I’m totally on a roll when it comes to food these days. During previous attempts to lose weight, I always felt hungry–starving even. No matter what I did, I never felt full and I always felt deprived. That’s no way to live a life, and that’s why all my other attempts at losing weight failed.
With my current lifestyle, I feel like all I ever do is eat. I’ve been allowing myself 2,100 calories per day. I eat a 500 calorie breakfast, a 500 calorie lunch, a 500 calorie dinner and that still leaves room for 3 snacks of about 200 calories each. There’s plenty of eating during the day; in fact, some days I have problems actually eating that much.
I’m also trying to replace all of the calories that I burn while exercising. Lately, I’ve been exercising for an hour, four times per week. Most of that exercise has been running, which means I’ve been burning anywhere from 600 to 900 calories during that hour. It’s really hard to know exactly how many calories I’m burning, so I’m just going with the numbers that show up on my treadmill or on my iphone when I input my food and exercise every day. Those numbers are probably a little elevated, but I’m not going to worry about it so much. So realistically, on the days that I exercise, I should be eating about 3,000 calories per day. Even though the exercise does make me feel hungrier, 3,000 is a lot of calories to eat in a day.
But I’m bored with food. I eat almost the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and snacks each day. My dinners are varied, but the rest of the food I eat is very predictable. This makes it easy for counting calories, but my taste buds are bored. In the past, several readers have commented about how a lack of variety in their diets helps them to keep their weight on track and that repeatedly eating the same things doesn’t bother them. But I don’t know if I can do this forever. I’m not worried about it so much right now because the pounds are coming off. But what about in the future when I no longer want to lose weight. Do I have to still eat the same things over and over every day?
How do you guys manage your food intake? Do you eat a lot of variety, or mostly the same things repeatedly? How do you add variety to your diet and still make it easy to keep track of what your eating?
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
What if you were to plan your menu a week ahead? Over the weekend, chart out 7 breakfasts, 7 lunches and 7 dinners, and their calorie levels. Make sure you have those ingredients on hand (if they are homemade meals versus from a box). Keep the list on your fridge, and when it comes time to eat, just eat one of the pre-planned meals, knowing that the caloric count fits with your plan. This way you can eat for a whole week and never repeat an dish if you don’t want to.
If you get yourself a few big cookbooks with recipes you like, you can go for weeks, months, or even years without ever repeating anything. I love to cook and am always eager to try new recipes so maybe it’s easier for me, but I rarely make the same dish twice (unless it’s so totally awesome that I keep coming back to it again and again; I have about 20 recipes that fall into that category, but I like to keep trying new ones).
You’re right about breakfast, though. I used to call myself a “cereal monogamist” because I could eat the same breakfast cereal for five or six years, every day, before switching to a different one. Mark Bittman has gotten into savory breakfasts lately, and if you look up his Bitten blog on the NY Times site and his Minimalist column in the Times on Thursdays you’ll see he has several recipes for unorthodox breakfasts. Heck, in Japan it’s common to have miso soup for breakfast!
For lunches and snacks I like to make something I can nibble on for a few days, like a Mediterranean lentil salad or a kasha or barley salad – something with beans and vegetables and a few carbos. Carrots and hummus are good for snacks, also nut and fruit mixes.
I agree with Jaynee. Planning a Go-To menu of meals within certain calorie ranges will help add a great deal of variety to your diet.
Over the past few months I have been compiling a collection of recipes from various sources – Epicurious.com, Shape Magazine, Cooking Light etc and have almost 30-35 recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A lot of these do require some cooking or at least assembling of ingredients but they give me a great deal of variety in taste, aromas and flavors.
If you like different ethnic cuisines then really there’s no end to the deliciously healthy recipes out there. Thai, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Ethiopian…. most have at least a few healthy recipes. You could pick a cuisine and make a theme of it for a few days even!
Dang! All this talk of food is making me hungry now!! Time for my morning snack ~ today, a healthy combo of almonds and an apple along with some decaff coffee….
Bon Appetite!
I’m a creature of habit when it comes to food. I have a set 8 recipes I rotate through every two weeks, filling in the few remaining spots either with new recipe experiments or a simple omelet or something. I also cook enough each time for left-overs for the next day’s lunch.
