My eating habits

In my opinion my diet is pretty healthy but before after putting on a few pounds having tonnes to eat on my little Devon jaunt (post here) it was time for an overhaul before Christmas. Now I now most people regard January as the time for a detox, but I think I timed it quite well before the festive period. Lets face it; I needed to lose the weight just so I could afford to put it back on with all the chocolate I consumed! I got the opportunity to trial six different detox delivery services, which you’ll read about soon. But I thought it would be good to do a bit of an overview of my current eating habits, so you could see my starting point.

A typical day of eating for me is a bowl of shredded wheat with almond milk and strawberries or bananas on top. Lunch can be anything from a salad, to last night’s scrummy leftovers (a rice or pasta dish) or homemade soup; dinner is usually a well-balanced meal containing veggies and some sort of fish or meat. Carbs are my friend – mashed potato is my favourite most comforting food stuffs.

As I currently have almond milk on cereal and the only dairy milk (semi-skimmed) I have is in my tea of which I have two maximum a day or sometimes none at all. I do have 2 brown sugars in my tea, and I used to have a lot more but lately I’ve cut back due to how much sugar I have in it. With alcohol I usually only drink on nights out, and it’s quite rare for me to hanker after a glass of wine. Meat is something I hardly eat too, I like it don’t get me wrong but I don’t like a huge hunk of meat on my plate, so steak is a rarity and chicken is a far as it goes – and everything small please. Junk food just isn’t my thing – I honestly can’t remember the last time I had a McDonald’s. I think I’ve had maybe 3-4 KFC’s, Burger Kings and Subways in my life, because I just feel awful afterwards. That goes for rich, greasy, fatty foods too. Processed foods are at times inevitable, who hasn’t thrown in a microwave meal when they just don’t have the energy to cook, but I like to cook from scratch most of the time (or rather my mum does it for me – love you! – that is until I moved out at the end of January). I also tend to drink quite a bit of squash like vimto or high juices like lemon, but I want to cut back on this drastically.

Let’s be clear, I don’t ever really deprive myself of something if I want it. I think this is because around June 2012 I had an awful time when I found out I had gallstones. After numerous hospital stays (one in which I lost over one and a half stone in 10 days!), agonising pain, lots of vomiting, and generally feeling crappy and not being able to eat really anything for the best part of a year, it was finally removed. My body pretty much returned to normal after my recovery, but I’d tortured myself with enough Nigella TV show reruns (without being able to eat concurrently) whilst I was ill to know that I wanted to eat again properly – dessert and all!

So now its everything in moderation and if I’ve had something naughty then I tend to make sure that the next day my diet is super nice to counteract. Dessert? Hell yes! Free cake? Don’t mind if I do. Starbucks on a Shopping Trip? Mmmmm. Chocolate is in there too, but I’ll stress that these things are occasional. My weight is testament to how this works for me, in general I don’t tend to put on weight even if I eat more, snack less or eat nothing. It tends to stay very steady, unless I’ve consistently blown the diet for over a week. I don’t tend to exercise much (read: just walking and not that often). But you can see with my 2013 resolutions that I want to change my exercising habits.

I’ve just finished reading James Duigan’s Clean and Lean Diet Book and I’m inspired to get a better body and be cleaner inside, so we shall see how 2013 goes.

What about your eating habits? Do you have to be eating whilst watching cookery programmes like me? I’d love to know.

Levanah

xoxo