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.

Daily Prompt: Pour Some Sugar on Me

What is your favorite sweet thing to eat? Bread pudding? Chocolate chip oatmeal cookies? A smooth and creamy piece of cheesecake? Tell us all about the anticipation and delight of eating your favorite dessert. Not into sweets? Tell us all about your weakness for that certain salty snack.

 

For people like me, who have a real severe sweet tooth, having to pick one, has the same dread as a parent having to pick their favourite child. How can I possibly pick my favourite sweet thing to eat??

There’s simply too many choices.

At this precise moment, I could totally murder a family-sized custard tart… or an entire cake – like a chocolate Swiss roll, or a butter cake, or like a half-dozen chocolate croissants. Or an entire packet of biscuits – I don’t really care what type of biscuits, just as long as I get to eat an entire packet (or three) of them.

I have a weakness when it comes to sweet things and desserts. And I mean major weankess!! I just can’t restrain myself. In my drawer at work, more specifically my bottom drawer, is where I keep most of my food – like all my crackers, and tins of tuna, and powdered soup packets… but I also have my rectangular plastic container.

In that container I usually have it filled with a few different sweet-snacky things. At the moment I have a few individual packets of low-calorie berry-flavoured biscuits – they’re new on the market, so I decided to try them. In every flavour.

I also have these small banana and choc-chip two-bite snack cake things. Naturally there was three different flavours when I first discovered them, so had to buy a box of each, and have also slowly eaten my way through those as well.

Not to mention the odd mini packet of flavoured Tim Tams… or the odd chocolate bar…

Oh and when one of the parents brings a chocolate fundraising box to work, I’m gladly donating money to that… simply because I can get giant Freddo Frogs and Caramello Koalas for a dollar… A WHOLE DOLLAR!!

I don’t actually think it really matters what the item is, as long as it’s sweet and there’s plenty of it, I’ll go to town with it. Block of chocolate… it’ll be all gone within minutes. I don’t seem to be able to restrain myself, or slow down to savour the flavour, or enjoy the moment… my brain will see a block of chocolate, an entire cake, a box of truffles etc as a challenge and say ‘Right. See all of that?? How fast can you get that into your belleh?? You’ve got a 5-minute time limit. If you can’t finish that whole thing within five minutes, then you’re nothing more than an embarrassment. And a failure. A completely embarrassing failure. You make me sick. What the fuck is wrong with you? What do you mean you don’t feel well?? How dare you let that stop you?! GET OUT OF MY SITE IMMEDIATELY!!’

When I was younger, it was even worse. I had something called ‘The Oprah Box’, which was stashed away within the depths of my wardrobe. It was a red square box, and it was always stocked with packets of biscuits and lollies and blocks of chocolate. And I mean always!. Sometimes I’d get home late at night from dancing, and if I was staying up late studying, I’d attack the box. If my homegirl B came over, we’d attack the box together. There was always something in it.

It amazes me how I don’t have diabetes already. God knows I was certainly on the right path to developing it. I think because I actually eat normal food the rest of the time, and it’s actually pretty healthy, plus the fact that I’m quite regularly active at the gym.

As I finish this post, I’m currently sitting in the food court of a city shopping centre… people around me are eating Mickey D’s and it smells so. damn. good. I just wanna go smash down a couple of burgers, but I have to go to the gym later on, and I simply can’t do it to myself.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/daily-prompt-pour-some-sugar-on-me/