Filling Lunch!

This lunch was super filling – and delicious!!

Roasted turkey breast, sharp cheddar, and spinach sandwich on sprouted grain Ezekiel Sesame bread:

Spaghetti Squash with cinnamon:

Clementines, although one of them was a bit rotten. I ended up throwing away some of these sections.

Pumpkin yogurt with Fiber One!! YUM!!! 4 oz of plain yogurt with 1/2 a cup of canned pumpkin. I added some pumpkin pie spice to this last night. It was fabulous and filling – and what could be better than those!?

And hot green tea. (It may be 80* out there, but our office is cold!)

All together for 519 calories:

Walk

I got in 30 minutes of walking in this gorgeous weather – I was even HOT during the walk! Just a few weeks ago I was walking with gloves and a scarf. How strange it is to live in the South!

Observation

I didn’t get hungry all morning. This amazes me because I used to be obsessed with my 10:00 snack of almonds and dried apricots. It used to drive me nuts to make myself wait until 10 or 10:30 to have a snack. But then I started having more calories for breakfast and bam – snack obsessed no longer necessary. In addition to more calories at breakfast, I also noticed that I crave water at 9:30 and any hunger in my stomach goes away. These two things have made a HUGE difference in my mornings.

Many of you know I recommend the book Fit From Within by Victoria Moran. This woman “gets” eating. Some of her chapters are a stretch, but of the 101 tips she gives, many of them resonate deep within me. This is one that just clicked:

The rationale behind three meals a day is simple: if you start to eat only three times, you have to stop only three times, and stopping is the problem….This doesn’t mean there can never be an exception, that you will never have afternoon tea or an after-theater snack…Nothing that you eat rationally and out of choice rather than compulsion will interfere with the fit-from-within process. Nevertheless, I highly recommend that, unless you have a medical condition that requires you to eat more often, you stick with three meals a day most of the time.

If you do, there will be several waking hours during which you will have nothing in your mouth. This is good. This is when you learn to focus on your inner life and your outer world instead of food. It’s also when you come to know at a visceral level that, although food and water and air are indispensable for maintaining your body, the essential individual that you are is sustained by something else, something more.

Eating three meals a day is both a discipline and a gift. In the beginning, it might take all the fortitude you’ve got to get form one meal to the next without picking up something to eat. Call in your inner resources, understanding friends, or something else that inspires you. Learn the difference between what it feels like to be hungry and to think you’re hungry because you’re used to eating often.

I still have a snack in the afternoons, but reading this passage was a lightbulb moment for me. “Stop obsessing over food because you’re used to eating often.” I snacked all throughout my weight loss and have nothing against it – as long as you’re keeping calories in check. But I’m so much happier thinking about food less – and needing it less.

See you for dinner!