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Jul
13

Checking In – Visual Food Diary Day Two

I couldn’t find my memory card reader for a bit, so this one is going up late. I figure this will work as a check-in, too.

Well, day two didn’t go at all as planned, to be sure. It was one of those days where you make a tiny decision, and then it just keeps adding on…

The day started off with my usual smoothie. I love smoothies, even in winter. Oh, wait, I think I said that yesterday…

Okay, so this is the one where you find out I was never one of those people who couldn’t have the foods touching each other. This may not look the greatest, but it tasted of pure awesome. Five bean mix (just beans, not baked beans or packed with crap), the other half of the snack can of tuna, a spoon of cottage cheese and some spinach leaves in there for some greens. Yum-o!

Meet my kryptonite – and we’re not even talking coffee. For a while, I was having a large chai latte every day. Of course that’s no good, so I cut way back. Recently, I would have one large chai once every fortnight (if that). Now, I’ve cut back again and only drink regular size every once in a while for a treat.

This is where the story starts, though. I had a rough day and wanted a glass of wine. Just one. Alcohol is something I’m cutting back as well. So we agree, we’ll go to the pub for once glass of wine for me and one something of The Bloke’s choice. Then we head back home.

Well, as it turns out, one of our favourite barmen is going to be leaving soon, and we were having such a good conversation…

…we stayed for dinner.

Pub food again, but this time I was a bit better. I got a smaller parma and asked for a ‘double salad’ instead of salad and chips. That was all fine and well, it was about eight, we were about to go home…

Then some old friends we hadn’t seen for a while showed up.

I had one of these and then had water for the rest of the night, which is pretty good in my book because we didn’t leave until eleven!

The night was completely unexpected, but a lot of fun. I hate to have gone out two nights in a row, but some days you just can’t beat a good conversation with friends.

I got some comments on taking pictures of all my food, and then I explained the project. Everyone was quite impressed and we talked for at least an hour about food habits (I’m a half-way grazer, one friend was a total grazer, my husband is more one big brekkie and he’s set for the day and the other guy is more like me). I’m still quite excited about the visual food diary, even though I know difficult times are ahead as far as temptation goes…

Category: Challenges, Checking In, Food  Comments off
Jul
12

Visual Food Diary: Day One

And here we go…

Breakfast! I’ve always been a smoothie fan. This particular beauty is a mix of ladyfinger bananas, berries, probiotic drink, and fruit juice.

Light lunch of one slice multigrain with hummus, half a ‘snack can’ of tuna, and a spoonful of cottage cheese on the side. Cottage cheese is pretty notorious for being a ‘fatty no-no’ but I love the stuff.

Snack apple. Golden delicious all the way.

Orange juice (no added sugar, etc) times two. Not the best choice, but not alcohol.

The husband and I went to the pub so he could blow off some steam after a rough day, so I ended up with pub food: chicken parmagiana with chips and salad. I was pretty ravenous by dinner, and I ate it all.

[Small, thin slice of extra dark chocolate not pictured.]

Thoughts

Wow.

I hardly know where to begin when it comes to the ‘visual food diary’. After just one day, I am really impressed on how it has changed me. Yes, I still had a pretty massive parma and chips, but all the things I didn’t have! I didn’t know I was such a grazer, that’s for sure.

At first I was a little scared of how much it made me think about food, thinking that doing so would be a bad thing. After all, wasn’t my goal to stop thinking about food so much? But then I realised that I wasn’t thinking about food in a bad way, I was finally giving proper thought to what I wanted to eat, whether it would be healthy and satisfying, and whether or not I would be willing to photograph it.

I’ve had food diaries before, but the photographic evidence has given it a whole new dimension. Pictured above may seem like a lot of food, but that, my friends, is an amount I feel is a good first day. Wow!

Another part? Well… It’s taking pictures that is making me do so, but it’s really nice to care about the preparation of food that I’m making for myself. I care about what I make for everyone else, but me? This is a new pleasure.

Category: Food  2 Comments
Jul
11

Exposing My Privates: My Secret World of Eating

I’m an emotional eater if there ever was one, and a binge eater as well. The last thing I ever want to do is let people in to every little thing I’m eating.

But then I read Foodie’s blog.

First Foodie asked if you (general public ‘you’) would ever be willing to put what you eat on display. Keep a photo diary of your eats and show them to the world. Not feeling so great about everything I had been eating lately, I found the idea intriguing. Could I really let people in?

One of Foodie’s friends remarked that what you eat is private, and Foodie wondered if exposing what you eat is like exposing your privates (hence the title of this post).

Personally, I think what you eat is as private as you make it. Hanlie mentioned in the comments on the blog that she has been a sneaky eater in the past – so have I. I’ve felt the need to hide much of my eating, thus my eating has always been private. And usually unhealthy.

Foodie has stuck by her word and created What Foodie Eats, full of lovely fotos of food. (Was that clever letter stuff or just silly?)

I’ve decided to follow the lead and expose myself to the world for a while. I think it will help me, though in what ways I don’t yet know. Will it stop me from making bad choices? Will it help me with portion control? Will I get some oysters and disgust some people who don’t appreciate oysters’ deliciousness?

