhaps that should have given me a clue.  Why else would you sell a product at a third of the recommended retail price?  Undeterred and with approximately 30 seconds left until closing I grabbed one of these items for the pricely sum of just 67p.  No, that didn’t worry me either.  My frugal instinct satisfied I carried on unaware of the monstrosity I had purchased.  I was just chuffed that I didn’t have to spend a fortune!

Treading Carefully

I love trying different foods but have to be careful with what I eat.  I often find my stomach and my taste buds at odds with each other when it comes to food choices.  As a result, I weigh up the ingredients of most things that I eat.  I don’t spend ages researching the ingredients but take an educated guess on how my stomach will react given the main information on the label.

A Sickly Surprise

The first two protein bars were fine, as expected.  I’d had them before and knew that tasted much like chocolate bars with a chewy layer of protein.  Tasty, cheap and effective even if they aren’t too kind to your teeth. I would recommend Grenade’s Carb Killa protein bars to anybody looking for a quick, protein dense post-workout snack.  They aren’t cheap but they do the business.

I waited until today to try my ‘bargain’.  It reminded me of the sickly protein shake that I decided to buy when I was strength training at the end of 2015.  The clue was in the flavour then.  Vanilla protein and hard workouts don’t mix well.  The clue was the heavily discounted price this time.  This was worse.

The packaging said ‘Chocolate Fudge’, it might as well have said ‘tastes like chocolate flavoured vomit’ (sorry for the graphic explanation but if you’d have eaten it yourself, you’d say the same!).  Once you’d chewed through the gloopy outer texture, the initial hit of milk chocolate wasn’t too bad.  It’s when the ‘fudge’ takes over that this particular protein bar turned nasty.  I took a sip of water to wash the flavour and on-rushing nausea down and tried again.  The second bite only served to intensify my initial reaction.

I don’t usually throw food in the bin but I had to make an exception here.

 

*The protein bar brand discussed throughout this post was not and has never been mentioned on this blog*