Early on in this blog, I wrote down the mechanics of what I was doing more frequently mainly as a means of tracking my behavior for myself. I wanted to reflect on how I was living at various stages so that, heaven forbid, if I started to slip back into old habits and regain, I'd have a road map back. Of course, I'm hoping all of the psychological work I've been doing will leave me in a good place and that will not happen.
Since it's been awhile since I've talked about my diet, and I use the word "diet" here as a noun to mean "the food I happen to eat", not "restriction" (as in "on a diet"), I wanted to pause in my deeper musings to outline what I've been eating.
Here's today:
Breakfast (around 7:30 am):
pain au chocolat (mini chocolate croissant - about half the size of my palm)
coffee with 1/3 full fat milk
(roughly 160 calories)
Mid Morning Snack (around 10:00 am):
banana smoothie - medium frozen banana, 1/2 cup skim milk, 1 tbsp. Hershey's syrup, dash cinnamon
(roughly 200 calories)
Lunch:
steamed squash
chicken breast
(roughly 250 calories)
Afternoon snack:
6 animal crackers
1 Asian sweet
1 rice cracker
(roughly 130 calories)
Dinner:
whole wheat pasta salad with 3 slices lean ham, 1/3 roasted red pepper, diced onion, mayonnaise, garlic, black pepper
carrot
navel orange
(roughly 450 calories)
Evening snack:
peanut butter on whole wheat bread
(roughly 300 calories)
I also had about 4 cups of tea (with skim milk, calories never counted) and nibbled on the core of some fresh pineapple I was preparing for my husband's lunch. He doesn't like the cores, but I do. I'll also have a Diet Coke, possibly two, and likely drink about a liter of water. However, I don't force myself to drink boatloads of water. It just ends up like that.
The entire day will likely weigh in at around 1500-1600 calories, though if I'm very hungry in the evening after work, I may throw in a banana with the peanut butter on whole wheat. Note that all of the food was homemade except the pain au chocolat (from a bakery), and afternoon snack items (pre-packaged). Of course, the pasta was purchased dry and I prepared it, roasted the pepper and assembled my own salad. The whole wheat bread is homemade. As I've said before, this type of eating is a lot of work.
For a work day, in which I have to plan my eating carefully because of the schedule and the need to pack a lunch, this is pretty typical. You can see that there is a fairly good balance between eating for pleasure (Hershey's syrup in the smoothie, croissant, cookies, sweets, cracker) and nutrition. This is a little lighter on the vegetables than I sometimes go (usually, I have a vegetable-based soup as part of lunch) and slightly heavier on fruit, but in the summer it sometimes works out that way. I also take a multi-vitamin and Calcium supplements.
