I'd usually eat a smaller salad with dinner, but more often than not, it was a very small portion of the meal - dwarfed by a mound of instant potatoes, formerly frozen vegetables, and a big piece of meat that was slathered with oil and put on the grill.
The plate pictured in this post is one of my more frequent dinners these days - dark salad greens, two carrots, two pieces of celery, half a green pepper, and a piece of broiled salmon. If it's been a particularly active day, I'll add couscous.
Lunch used to be a sandwich from work, featuring meat and cheese, with a handfull of potato chips. These days it's a garden salad from work, light on the dressing, with added mushrooms and spinach.
Breakfast used to be coffee. More often than not, a mocha.
The coffee is still there - my morning mocha is the one refined sugar luxury that I allow myself daily. But now it's preceded by a fresh fruit smoothy made of three or four kinds of fruit, blended with orange juice and Greek yogurt.
Snacks used to be my biggest guilty pleasure. In a week, I might polish off two bags of Doritos, three or four Snickers bars. Then there were the cookies, bars, ice cream, all kinds of buttered toast...
These days, the toast is grain toast with Greek yogurt, peanut butter, or sun butter. I'll usually have two pieces of one or the other in a day.
My other snack choices are usually nuts, fruit, carrot sticks, a glass of milk, or another smoothy.
And if I want a sweet, creamy dessert, last night I found what might be my new go-to dish.
I took about a cup of Greek yogurt, stuck it in the freezer for about ten minutes, drizzled it with about a teaspoon of honey, and a handfull of diced, fresh strawberries. As long as I don't over do it, that strikes me as a pretty awesome way to satisfy my sweet tooth.
Every time I eat, I'm faced with the option of eating something good or bad. Every trip to the store, I'm met with the temptation to buy junk food...
Sometimes it's a tough choice, sometimes it's easy, and sometimes I'll slip. But when it's totaled up, my diet has improved by leaps and bounds when compared with the way I've eaten in the last few years.
my appetite in the middle and added more protein back to my diet in the form of yogurt, instead of just nuts, fish, and the small amount of ground beef on my heavier workout days.