It’s the weekend yet again and time to think about what I am going to eat for the next week. Normally it is not a problem as I have a four week menu system that I designed. It is flexible enough to slip new recipes in and to take some recipes out depending on how I am feeling.
I get very easily bored by eating the same things all the time and need to regularly change our dinners. I have very wide tastes in food and like just about everything. During the last three years my tastes have changed too and I find that I now eat things I would never have considered eating three years ago. For example, I now eat sardines fairly often whereas before I would never have even thought of having them.
Anyway, I have been thinking this week that I would like to try some new recipes but the overall menu for the week must be healthy and follow the following healthy eating guidelines:
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At least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. I love all kinds of vegetables so do not find this difficult. I have to be careful with fruit because they contain more natural sugars. However, if you do not have diabetes then this will not be a problem for you. I keep telling my family that they should eat a rainbow meaning they should eat a wide variety of colours as each colour provides different nutrients. They seem to like this idea and it helps to encourage them to eat up their fruit and veg.
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3 portions of whole grains a day such as wholewheat pitta bread, wholewheat bread, brown basmati rice, wholewheat pasta, oats, bran etc. I normally have oats for breakfast, pitta bread for lunch and then basmati rice or pasta for dinner.
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4 portions of fish per week. Two oily types of fish such as mackerel and salmon and two non-oily fish such as haddock and canned tuna. For lunch I will often have mackerel, salmon, sardines or tuna in pitta bread and then for dinner have cod, haddock, fresh tuna, fresh salmon etc.
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Lean meats with visible fat removed such as extra lean minced beef and poultry such as chicken breasts without the skin. I always have two dinners which include chicken, one dinner which includes extra lean minced beef or other lean meat such as pork steaks. On a Sunday we always have a roast but I try to choose the leanest meat I can and cook it without adding any extra fat.
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Skimmed milk, no fat/low fat yoghurt, low fat cheese. I do not eat much cheese although I love it as I have found that even low fat cheese is quite high in fat. I love fat free natural yoghurt (with no added sugar) and will often have it on strawberries in the summer. I always have skimmed milk on my cereal or in my cups of tea. I do not often drink coffee any more as I have totally gone off it even though three years ago I was a coffee addict.
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Beans, nuts, seeds, pulses. I almost always have butter beans on a Sunday and have red kidney beans once a week in a healthy chilli con carne or a totilla. I have a few walnuts and seeds with my breakfast cereal. I also like lentils but other family members are not very keen on them. I am always on the lookout for recipes with lentils that I think they might eat. Pine nuts are very nice sprinkled on fruit.
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A small treat – I like my two squares of 70% cocoa chocolate in the evening!
This picture from the Foods Standards Agency, the Eatwell Plate, is a very good visual guide to what we should be eating and in what proportions.
Photo from stock.xchng
Being obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or more, is bad for one’s health but a new study reported in the New York Times states that being a few pounds overweight could protect people, especially the elderly, from an early death.
Researchers found that while underweight and obese people die earlier than people of normal weight, those who are overweight actually live longer than people of normal weight.
From this study it looks like keeping a healthy lifestyle is more important than losing a few extra pounds. However, the researchers are keen to emphasise that they are not encouraging people to put on weight as there are many negative health consequences associated with being overweight and obese.
In order to enjoy better health it is important to choose a healthy lifestyle by making good food choices, taking regular exercise and keeping blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar under control.
Perhaps we should all stop beating ourselves up about being a few pounds overweight and concentrate more on achieving a healthy lifestyle if we want to improve our overall health rather than just concentrating on what the scales tell us we weigh.
Val’s recent blog post, Organization, schedules, sunscreen and lipstick in which she describes the organisation or lack of organisation in her life made me chuckle because she sounds so much like me.
The lack of organisation in my life drives me nuts and every time I spend hours searching for something I vow that I will be more organised in future. However, no matter how much I want things to be organised and no matter how much energy I put in to getting things more organised, my life is still in chaos and the more I try to organise things, the more chaotic I seem to make it!
However, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes I decided that I really needed to organise my diet much better than I had up until then. I decided that all processed and convenience foods would be eliminated from my diet and I would live on natural foods as much as possible.
I also had a family to look after which included two adult males and I was responsible for cooking the evening meal. I did not have time or the will to cook separate meals for them and separate meals for me so what was I going to do?
I explained to the men that the food I had to eat had to be what a normal person on a healthy diet would eat and fortunately, probably due to media influences around the time, they decided that it would be a good idea if they improved their diet too.
Now all I had to do was to get organised.
This is how I did it:
- I found some healthy recipes to cook for our evening meal. There are lots of recipe books and websites full of healthy recipes available these days so it was not that difficult to find some easy to cook family recipes.
- I made myself a weekly meal planner and jotted down the meals I planned to eat that week.
- I bought myself a ring binder and put those recipes in plastic pockets inside of the binder.
- I then made my shopping list by jotting down the ingredients I needed from each of the recipe pages.
It was easy and I was on my way to a much healthier way of eating.
I have kept this system up for almost three years and I could not live without it now. The best thing about it is that it frees up my time for more interesting things. I no longer have to spend hours thinking of things we can eat and no longer just pick up anything in the supermarket. Grocery shopping is now much quicker too.
Over the years I have added lots of new recipes to my recipe file and have a four week menu plan so we never have the same evening meal more than once a month. This makes sure our diet is varied and also helps us not to miss out on our favourite dishes. The ring binder is especially flexible as recipes can be added, taken out and rearranged as necessary.
Below are some Weekly Meal Planners I have created for you to use to set up your weekly menus. Click on the picture of the meal planner you would like. The meal planner will open as a PDF document for you to print. Alternatively, right click on the download link and save to your hard drive.
I hope these help you to organise your diet with very little hassle.
Download
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Download
I was interested to read Why those oh-so-healthy diet foods make us eat even more in the Mail Online which tells us that people who are on diets to lose weight can eat just as many calories as they would if they were not on a diet even though they are eating healthier food.
It reminded me of a good friend of mine who, when on a diet, thought he could eat as many crispbreads as he wanted. Even though I tried to explain that it was not what he ate but the amount of calories he consumed that make him put on weight, he still could not understand. He had it in his head that chocolate, biscuits and cakes made him fat but crispbreads, apples and other so called diet food would not make him put on weight. Needless to say, he did not succeed in losing weight.
Unfortunately, the simple truth is, if you eat more calories than your body uses up in energy then you will put on weight. Your body does not care where those calories come from. If it cannot use the calories up then it stores them as fat. Eat just one more apple than you need each day and at the end of the year you could put on more than 7lbs of fat.
The lesson to be learned is to eat healthy food but not to eat too much of it!
Photo from stock.xchng
To stay healthy it is important to follow a healthy lifestyle every day. This involves permanently changing our eating and exercising habits.
In her blog post, ‘Diet’ Is A Horrible Word, Darya Pino maintains that when one says they are going on a diet they mean they are intending to change their eating habits temporarily in order to lose weight. However, the biggest problem with dieting is that many people find they put on weight again when they finish their diet. In some cases, they even end up weighing more than they did before they began their diet.
This is why it is so important to make sure that any changes to one’s diet are permanent. This rules out fad diets like the banana diet, the baby food diet, the Atkins diet or any other short term change in eating habits. The diet one adopts must be something that can provide all the nutrients our body needs and must be something we can follow for the rest of our lives. Otherwise we will fall off the bandwagon and the weight will creep back on again.
Therefore, lets throw out the diet and concentrate more on filling our bodies with good food like whole grains, fruit, vegetables and lean meats and throw out the sugar and fat laden foods found in fizzy drinks, cakes, biscuits, crisps and fast food.
Make a permanent change in your eating habits and get fit this summer!
July 11, 2009 1:43 am | 
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