Thursday, April 13, 2006
Food diary
This week I have homework from my gym trainer to complete a food diary so that we can work on improving some healthy eating habits. I am just trying to be a bit sensible about my eating, so avoiding junk and fried foods, trying to eat in moderation etc. And he also strongly emphasised the importance of having healthy snacks and meals throughout the day (eg breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, tea, supper).
This is one of those things that I know intellectually - eating snacks and smaller meals throughout the day makes you less likely to pig out at dinner time just when you are going to bed to be totally inactive for 8 hours. But I suck at it - I often skip breakfast because it requires that I get up that little bit earlier and therefore interferes with my precious sleep. Plus I hardly ever have decent snacks during the day, simply because my situation working in an office etc. Anyway, I am working on that at the moment, and hopefully I can be a bit more consistent about my eating so that my body gets the picture that it is not going to starve to death and that it would be okay to burn off some of that fat.
Keeping the food diary is not too bad. I have tried to be pretty honest while attempting to be well behaved. But it shows that there are some things that make it hard. Once a week I have dinner in a pub with friends which is my church worship. All lovely as an open welcoming environment, but very hard to find something that is not too fried and disgusting on a pub menu. On my first day of the food diary, I had a marketing lunch with some people we were trying to schmooze as clients. In a way it is good that this was in the diary because it is a fact of my life that from time to time I have to eat out with clients and while I can try to make decent choices, often my ability to make a pain of myself in that environment by insisting on healthy choices is limited. So that is something that I have to work around with my diet and try to be realistic about.
This is one of those things that I know intellectually - eating snacks and smaller meals throughout the day makes you less likely to pig out at dinner time just when you are going to bed to be totally inactive for 8 hours. But I suck at it - I often skip breakfast because it requires that I get up that little bit earlier and therefore interferes with my precious sleep. Plus I hardly ever have decent snacks during the day, simply because my situation working in an office etc. Anyway, I am working on that at the moment, and hopefully I can be a bit more consistent about my eating so that my body gets the picture that it is not going to starve to death and that it would be okay to burn off some of that fat.
Keeping the food diary is not too bad. I have tried to be pretty honest while attempting to be well behaved. But it shows that there are some things that make it hard. Once a week I have dinner in a pub with friends which is my church worship. All lovely as an open welcoming environment, but very hard to find something that is not too fried and disgusting on a pub menu. On my first day of the food diary, I had a marketing lunch with some people we were trying to schmooze as clients. In a way it is good that this was in the diary because it is a fact of my life that from time to time I have to eat out with clients and while I can try to make decent choices, often my ability to make a pain of myself in that environment by insisting on healthy choices is limited. So that is something that I have to work around with my diet and try to be realistic about.