Back to basics

Saturday:

This morning I was thinking about what I need to get my food back on track after my little lapse. One or two bad meals or days need not be a diet-ender. So what works for me?

The first thing that I've slacked off on these past few days, even before the slump, was including lots of vegetables. Eating my vegetables is always a bit of a struggle, I don't like that many kinds or know many appealing ways of cooking them. My meals revolve around the protein, and making sure there are enough carbs for Tim. Vegetables are the afterthought, the "because I have to". So when the gloss of a new diet wears off, the virtuous increase in vegetables is the first thing to go.

Yet not only are veges good for me, they fill me up. No wonder I start eating more junk when i stop eating vegetables, I have to fill my stomach with something. Clearly this needs to be a priority.

The other thing I need to careful of is the timing of my meals. For example if I'm not hungry for morning tea and don't eat my piece of fruit, then I am ravenous an hour later. Too close to lunch to snack, so early lunch instead. So I'm starving by afternoon tea time, and eat too much. Not hungry at dinner time, eat only a little. But hungry in the evening... So I spend the day snacking, maybe on healthy food but not proper balanced meals. All because I didn't have my morning snack on time. It can mess up my whole day.

Pre-planning works well for me. Each evening I write down what I'm going to eat the next day, and I stick to that pretty closely. If I don't do this, it's easier to eat something less healthy. I also always plan the week's dinners before I go shopping - I don't understand how some people don't do this, I would hate not knowing what I was going to cook until it got to 5pm and try to work something out from the ingredients I happened to have.

I decided to swap over all my food recording to the Fitbit. It's actually quite a pain because all the items are American. The database didn't have Lebanese cucumbers (probably not much different to standard cucumbers in nutritional value) or my brand of cheese (fat and salt content could vary a lot) or my brand of tinned corn (sugar and salt). Cuts of meat are named differently. Some types of food have completely different names which might trip me up if I don't know. For example in most of the world "marinara" means seafood - that is what the word "marine" means after all, from the sea. But in the US apparently it means a tomato based sauce, nothing to do with seafood at all. Very confusing. I'll give the Fitbit recording a go, but might end up going back to my Australian CalorieKing if it's too hard.

Report Card:
Diet: Ok. Since it was Valentine's Day, we had dessert with dinner and I also ate some of the chocolates I was given. I will only be having one a day from now on.
Exercise: N/A. Saturday is my rest day.
Water: Great. Finished 12 glasses well before bedtime.
Sleep: Ok. Had an afternoon nap.
Mental health: Good. Feeling much better today. Did my meditation in the afternoon, and enjoyed spending time with my family.