Episode 132 – Jonathan, What Do You Eat?
Posted on June 9, 2016
It’s Q&A Thursday’s and our question is in from Triple Threat Kay who asks: Jonathan, what kind of food do you eat? This is an interesting question because I’m alway’s evaluating how I eat, how I can eat better, and why I eat the way I do, it if that makes any sense at all. This is very personal to me, but hopefully you can find some strategies and tactics that will work for you as well.
I thought this episode was going to be really simple for me to record, because in my mind the answer’s so clear and it’s easy for me to eat the way that I do and make the choices I do, I mean I’m talking about myself how can I not know? But as I wrote the outline to this episode I realized it’s a lot more complicated than I thought it was, it’s hard for me to lay it out in a plain understandable and digestible way that you can consume. Both of those puns were intended by the way.
I’ll start with how I decide what I eat or how I make the food choices that I do. I use this sort of guiding star system in my mind where I have food’s that I can more or less eat and unlimited amount of, I have foods that I eat a moderate amount of and there are foods that I try to never eat and avoid entirely.
Foods like fruits and vegetables, lean meats, eggs, milk, whole grains like kamut and spelt flakes, starchy vegetables like potatoes, carrots, beets, are all things that I can eat as much of as I want to. Basically anything that’s a whole food that’s not really high in fat I can eat an unlimited amount of.
Next on the list are foods I eat in moderation, but I try not to eat too often or I measure to eat, these are things like nuts, seeds, organic crackers, dehydrated fruit, avocado anything that’s a whole food that is very calorically dense or organic and flour based like bread, crackers and nachos. I eat these food’s sometimes, but really try to limit them.
Last on the list are food’s that I should probably never eat, these are the chocolates, the ice cream’s, fudge, chips, caramel corn, soft drinks, fruit juices, processed meats, all the foods that pretty much anyone should be able to look at and say ‘yeah I shouldn’t eat that food.’ Food’s that many people would call ‘bad’. And every once in a while I will reevaluate some of the food’s on my lists and whether they should move up or down in one of the categories based on what I’m reading learning and just from the experience of eating. But if I’m being completely honest, foods almost only get down graded to a lower level of I shouldn’t eat them, unless they are new foods I’ve never heard of then they get a fair shake.
The way I came up with my list is I start with whether or not a food is a whole food. Whole foods almost always start at the top level, then I look at where their calories come from and how calorically dense they are and then they stay at the top or they move down to lower category.
If a food is processed or in a box then I read the label to see how many calories, how much sugar, fibre, fat and if that passes my internal test of low sugar, low caloric density, high fibre etc. I look at the ingredients list, if I see sugar, hydrogenated oil or a bunch of unknown ingredients that I can’t pronounce they get auto downgraded a level, but usually a level 3 or a ‘I won’t even touch this level’
How I eat each meal is a slightly different story, I usually try to eat one carb, one protein and one vegetable or fruit in all of my meals. Sometimes I’ll skip the carbohydrate in a snack, but it depends if I’m exercising or not on a given day. A good example of this is for lunch today I made a Greek salad that had lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives and feta cheese on it and then I put mixed bean medley as my protein for it, I had a handful of organic crackers just for a little bit a hold and because I exercised today, and a bowl of raspberries for dessert. It’s a really good example of a meal I would have. I try to make every single meal, whether it’s a salad or a plated meal to have that kind of a mix of vegetables or fruit and protein usually fish or beans and if I want something sweet for dessert I have a piece of fruit.
I haven’t always eaten this way, I used to eat in a much more unhealthy way, lots of bread, crackers, cereal, pasta, chocolate covered nuts. My relationship with food is a little bit complicated, so my food preparation needs to start in the grocery store by only purchasing foods on my unlimited eat list or eat only in moderation list. Then when I come home I store the foods that I know I should eat more of in easy to reach places and food that I shouldn’t eat I put in places that are out of sight and harder for me get, so much so, that sometimes I can forget that they’re even there. Foods that are on my I should never eat those lists I try to never buy or I will only buy on the weekend for special occasions, and occasional the mere fact that it’s Friday is occasion enough. It’s the only way I can control my eating those foods because I’m the type of person that once I start eating the tray of brownies
or the bag of cookies I’ll finish the whole thing or eat until I feel sick, which is not good.
The last thing to look at is that I eat a lot of the same foods over and over again. I eat the same thing for breakfast, well almost the same thing for breakfast every day which is a half cup of kamut flakes, some cinnamon and a tablespoon of raisins and a couple of over easy eggs. If for some reason I’m out of kamut flakes then I will eat an English muffin with peanut butter on it instead. In case you’re wondering kamut flakes are like oatmeal, but not. The other thing I do is I make my lunch the night before with leftovers from the dinner and this does two things: it pre-measures my food so I know roughly how much I’m eating, it keeps me from eating more dinner than I should and saves me time because it’s ready to go, all I have to do is grab it. In terms of portion control it’s possibly the best strategy I have for not over eating.
To eat less in general, I follow a lot of the principles from the book Slim by Design by Dr. Brian Wansink and I’m devoted to experimentation and trying to make better choices as I go and eery once in a while I throw caution to the wind and give myself permission to eat whatever I want and not feel guilty about it.
I’ll be honest, eating has been one of the hardest things for me to get a grip on in terms of living a healthy lifestyle, one time I ate a bag of Oreos for dinner and I ate a 1.4kg bag of chocolate covered almonds in two days, I get cravings, sometimes I eat too much and I am by no means perfect. I understand what it’s like to have a showdown with a piece of cake, mmmm maybe I’ll just have one bite just for the taste, suddenly half the cake disappears. I know what it’s like to live with someone that is very capable of only eating two cookies out of the bag.
If I had to boil this down into one summary, being patient and understanding this stuff takes time in order to be sustainable, being committed to experimenting and not being hard on myself when I eat more than I should and planning have been the biggest thing that has helped me eat how I do and much better than I used to before, helping me be the healthiest person I can.
Triple Threat K thanks for that question, I hope you found my answer helpful, I got more personal than I intended, but I guess that’s just where I needed go. If you know someone that struggles with how they’re eating and has trouble making better choices please share this with them, hopefully they can relate at least a little bit and take something away from it, to get them moving in a different direction.
