May 13: So Bad For Me

How often do you eat foods that you know are bad for your body?

 

Um… CONSTANTLY!! I know that I shouldn’t, and I know that it’s wrong for me to do so, but I just can’t help myself. It just tastes to damn good, and is so incredibly satisfying.

In saying that though, I will at least acknowledge that my diet, generally speaking, is quite healthy. Dinners are usually vegetables or salad with some kind of lean protein like fish or kangaroo or chicken, and recently we’ve been getting into Quinoa, which is quite good for you… And I drink a lot of green / herbal tea. I’ve swapped sugar for Xylitol which is a natural sweetener, and not that nasty white stuff (although I use that for baking…!!) but my weakness is cake and biscuits.

Fuuuuuck me. I wish I could kick it, but I just can’t seem to. There’s a sugar addiction deep within me. It’s grabbed hold of something and it’s refusing to let go. I’ll easily polish an entire back of biscuits before I’ve even finished my cup of tea. Or, maybe before I finish my second cuppa. Put a cake in front of me, and I have to exercise ridiculous amounts of restraint to eat just one slice, because if you so much as turn your back, I’ll inhale that damn thing, and devour the crumbs and make that plate look like there was never anything on it. It’s disgusting, and so very wrong, but it just can’t help myself.

The absolute worst is cupcakes. SWEET BABY JESUS!! For me, cupcakes are like crack. And it certainly doesn’t help when there is a cupcake shop right outside our local supermarket… Everytime we go there and do some groceries… Cupcakes. Need to just rush in and pick up a few last-minute things for dinner? Grab some cupcakes. Just finished lunch before you go and do grocery shopping? Let’s just get some cupcakes for when we get home and have a cuppa.

I know that by comparison, our diet would be somewhere in the middle. It’s not ridiculously healthy, nor is it super unhealthy but there in the middle. There’s certainly room for improvement, but that requires effort.

May 12: Nutrition vs. Taste

How do you balance good nutrition and good taste?

 

Generally speaking, I was always of the view that if it’s supposed to be good for you, healthy etc then it must taste like crap. On the flip side, if it tastes amazing, then it must be bad for you.

However, over the years as I’ve grown and as my palette has developed, I’ve discovered that healthy food can actually taste good. Don’t get me wrong, there are still foods out there that are good for you, and taste like some kind of fowl hell, (yeah, I’m looking at you corn and Brussel sprouts!!) and don’t even get me started on things like gluten-free – that’s just so much wrong, I can’t even begin to explain! I guess it’s because I’ve always had a diet that has used utter and full-cream milk – all those ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ ingredients that actually make food taste amazing.

Over the past few years I have managed to implement ‘healthier’ alternatives in my diet – we use a soy-based spread instead of butter; swapped full-cream for semi-skim… We also eat a lot more lean meats and vegetables… But in saying that we also have a weakness for cupcakes and potato chips… Our diet isn’t perfect, but it’s not terrible either.

I find that I’m still in the mindset that if it’s healthy it doesn’t taste that great, and requires a lot of seasoning / flavouring etc. every now and then friends of mine who have extremely healthy diets will get me to taste something they’ve made, particularly ‘raw food’ which actually tastes incredible. Those moments mess with my head because it just seems too good to be true that something so yummy can actually be healthy for you… I still don’t understand it, and then they tell me how easy it is to make, however easy = time consuming + expensive ingredients… And let’s face it, I’m just lazy.

May 1 – Meal Time

Tell us how you eat: do you sit down to three meals, eat several small meals, or grab a granola bar on the run?

I almost don’t even want to write this post, because I already know that I’m going to get flack for it, because I don’t really eat properly… well, I mean I do, but I also don’t.