There’s a high potential to get bored, there, but I find adding in the new recipes gives me something to look forward to and a shocking break from the routine. In addition, one bi-weekly menu item is stir-fry, which you can do so many ways. Another is what I call “Pasta a la JBP,” which is just your basic pasta with tomato-paste based sauce, but by varying the veggies with the seasons and from week ro week, you can get a fairly good variety of tastes. That, plus adding in cheese or beans to my weekly salad supply or olives and Bac-O bits, you can get variety there, too.
I guess when it comes down to it, I keep my taste buds happy not by changing up what I eat, but changing the ingredients of what I eat. You don’t change much nutritional value going from red peppers to eggplant, so I stay on track for the calories I need. That, and it’s easier after a long day to just go through the mechanized routine of cooking menu item X with side Y, despite chopping red onions instead of yellow onions.
Well I guess I’m in the same boat as you are Mac. I have trouble getting in my calories, which is a huge shift from around a year ago when I was struggling to control my eating. Of course, my caloric needs are a lot higher than yours, but I have no problem eating the same foods…well I eat the same breakfast everyday, but my lunch varies between 2-3 options. My dinner is different everyday. The weekends I just splurge and eat anything I want.
I’ve been doing great this whole year up until about a week and a half ago, when the boredom began to set in and old habits started to creep up on me. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to weigh in and post my second weight gain in a row.
That’s okay, it tells me that it’s time to change strategies. Eating the same thing every day doesn’t work for me; I love food too much. Between the endless Boca chili and Corn Bran cereal, I’m about to flip out.
True, I should have done something about it LAST weekend, but I didn’t. Own your mistakes and move on, right? Tomorrow afternoon, I’m looking for new recipes and ways to inject a whole lot of variety into my diet.
I’m like Clint – I love food too much to eat just one thing. However, I do tend to do stick with several themes, and vary my meals around those themes. Usually that means mixing up the veggies while keeping the protein and carbs to things I know and love. It’s pretty to keep track of eating this way, when the calorie differences in vegetables isn’t huge. (When I was counting calories I eventually stopped adding up the specific veggies and just took an average.)
For example, when I first started taking my health seriously, I was really into egg white omelets. But I was always mixing up the ingredients in my omelets. Sometimes I’d go basic onion, green pepper, mushroom and tomato… other times I’d get exotic with tomato, onion, cauliflower, chili powder and mango chutney. Now a days, scrambled tofu is my bag, and I scramble it up with whatever veggies I’ve got going. I also make heavy use of herbs and spices to mix things up. Mixed italian herbs and fresh parsley are a mainstay.
Anyway, I hope this helps. I think you just have to be open to experimentation. Next time you’re making your usual lunch sandwich or whatever, think, “I wonder how that would be with a sprinkle of oregano, or a forkful of sauerkraut.” Having salad? Toss in fresh chopped parsley or cilantro. Having a muffin or some oatmeal? Add a smear of almond butter.
Hope this helps…
What do you use to track calories on your iphone?
I’m sort of like you. Mainly bored but it works.
I’ve noticed that you’ve mentioned in several of your posts that you try to eat enough calories to replace what you burn off during exercise. I’m curious as to what the reasoning is behind that. I thought the point of exercise was to burn off calories?
I thought the point of exercise was to feel good and be fitter? Food fuels the fire.
I eat a lot of the same stuff, but it’s a reasonable variety of stuff. I just combine it in different ways and with different spices. I eat omelets and salads a lot, but you can make so many different salads or omelets that you don’t have to eat the same exact one every day. I change up oils and vinegars and ingredients.
Oatmeal or other cereals can take a lot of different ingredients added to keep that fresh as well. If I really get bored and want something like pizza or a muffin or some dark chocolate, I have that on my free/maintenance calorie day.
When I have time, I try a new recipe here or there. It’s generally a good idea to get plenty of variety in the diet, and it’s fun to try new things, so I just enter them in my food database and forge ahead. Calories are just calories… there’s no diet rule that says they have to be boring!
@Dave: Loseit! is the best iphone app I’ve ever used. It’s even free. And I’d pay for it if they ever made the data exportable!