Day 3: A New Way of Looking at Food

Day 3, Wednesday January 21, 2015

Everyone has a favorite food, mine is anything spicy – the hotter the better!

I thought I had always needed the heat to make my food taste better, boy was I wrong.

All this time I was covering up the flavor in food with the heat and in the process eating more food to stop the heat. It was a vicious cycle that I started when I was younger.

Heck, I even told myself that I graduated from jalapenos to habaneros just to increase the heat. But really it was my hunger for more food that was really in charge of my eating habits and not my need for heat.

So when I knew we had Planet Fitness, EPCC and others on board to do Fit for ’15, I made a conscious decision to also take a break from spicy food and peppers.

You may ask yourself why? Well the best way to describe it is a slippery slope and I didn’t want to slip.

As I prepared myself for what I thought would be tasteless food and the absence of heat in life, I decided to plan my meals for the entire week.

So during my weigh-in I asked my Planet Fitness Trainer Nancy Diaz if she could suggest foods I could eat.

She first asked me how many times a day I eat a meal, I replied two and that I only ate lunch and dinner.

Nancy said I needed to increase that to a minimum of 5 meals a day and to add breakfast and snacks to fuel my weight loss and nothing bigger than the size of my fist, luckily I have large hands!

So below is what a typical day of meals looks like for me:

Breakfast (Before my workout)

cup of oatmeal cup of frozen blueberries

Snack

1 Apple 1-2 small oranges

Lunch

Turkey or Chicken Spinach Salad

Snack

1 Celery Stalk 1 Carrot

Dinner

2 Hard Boiled Eggs 1-2 slices of ham or turkey Sliced Carrots Sliced Celery

This may look like a small amount of food but along with drinking water throughout the day the meal plan above kept me feeling full, never hungry and surprisingly satisfied.