How to Successfully Count Calories – Week 3

Where You Should Be After Week 2 You should have used your food scale by now. Probably daily. Be regularly entering your calories consistently.  You should have your Daily Calorie Goal (for weight loss) by now. You don’t necessarily need to hit your Daily Calorie Goal every single day, but you should be entering every day […]

Eating the Same Foods Daily

I love chocolate cereal. I like other chocolate things as well, but chocolate cereal stole my heart. I don’t see a problem with eating something you like often. In fact, for me it frees up space in my head to focus on more important things, like what variation of chocolate cereal should I try this week. Or bitcoin? 

 

 

I eat the same breakfast most days. I also eat the same before bed snack most days. A lot of the time I eat the same lunch for weeks at a time or a variation on the same lunch.

 

You can read the full outline of my diet in week 2.

How Can You Make The Same Lunch Every Day Work For You?

Does that sound boring? Eating the same lunch every day?? For me that sounds great, but I’m used to it. I also prioritize my favourite foods for my meals, so if I’m having a meal again, it’s usually because I like it.

When I was actively losing weight I felt weird about having the same food every day. So I built variation into my lunches. I still had the same breakfast and the same snacks, but for lunch I would eat:

 

 

  •  
    • half a can of Campbells soup (when they were 540ml – they’re smaller now, so I’m not sure it would be quite enough)

 

    • 2 pieces of toast with cream cheese (about 2 table spoons of cream cheese on MFP)

 

    • Chocolate jello pudding – 60 calories – pre-packaged

 

    • can of diet cola
      Then at 1pm I would have

 

    • Apple

 

    • protein shake (1.5 cups milk, 1 scoop)

 

 

This was nearly every day. The variety came in the form of different soups. So I’d have half the can Monday, finish it on Tuesday. Have another half can Wednesday finish it Thursday. You get the picture.

 

It’s a very similar meal but the taste can vary a lot depending on the soup that is your base. These days I mostly eat peanut butter and jam because it’s amazing.

 

Hungry Time and Negotiation

If you don’t like doing something you’re not going to do it. Even if you want the outcome, you’re not going to consistently do things you don’t like for an outcome you want. Even if you want the outcome a lot.

Instead of using willpower to try to force yourself to do or eat things you don’t like, figure out how you can do things you like while achieving your goal.

 

Tricking Yourself

Would You lie to You? YES. And you should! 

I would often have “eyes bigger than my belly” when loading up my plate. For dinner or for other things (treat days at school when I worked in schools). 

One of the most effective ways I have found of combatting that problem is to actively lie to yourself. It’s not really a lie, but it ends up being a lie.