What I eat
People assume I don’t eat much. It turns out, I eat all the time. And by all the time, I mean, “ALL THE GODDAMN TIME”. I’m practically never not eating.
6am: I tend to “carbo load” a little before working out, usually a bowl of cereal. (~250 calories)
8am: Post-workout I have a protein shake. (~110 cal)
10am: Usually once I get to work, I’ll have something like “second breakfast”: lately it’s a couple rice cakes (about 100 calories total) and a coffee of some sort (also about 100 calories). Sometimes some yogurt too.
noonish: Lunch. Since we cook most of our food I don’t know any details on calories. I will say that portion sizes are modest, ingredients are as good as we can manage (eg very low fat ground beef or turkey, or fish, etc); if I had to guess, I’d say it’s maybe 350-500 calories, depending. I’ll often have a “treat”, usually a some small cookie thing, 100 calories or so.
Afternoon: Whatever’s around. It’s always a challenge to manage afternoon blood sugar/food craving. I still haven’t gotten it right; my goal is to be ready to eat when I get home from work, but to this day, 2 years later, I am rarely “on target”. At any rate, I usually have another snacky thing in the ~200 calorie range.
Dinner: See lunch. I try to either have drinks, or dessert, but not both; my willpower is often lacking though.
I try to drink water, limiting myself to a couple sodas a day (diet, natch; I prefer Coke Zero) usually with lunch and dinner.
In total, it could be as much as 2000 calories in a day; probably about 1800 on average.
My workout is probably a separate post, but suffice it to say: I walk a couple miles a day (yay dog) and have a pretty strong workout in the morning.
This plan seems to work well, for 2 reasons:
1. I try to eat real food and not packaged diet foods; high quality food is always better than semi-cardboard sodium-laden crap.
2. If you sum the calorie count, it’s a lot: but when viewed as a graph (so to speak) it’s really about 150 calories every 2 hours, which is reasonable (you’ll burn about 150 calories over that time sitting perfectly still). So I’m not hungry most of the time, which often leads to overeating, and I’m limiting calories to what I’ll reasonably burn in my sedentary job.
