It's getting easier to keep my weight within range, I think, but it's still a little tricky to decide how to cut calories when I get a bit heavy and (a bit more difficult) to add calories when I get a bit too light.
This morning I was thinking back over my meals and how I feel about them and I realized a few things:
- Breakfast is the meal I am most likely to eat at home, and thus have total control over.
- Furthermore, restaurant breakfast choices include most of my at-home breakfast choices: of all the
breakfasts I might eat at home, I can probably replicate 90 percent of them if I find myself eating
breakfast away from home.
- I wake up in the morning quite hungry and able to eat a lot of food if I want to; but the whole time I was losing weight, I was consistently satisfied with a particular small breakfast.
It's been a while since I performed an experiment on myself, and this one is perhaps going to be a longer one, but here's what I'm going to try:
- If my weight's in range, I'm going to eat pretty much what I want "in moderation," moderation being defined as watching the composition of my plate (half veg, quarter meat, quarter starchy veg or grains), treating carbohydrates with caution, and paying attention to hunger signals.
- If my weight's too low, I will behave normally except at breakfast. At breakfast I'm going to have, in addition to whatever I feel like having, a slice of whole-wheat toast with butter or peanut butter.
- If my weight's too high, I will behave normally except at breakfast. Instead of "whatever I want," I'll eat the Small Diet Breakfast. That is, one egg, boiled or poached, and 4 oz. tomato juice.
The Small Diet Breakfast is, incidentally, about 100 calories, in the apparently-magic-for-me ratio of 50% fat, 25% carb, 25% protein. I find that when I eat whatever I wish to eat for breakfast, I usually hit about 300 calories -- so breakfast will be smaller by approximately 200 calories when I do this.
Adding an ounce of whole wheat bread plus a tablespoon of butter or peanut butter adds around 190 calories, heavier on the carbs than my normal diet.
Of course, it's possible that if I eat "normally" the rest of the day, I'll unconsciously adjust my intake to make up for the change in calories. But it seems like a good hypothesis to try, because I can't think of an easier place to adjust my calories than at breakfast.
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