Subtitle: why Mummy has a raging headache
Some time ago I came upon a nugget of healthy eating advice that I haven’t forgotten.
If you want to embark on the road of healthy eating you should start by making two of your three main meals into healthy ones.
Breakfast is easy. I eat breakfast while I’m practically asleep, and I can easily make and eat the same thing every day.
On Tuesday morning I ate, thanks to some advice read in a book called Eating Clean, a giant bowl of oatmeal with berries and ground flax. I was full to bursting and it kept me full for a long time. (Ha – I just realized I measured out and ate TWO servings. No wonder I was so full!) I’m on a roll. Today is day two of oatmeal-berry combo (no sugar!) and so far so good.
The other meal I can easily healthify is lunch. I can eat lean protein/healthy greens without too much effort. I love my big salads. But it’s dinner that tends to give me the ol’ one two. i.e. the four *warm* slices of Ace Bakery white bread I ate with (pasta) dinner the other night. Hello Carb City USA!
Stuffing myself with bread isn’t doing anything to diminish the 4-5 pounds I gained over the holidays. In all seriousness, I don’t really have a weight issue, but too much Halloween indulgence spilled over into the holidays and now that the cold weather has set AND given the fact I work from home in it’s pretty easy to surrender to toast with peanut butter.
Here is part of today’s (ahem, HEALTHY) mid-morning snack:
It’s leek/potato soup. I made it last night. It is delicious. (The dots are hot sauce!)
Eating Clean outlined a few ideas I am going to adopt. But first I have to backtrack a second and say that I first learned about the book from Chantal. I got on the Ottawa library website and got myself on the waiting list. I didn’t have long to wait.
It’s written by Tosca Reno, and I liked a lot of what she had to say. She doesn’t really advocate one food group over another (although her diet doesn’t include a lot of bread products – no wonder!) just eating the kinds of groceries which can be obtained by shopping the periphery of your local supermarket. Her message can be boiled down into one thing:
Eat unprocessed whole foods in moderation.
No surprises there. In fact, it’s something I’ve thought/written about in the past. I was doing this for awhile but fell off the wagon and stayed off for too long.
Tosca is a big fan of oatmeal for breakfast (hence my gut-busting breakfasts), lean protein, veggies, lots of water, and smaller and more frequent meals.
She wrote a top ten worst foods list. I was happy to see there aren’t many that I actually eat:
- Donuts (nope)
- Marshmallow fluff (nooooo)
- Cola, sodas, pop (very rarely)
- Bacon, deli meat, processed meat (Ack! Bacon is the reason I’m not a vegetarian.)
- Sugary breakfast cereals (nope)
- Fruit juices and fake fruit drinks (We never buy fake fruit drinks, I rarely have juice in the morning. The girls only have a small glass in the morning.)
- Junk food (I’ll take a chip over a chocolate bar. But we don’t buy them very often.)
- Candy, candy floss, cotton candy (My candy plan involves a local boutique candy store, where one excellent caramel easily trumps a bag of cheapie ones.)
- French fries (Um. Yes.)
- Twinkies (Who eats twinkies??)
I’ve added a couple new things to my grocery list this week, something to help with the breakfasts and lunches: egg whites, chicken, and tuna. This is temporary. I don’t believe that a restrictive diet is sustainable over the long haul (a life without cheese is a very sad one indeed), but eating well (and in moderation) is.
Problem: Eating Clean wasn’t the only book I checked out of the library. I also borrowed The Bread Bible. *sigh* What’s a gal to do?
