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Friday 30 May 2008

Baby Steps for the Other Side

There is light at the end of the tunnel thanks to the timely intervention of Kitty and Shelley.

Kitty emailed me and suggested that I should face the fact that I did, in fact, like "bad food" and should try to work it into my calorie allowance.

Shelley encouraged me to do a meal plan for a week that includes all the "clean food" that I really love and none of the stuff I force myself to eat because it is good for me.

By combining the two ideas, I have come up with an eating plan for this week.

First of all I listed all the things I really wanted to eat, that I could make a healthier version of. For example, tonight I had home made fish and chips - grilled white fish with sweet potato wedges baked in the oven and a little dryslaw with low fat dressing. I am now satisfied and full and a binge doesn't seem on the cards.

I also had a chicken sandwich for lunch on the most delicious Spelt and Ancient Grains bread to satisfy the toast craving.

I have planned french toast for breakfast tomorrow and and whole eggs on toast are another option for when I don't feel like porridge.

I have worked on some new 300 calorie meals and I can have 5 a day.

I also have decided to allow myself to replace any one meal, on any day (or every day if I want) with 300 calories of junk. This means I can have almost anything that I feel I am missing because not many of my favourites fall outside this limit. So instead of eating junk on top of my daily calorie allowance, I am fitting it into the budget.

So here are the rules for the next 7 days:

+ 5 x 300 calorie meals a day (with 50 calories spare for creepage)
+ eat breakfast/meal 1 whether hungry or not but wait until actually hungry for meal 2 (which may be longer than 3 hours later especially if I'm having porridge for brekkie)
+ stop eating if I am no longer hunger and save the rest for later (sometimes I just need a few bites)
+ protein with every meal approximately equal to the carbs (does not apply to treat meal)
+ one treat up to the value of 300 calories a day instead of one meal
+ eat only food I enjoy (which means no diet food that I don't really like = rice cakes)
+ don't worry about getting in 6-8 cups of veggies a day
+ work out the exact quantity of treat food to buy without buying extra for the next day
+ don't cook more starchy vegetables than you need for that meal (because I will pick at the sweet potato and pumpkin after dinner)
+ spinach, lettuce and sprouts can be added at any time to anything and don't count
+ everything must be measured and entered in Calorie King (no squirts of BBQ sauce - measure out a teaspoon)
+ minimise food preparation by buying pre-made salad mixes and pre-cut veggies
+ don't stress over the macros too much - as long as the carbs and protein are roughly equal, the fat can creep up a little - limit is 33/33/33
+ don't worry about avoiding wheat too much as long as it is hearty wholegrain wheat (doesn't apply to treat meal - I can hear a low fat muffin from the bakery calling my naqme)

Obviously this is not nearly as healthy as I was eating for the past 16 weeks but I have two choices
a) eat more calories of clean food (which is what I was trying to do and didn't work - ate all my extra calories and still wanted junk so I binged)
b) eat less calories of not so clean food and include all the things I have been craving.

Strangely (or obviously) now that nothing is off the menu, I don't feel I need to eat everything bad all in one sitting because I won't be able to have it once I'm back on my diet healthy way of eating.

Eventually I hope to clean up the eating and get back to loving salads and green veggies, but right at this moment I am sick to death of produce.

The scales are showing a 4 kilo gain (that is not a typo!) but I am hoping I can get out of this minor catastrophe with no more than a 1-2kg gain. I am planning to faithfully follow this new regime for the next 7 days and do a proper weigh in next Saturday.

I feel so much better now I have figured out a solution. Thanks for all your kind words of support, it did give me the impetus to get my sh*t together!

So far ... so good. I'm off to work out a list of junk food I can shove in for 300 calories :)

7 comments:

  1. Sounds like a bloody sensible plan to me. I love rice cakes (mmm, salty) but hate, hate, HATE cottage cheese.

    Tim Tam Cornettos have about 240 cals.... :p

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  2. Anonymous8:59 pm

    Sounds like a great plan, you will be fine, I have loved reading your blog, I hope you keep posting !!

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  3. Anonymous6:59 am

    kekster! i loooooove cottage cheese woman!

    katie, i recently discovered (because i'm an an obsessed freeeeak) how they make pre-cut salad stay all fresh and not all brown for soooo long.

    they was it in very strong chlorine, then bring it back to life from its shrivelled limpness via an intense blast of air. they then bag it. eeewwww.

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  4. Anonymous7:16 am

    You're a star Katie.

    I'm glad that you've found something that will work for you babe.

    S X

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  5. A lot of what you wrote works for me - like breakfast first thing no matter what - and then waiting until later for meal #2. And I have always balanced protein and carbs and eaten as a meal/together. I love that you are only eating things that you love and not things that you feel you must. I do that too. Hope your weekend is wonderful and stress free.

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  6. Great strategy Katie. Have a good weekend!

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  7. Anonymous12:32 pm

    Maybe you need another goal Katie. That's probably why you did so well before...because you were prepping for the competition. Maybe you should consider another go at it since it's really hard to try to do well with eating and working out when there is no particular goal or reasoning behind it to keep us motivated. But I hear ya as far as getting sick of eating certain things goes. Sometimes I barely touch produce if I eat too much of it for so long!

    CJ

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