Part of your X a day...

Following on from positive rant about my progress made at the gym this is a quick look at my diet and my ongoing quest to reach a body shape/weight that I'm comfortable with.

Everyone is familiar with the recommended 5-a-day servings of fruit and veg. Now, it doesn't take a pro mathematician to tell you that one way to achieve this would be to have a portion at every meal, breakfast, dinner and tea, and pick up the other two portions via a mid-morning and a mid-afternoon/supper break.
Compound that with the recommendation that along with that we all should also aim for 3 servings of wholegrain wheat/fibre or at least that's what the animated cereal boxes before the weather tell me.
Now if you take those two recommendations, the only method of achieving this is to have either fruit and fibre or fruit-themed weetabix for every single meal of the day. Factor in all the other foodstuffs we should be eating, I read somewhere that you should try and eat fish once (it may have been twice) a week on top of that.

I am of course being a little silly but there is a quickly knocked up, rough round the edges solution to the problem. I am complaining as it seems pretty hardcore to actually succeed in hitting the target number of portions but I feel I am getting part way there, plus the other changes I've made to my diet which seemed to have had a positive effect (that is implied from the lack of negative effect)

When trying to start any positive habit, I've learnt some methods to hack out the result I want. The crucial lesson is to make small steps. Like with my gym attendance, at first I set myself a target of regular attendance, rather than actual targets in terms of distance run, weight bench-pressed etc and the same can be said with improving your diet. Now, I am the first to admit that my diet is less than perfect, but to increase my fruit intake I said to myself, hey buy a bunch of bananas and see how I get along. I evolved that into swapping a chocolate treat after my tea with a banana instead. I've now reached the point where if I choose to skip the post-tea banana or the house is out of bananas, I actually miss it. Now, that's taken a fair few weeks to build up the habit but it's now pretty much hard-coded into my daily routine.

As I alluded to above, I've also cut out pretty much all chocolate from my diet, the only chocolate I have now are the treats my Nan gives me whenever I go back home now. I still find myself every now and then thinking, "mmm, I could really go for a Mars bar," but not having them in the house makes the temptation only very slight.

I probably mentioned in passing the "fun" I had when I got some hardcore toothache towards the end of last year, I had to go in for root canal treatment. The cause of the problem was surprise, surprise too much sugar in my diet, particularly concentrate fruit juice. As a result of this, I've reduced the sugar in my diet which as there has been no noticeable negative effect, must be judged as positive. So pretty much every drink I have is sugar-free; I only drink Coke Zero now (if I have it in) which actually isn't too bad, it maintains the syrupy goodness I love, it's not for everybody, but it's something I think is pretty awesome. I've also dropped from 2 sugars to 1 sugar in my coffee at work. And speaking of Coffee, I've swapped over to Decaff which has not made me any more tired - it's all in your head that coffee keeps you awake.

There's quite a few more things I've done to achieve a diet that is a bit more healthy. I used to be an advocate for full-fat (blue) milk. They could have got me to go round people's houses and try to sell it, I was that much of a fan. I've managed to move from blue to green, and then from green to red, the semi-skimmed option which is the lowest in fat. I've also taken up drinking Cranberry juice (low in sugar variety of course) which is supposed to be very good for you what with all the antioxidants contained within (plus it apparently has more vitamin C in than concentrate Orange juice wtf!). I used to always snack around 10-11pm, so I'm slowly moving my teatime back in the evening to prevent munchies occurring before bed - I cannot sleep on an empty-ish stomach.

One part of my diet which still needs much improving is the fact that I still eat a fair amount of cheese. I intend to reach a point where, thanks to me finally learning how to knock out a cheese sauce, I will only consume cheese as part of the aforementioned cheese sauce to go with pasta. My Nan still likes to make cheese and onion quiche (and I still like to eat it :D) so that will eventually be the only other time.

I think I've been pretty successful in all these changes due to the fact that I've never set myself a target - "I will cut this food out of my diet by next Friday", and that way I've been taking those small steps towards my goal. It's not important how long it takes to get there, only that I get there eventually. Of course it may be better for some to set dates as part of targets, it's different for everyone. To quote scrubs

"A day spent wishing is a day wasted. If you want to be different, then be different" - Janitor

That being taken from the episode where Elliot has a makeover into the hot rocker chick with the messed-up hairdo.