Diet

I am overweight. With living with my family it is easier to eat with them than separately, especially with having a small kitchen and a limited budget for food. So, to eat less, I have taken the simple course of fasting on weekdays: I don't eat anything before 1600 after which I have a snack so I am not driving home in rush-hour traffic with low blood glucose. For a while I was losing maybe half a pound per week on average but last summer it started to stall. I am actually now lighter than I have been for a long time and over last month I did lose a few pounds again but I thought I should try a little harder to see if I could return to a more consistent loss. So, while continuing the fasting, I have also started to count calories. I hope to weigh under two hundred pounds before much longer.

It has been an interesting experience. I already know a bit about nutrition and satiety but, in counting the calories in everything, simply knowing how expensive some foods are has made me rethink or adjust some decisions. The budget that I have set for myself turns out to be palatable: I allow myself treats, but generally just not as much, or fewer at once. For this past week I had given myself 12,500 calories as a limit and ended up eating maybe a thousand less than that so this regime is sufficiently behavior-changing without feeling like a straitjacket. Just this weekend I still ate plenty of pizza and cheesecake, I put mayonnaise on sandwiches, and I had a ginger beer, a whisky, some chocolate, and an amaretto morbido. One might reasonably ask what more I might have eaten had I not had to account for it all and the answer is perhaps mostly in terms of portion size. In short, the diet's improving my eating but in a way I can live with.

I try to eat only enough to not feel hungry. I do try to eat plenty of vegetables and legumes, together with some fish, poultry, and various wholegrains. I still allow myself other meats, some dairy, etc., for variety, but not much or often. I like herbs, spices and other seasonings to help the healthful food to remain appealing.