Monday 10 February 2014

My Weight Loss Journey: Food

Hey Guys

So this is the third instalment my weight loss journey to you all. If you missed the last two you can catch up here (Part 1 & Part 2), Ive also created a page which will filter all the posts about my weight loss, so there all together. The last two posts were all about my personal history with my weight, starting out, planning and goals, so all you need to get going, in my opinion anyway.


As this title suggests this post is about my relationship with food and what I eat. Although I'm sure your'll be happy to know, even though this post is about what I eat to loose weight, I am currently sat in bed eating a bag on mini eggs and incredibly hungover. Sigh of relief that I'm not just going to talk about eating rabbit food?

From my previous posts I've always said I don't want to go on a diet and simply loose the weight I want to change my lifestyle and my relationship with food. Otherwise I feel once I've got to my goal weight I'll slip back into the bad habits and pile on the pounds, any weight losers worst nightmare. So it's about the choices you make and the easy, realistic adjustments you can change to your lifestyle in able to maintain these changes. I'm trying to make life long changes so I avoid this feeling:


I've now been doing this for about 8 months and in total I've lost 2.5 stone, it's quite a slow process but that's because I'm not just strict dieting. I now live by a rule of Monday-Friday I eat a healthy balanced diet, then when it comes to the weekend I'll treat myself and I refuse to feel guilty about it, kind of a backwards 5:2 diet. I do this because I love chocolate, I love coca-cola, I love cheese, I love bread, my list could go on forever but I feel if I was to just cut all my favourite foods out, I just wouldn't keep the momentum to carry on. By setting my days where I allow myself treats I don't crave them through the week, I look forward to them at the weekend. With me so far?

So let me break it down how I do this:

Monday-Friday
As I said during the week I have a healthy balanced diet, I eat three meals a day and 2 snacks. Now I'll explain a few tricks which work for me:
  • Planning what your going to eat 
  • Try and make set times when your going to eat 
  • Little changes in what you eat  
Let me break it into each meal time changes.

Breakfast: 7:15am: I never used to eat breakfast so I almost had to train myself into eating it every day but now I can't go a day without it. The healthy changes I made for breakfast time is simple, I have 40g of high fibre cereal with 60ml skimmed milk. Changing my milk from the green top to red was hard at first and took me a while to get used to but now drinking semi-skimmed taste like cream to me. I also have a cup of coffee, skimmed milk and no sugar. I used to always have sugar so I slowly reduced it and started replacing it with a sprinkle of cinnamon as it's a natural sweetener and fat burner, bonus. Although after about 2 months I've completely stopped and just have coffee and milk. Now I'm not sure if changing milk has made a huge difference but every little helps right?

Am Snack: 11am: A Banana or a piece of fruit to keep me going till lunch.

Lunch: 2pm: This time does vary depending how busy I am at work but it's around that time. The main change here is stop the sandwich and have something a lot lighter, I feel lunch time is the easiest one to make a change and cut the calories. So lunch time for me is either a salad or left overs from the night before. However my salad consist of spinach, cucumber and radish's just because I don't like that many salad components haha. I always have some sort of protein with my salad either tuna or chicken, then a drizzle of balsamic vinegar to finish it off, tasty.

Pm Snack: 4:30pm: This is the time of day when my energy levels really drop and I get so hungry so I have 35g of mixed nuts and dried fruit, at the moment my favourite is a mix of walnuts, pumpkin seeds and dates.

Dinner: 7pm: Dinner changes every day and varies week to week, this is my favourite meal so I don't want to get bored. The main adjustments I've made is stripping out the white carbs, now that sounds a lot harder than it really is. I no longer eat bread, white potatoes, white rice, pasta etc I eat brown rice, green beans and sweet potato. I've also taken out unnecessary fats like butter and oil. I make substitutions where I can like Olive Oil for Coconut oil and Creme Fraiche instead of cream. I love cooking so I had so much fun discovering new ways to cook, in a healthy way, it's about being clever and looking at foods thinking how can I make this healthy. I did want to put a weeks meal plan in pictures, but I kept forgetting :(. I will try again this week to remember and update, but I'll repeat I'll TRY haha. However heres some of my favourites meals I now cook:
Healthy Fish Pie
Thai Red Coconut and Tomato Curry
Creamy Thai Green Curry
Lime Chicken
BBQ Chicken
Teriyaki Beef Stir Fry

If you see anything above you want to try then drop me an email and I can send you over the recipe. Most my recipes have been from BBC Good Food website, but I'm also a monthly subscriber over here, however I have altered them to my tastes and dietary requirements. All my meals above only take 1hour to prepare and cook, honestly I don't have time to slave at the stove so I limit 1 hour for cooking and prep.

So that's it, I hope that helps any of you diet strugglers out there and it gives an insight into what I eat and how I go about food nowadays. Like I said before the approach I take to loosing weight is to make adjustments which are easy to stick too for years ahead, because once I loose the weight I have no intention to put it back on again! I'm in this for the long run.


If anyone has any more questions or would like a little bit of advice from what I do or some friendly motivation then please feel free to email me, tweet me, comment whatever!

Otherwise other than that I'll see you Thursday for a beauty review :)

No comments :

Post a Comment