As my 24th birthday approaches (although according to the latest issue of Competitor I've already reached that age!) I was desperately trying to think of a blog post. Having nothing to note in training (weights make my muscles hurt, I'm still not a very good swimmer etc, etc...) I got thinking about what I do with the time I'm not training, eating or sleeping. Whilst this is a very small segment of my life most of the time I have spare is taken up with cooking. One thing I have really enjoyed about having a bit more free time is that I have been able to really improve my culinary repertoire, as well as being able to experiment a little more. This got me thinking about how my diet has changed over the last few years of my life and I was able to break it down into four distinct periods:
1. High Fat/Low Clue - this involved me having 2 meals before 8am, usually Frosties with full cream milk and then a full breakfast sandwich on the way to school. A full breakfast sandwich is exactly what it sounds like, bacon, egg, sausage, mushroom, cheese and extra grease. Lunch was often a battered sausage and chip butty (at a recession busting £1) and each day usually featured at least a pack of fig rolls. (AKA the moob diet.)
2. Low fat/Low Clue - in an attempt to lose weight I simply tried to cut out all fat. I must have been eating less than 10g of fat a day and all I ate was low fat food. Like many people I assumed this was the best way to be healthy not realising that many low fat/"healthy" foods contain a multitude of additives and artificial ingredients to keep the fat down. Equally, I was blissfully ignorant of the importance of good fats. I lost weight but felt like crap.
3. Uber-carb - When I arrived at University my rowing coach gave me various nuggets of advice, some were gold nuggets like HTFU (first time I'd heard this) others were nuggets of a different kind like "you cannot eat too much". This is a lie, you can and I did, moreover it was mostly made up of carbs. Here's a "You are What you Eat" style break down of a typical day:
- 3-5 XL malt loaves
- 8-12 Weetabix
- Pasta and Pesto
- 4+ Sandwiches
- All you can eat ride pudding
- Pasta bonding, an all you can eat pasta buffet which usually culminated in someone being sick.
4. Variety is the spice of life - my current philosophy is that, in moderation, most things are OK. I try to keep all foods that have been processed at a minimum and usually read ingredients and avoid buying something if I couldn't make it myself. I do a lot more of my own cooking so I know exactly what is in things and look to hit 10+ servings of fruit everyday. At this stage in the game (pre-Xmas) my diet is far from perfect, but in January I will become strict on my diet and stick with the "help or harm" philosophy: if it isn't going to make me faster, it ain't goin' in my stomach.
To break up this text heavy blog, here are a few of the meals I have enjoyed creating in the recent weeks.
YUMMY!
