I would like to begin by saying that I am not a gym person. I have a gym membership, which is different. It is a direct debit that leaves my account on the fourteenth of every month, like a very polite burglar. But three weeks ago I walked into a supermarket for a pint of milk and walked out with a bag of protein crisps, and I have not been the same since.

Let me explain how it started. I saw a yoghurt. It said ‘HIGH PROTEIN’ on the front in the sort of font usually reserved for action films about men who have been wronged. I thought, well, that’s just a yoghurt that’s been to university. I bought it. I ate it. I felt, and I cannot stress this enough, jacked. Physically, nothing had changed. Spiritually, I was lifting.

Then came the protein bread. Then the protein porridge. Then the protein cereal, which is just a normal cereal that has been told it has a lot to live up to. By the end of week one my kitchen cupboards looked like the inside of a very earnest vending machine.

The Wotsit Incident

I should confess something. Some time ago I bought a protein Wotsit. I will not go into detail, because I am still processing it, but I stood in the aisle holding that little orange finger of ambition and I felt things. Hope, mostly. And a faint sense that a snack had been given a LinkedIn profile.

It tasted of a Wotsit that had been asked to take on more responsibility. I ate the whole bag anyway, because that is what protein does to you: it makes you a person who finishes things.

Escalation

By week two, I had run out of things to buy, so I began putting protein powder in things I already owned. Tea, obviously. Soup. The dog’s water, which I stopped when Biscuit started looking at me like I’d betrayed a treaty. I put a scoop in my Sunday roast gravy, and it came out the consistency of wet cement, which my mum described as ‘bold’ in the voice she normally uses for my haircuts.

I also put some in the bath. I don’t want to talk about why. I will only say that a man alone in a tub of vanilla-flavoured water at eleven at night begins to ask himself questions, and the main one was whether I could absorb it through the skin.

“Absorbing protein through the skin is not a thing,” said Dr Helen Armitage, a dietitian at a hospital in Leeds. “I’d also gently suggest you don’t get into the bath with anything you intend to later drink.”

I took her points on board, and then I made a birthday cake.

The Cake

It was my own birthday, so I felt I had the moral authority. It was a protein-enriched sponge, with a protein-enriched buttercream, topped with a protein bar I’d chopped into what I called ‘rustic shards’. I lit the candles. I sang to myself. I looked around the room at my friends and family, who were all looking at the cake the way you look at a dog that has brought you something from the garden.

“It’s not that it was bad,” said my flatmate Callum Pryce, a trainee quantity surveyor. “It’s that it had a sort of texture I associate with a yoga mat. I’d have rather had the candles.”

The cake sits on my counter now. It has not been touched in nine days. I think it is technically the most protein-dense object in Cardiff, and I have started to suspect it is load-bearing.

The Discovery

Which brings me to last Tuesday. I was in the supermarket again, standing in front of a protein-boosted hummus, and I wandered, as one does when one has lost all sense of direction, towards the meat aisle. And there, in a plain tray with a plain sticker, was a chicken breast.

Just a chicken breast. No claims. No font. No action-film energy. It simply sat there, pink and quiet, containing roughly thirty grams of protein, like it had been doing this the entire time.

I stood there for a long while. A woman reached past me for a pack of thighs and gave me a look I can only describe as pity. I have, it turns out, spent three weeks and an alarming amount of money paying a premium for a yoghurt to do what a bird has been doing for centuries.

I bought the chicken. I cooked it with some salt. I ate it with a fork, like a person, and it was the best meal I have had since the Wotsit.