Episode 251 – Did I Eat 2 Dozen or 3 Dozen Cookies Saturday Night?
Posted on March 20, 2017
If you’re new to the show welcome, if you’ve been listening for a while thank you for coming back, I hope you find today’s episode useful, interesting and at least a little bit entertaining, I know we’re a little hit or miss there sometimes, but I try. We’re going to do some different things with the format of this show including bringing some of our other trainers on, giving more case studies, having conversations instead of just having me talking, I don’t know exactly how we’re going to roll that out yet, but if you have the chance I think you should hit the subscribe button, because things are going to change on a more regular basis and most of the shows are going to have a different feel than how we do them now.
If you’ve been a longtime listener of the show you’ll know that sometimes I struggle with how much food I eat, I think episode 37 Evaluating why I got punched in the face summed it up really well, that sometimes I get out of control on weekends, and I don’t mean a little out of control I mean a lot, now on the bright side my weekend has gone down to Saturday and Sunday where I can eat whatever I want and doesn’t include Friday anymore which has been a positive step in the right direction, however this past Saturday night I went on a binge, it started with a couple of beers and Thai takeout which was fine, but those couple of beers quickly went from 2 to 4 then 4 to 6, then the 3 dozen, yes 3 dozen chocolate chip cookies that my good friend Katrina had left on her counter started to look awfully good and while we were playing our game together and there was downtime between turns, which there was a lot of, I would walk over to the counter and help myself to a cookie or two and by midnight that night. I had managed to consume somewhere between 8 and 12 beers (you know to support the local brewery) and I don’t know how many cookies, but there were 4 of us there and there were only 3 cookies of the 3 dozen left and I know I ate most of them. Needless to say when I woke up the next morning I did not feel very good, but good enough to eat 4 chocolate crepes, with homemade nutella, whipped cream and a bunch of fruit and good enough after that to eat bean nachos for Sunday night dinner which is usually reserved for Friday night only as a treat. When I woke up early on Monday morning to start my day I felt like I got hit by a truck, I was thirsty like I’ve never been thirsty before and I was hungry, in a way that I’ve never felt hunger before, I was craving, you guessed it…..vegetables. I know, this is weird, right? I’ve never and I mean never craved vegetables.
I had to think about this for a bit, normally when I eat lots of chocolate and other unhealthy foods, I crave more and more of those foods, however since mid January I’ve been eating a lot less of them on a regular basis. All of our Christmas baking and chocolates that we’re given to us has been gone for a while, I’ve only really been eating sugary foods on Saturday nights and consciously I’ve been trying to eat less and the other thing is I’ve been a Pescatarian since August of last year, a little over 7 months, if you’re not sure what a Pescatarian is, it’s a vegetarian that eats fish. Don’t worry I was one for 2 months before I found out there was a name for it, if you didn’t know you’re not alone. Anyways, I’ve been making a real conscious effort to eat more vegetables, I take vegetables with me everyday in my lunch and dip them in hummus, I eat several giant salads a week, with all kinds of veggies and fruit on them and my wife has really gone gungho on making plant based dinners, so I’ve been eating a lot of vegetables. Once I put it in this context, now it makes more sense, I hardly ate any vegetables over the weekend, but I had been eating so many up until this point my body was going through some kind of vegetable withdrawal and now I was not only craving them I felt like I had to eat them.
Here’s my main gist, if I can call it that, the more food you eat of a certain type the more you’re going to crave that food, if you eat a lot of fruit you’ll want more fruit, if it’s chocolate you’ll want more chocolate, if it’s bread you’ll want bread. Whether it’s the bacteria in your digestive tract, your taste buds or something else entirely different it doesn’t matter all you need to know is, the more you eat the more you want it.
For the next dietary change you make, instead of restricting your diet like so many people do, I want you to just start eating more of the foods you know you should be eating more of. If that’s cauliflower, just eat more cauliflower you might have to dip it in hummus, but that’s okay, It’s what I did to start eating it, because I used to hate cauliflower and now I love it, even plain. If you want more fibre keep a bowl of black beans in your fridge and you can sprinkle them on anything you’re already eating, that’s another thing I do for more fibre and protein.
I want you to think about a specific food or a group of foods you know you should be eating more of, now I want you to figure out a way to get more into your diet, and just commit yourself to eating that food everyday by making it as readily available as possible and preparing it in anyway that gets you to eat it and slowly over time your body will start to crave more of that and if it works out in your favour, you will not only survive but you will also thrive in the days after that weekend you devoured no less than 2 dozen cookies.
If you feel inspired to change or would like some more resources outside of this podcast, I strongly encourage you to check out our facebook page, youtube channel and our blog. We have a tonne of free content there as well as lots of videos so you can actually see how to do some of the stuff we talk about here, we put links for all of that in our show notes.