Who knows. No matter what, I knew this wouldn’t feel real to me unless I made a promise right here on the blog to myself and to you, the readers. Here goes…

I solemnly swear to you and myself that, from 12.01am Monday July 12th (+10 Time Zone) to 11.59pm Friday July 16th, I will take photographs of everything I put in my mouth. (The pictures will be taken before I put the stuff in my mouth, I promise.) Every food I consume will be captured on my digital camera.

I promise to try to put up the pictures of the day’s food intake every night before I go to bed. If I am unable to do so, I will put up the pictures as soon as I am able.

There will be no sneaking, cheating or otherwise tricking the camera. I acknowledge that to do so would be lying and would take away any benefits I hope to achieve from this project.

The challenge is a short one because not only will it be easier for me to stick to, it encompasses the times when I have the most problems (when I’m alone during the day). While I realize that just taking the photos will be enough to show some benefit, I want to put them up here as well. It’s an added layer of accountability that will give me more benefit, I think.

You’ll have to excuse all the photos that go up this week. If they start slowing down the loading time for the site, let me know and I’ll put them after the ‘read more’ tags. I’ll still have my usual posts up, so there will be more content than usual this week.

Here goes nothing…

Category: Announcements, Challenges, Food, Getting Started  4 Comments
Jun
17

Finish Your Plate

AKA: Children in China are Starving

I think it’s Africa these days, but I’m old enough to at least been on the end of the starving children in China statement.

Sometimes weight is just weight. Someone gets a desk job and puts a few pounds on. But for the people who are overweight or obese and have been for years, if not most of their life, there is usually a lot more to it than just weight.

That’s why in this blog, I want to address some of the other things besides your desk job which can lead to being overweight. I have a lot of personal causes, but I want to move beyond the scope of my personal weight loss and issues to issues many people might have.

Getting back to the above, I’m willing to be you heard something like the above when you were young. Either that or you were mature enough and in a family situation where you knew you should eat as much as you can right now because you don’t know when the next meal is coming.

There is yet another alternative in this group, and that is you heard a lot of:

Finish your dinner or no dessert!

You have to finish your plate before you can go out and play.

Or,

You finished your entire plate! What a good boy/girl!

Now picture me sighing and shaking my head.

I didn’t realize this was such a big issue until I came here to Australia. My husband and I would eat either out or in, it didn’t matter and I’d reach a point in the meal when it would just be uncomfortable to finish the rest of the meal. Eventually my husband kept telling me again and again that it was okay to not finish the meal.

It may seem the simplest thing in the world to simply stop eating when you’re full, but it’s not. At home, I would feel guilty if my husband cooked and I didn’t finish. I felt not only like I was letting good food go to waste but that I was somehow insulting him and his hard work by not finishing. When we were out, I wasn’t worried about insulting anyone, but I still felt guilt when I pushed a plate or bowl with food still in it away and said, “I’m finished.”

This is a case of easier said than done if you have hang-ups about food. It took me months to be able to be reasonably comfortable saying I’m finished when I truly was finished. It’s truly a habit you have to teach yourself. Learning it, however, is one of the factors that kept me around the 250 mark instead of going any higher.

If you have troubles with this (when you’re at home, at least), take your leftovers and go through the act of making them leftovers. Even if you’d never really eat the leftover amount later, you’re still putting it away in the fridge and not into the wastebasket. You won’t get the guilt from wasting it or insulting anyone, and you’re still teaching yourself to say your finished when you are really finished, not when your mind/society/your parents say you’re finished eating.

Remember: You should not be deriving a sense of accomplishment from finishing your plate.

Category: Food, Mental Health  2 Comments
May
12

Potatoes and Insulin Resistance

There is nothing like a good reminder of why you’re on a quest to improve your health. I got one of those reminders last night.

I have completely taken rice out of my diet because of how it makes me tired. I’ve kicked pasta and now use bean curd noodles. I have had rye bread in the last couple of days, but I have otherwise kicked out bread. The same goes for potatoes.

All in all, I have made a lot of positive changes for my diet in response to the insulin resistance side effects I was having before.

But I dropped my guard last night.

My husband and I went out to eat last night and I ordered an extra bowl of veggies on the side. When it comes to craving things that are good for me, I obey my cravings. My meal already came with some veggies, but I had a desperate craving for broccoli and, well…

The veggies in my meal included two small potatoes. Now, I haven’t had potatoes for a few months now. Time obviously liberally dusted my mind with ‘forget potion’ because I figured I’d give the potatoes a go and see how it went. I wasn’t sure if I’d actually react to them or not.

Well, I did.

Potatoes don’t knock me out with quite the force rice does, but those two little spuds were certainly the next best thing. About five minutes after we finished eating, I was yawning and ready for bed.

Why do I always have to test things? Why can’t I just leave things alone when I’m told no? Bleh. Ah well. I have been well and truly reminded why I don’t eat potatoes. (Or rice, or pasta, or…)

How about you? Are you insulin resistant or battling other factors that make getting fit that much more difficult?

Category: Body, Food  Comments off
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