Eating Healthy

I’ve bounced around to a few different blogs in the past few days thanks to the Friend Making Monday thing and quite a few of them are focused on weight loss and fitness and all that.  I think mainly because that’s the type of blog that started the whole FMM thing.  I know Mandy has had a few posts about recipes and such that really looked good.  I spent a few weeks way earlier in this blogs life posting about food on Fridays but the idea that I would *have* to write about food for every Friday would kill the spontaneity that drives the writing behind this whole blog.  Once it is planned writing, it’s a job and I do enough work at work.

Anyways, eating healthy is something that I try to do pretty much every day simply as a way of giving my body the proper fuel it needs to do all the crazy amounts of activity that I engage in.  I’d like to say I have a plethora of amazing and wonderful recipes, but I don’t.  I make a lot of things, but few of them are “dishes” worthy of their own name and what not.

I follow a few general rules when it comes to food. 

Almost nothing that is fried is probably my number one food rule.  There are exceptions, but generally if it’s fried I don’t eat it.  Chicken wings and french fries I miss quite a bit but they soak up so much of the oil that it’s just not practical.  Wings are limited to Habs vs Leafs games when Alf is over, and Fries are just a few stolen from someone else’s plate here and there.  Onion rings are not so bad, but I don’t get them often.  The one fried thing I’ll have more than once in a blue moon is tempura.  Specifically squid tempura and vegetable tempura.  So good.

Lean meats is another general rule, so general in fact that the only thing I avoid like the plague now is ground beef.  I eat ground chicken instead, I’ll have lamb and pork and once in a while a steak (mostly due to cost of a good steak)  But I’ve also figured out the calories on all those things and chicken is about 1:1 compared to the weight in grams (100 grams is about equal to 100 calories) pork is about 1:1.5 and steak is about 1:2.  The calculations are incredibly general, but it works for the limited calorie counting I still do.

Lots of fruit and veggies – they are great I stack my plate with them all the time, I keep the heavy starchy ones low if I can help it, but carrots or green beans or the like – pile them on!  It’s a great way to fill my tummy without the cost of calories that other items would bring.

If I’m going to have a treat like ice cream or whatever I’m still sure that I earn it, with a run on the same day, or a bike ride out to the ice cream shop or something like that.  It’s common to think ‘oh I just did an hour of exercise I shouldn’t ruin it’ but as long as it’s in moderation, have that treat, your metabolism is pumping your body will burn it.  Especially once you are in shape.

I have a calorie range limit in mind and stick to it.  In a month I might stray from that limit once or twice, but even then it’s by 100 or 200.  Eat what your body needs, not what your eyes want to devour, that’s really the key to eating healthy I think.