eat more healthily

My goal for June was to do better than 5.2 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. What did I actually do? 3.8!!

This is terrible.

I got hit by the heat which made my appetite evaporate, and the austerity, which meant that fresh succulent produce was a rarity. The family got sick which means they were un-energetic and listless and apt to cook large meals and leave all the dishes while they went to lie down. I don’t tend to eat if the kitchen is a mess. And I got very busy this month, which means I forgot to eat constantly.

I am now in the habit of getting up before eight but not actually getting anything but tea until around one p.m.!! I keep getting up because I am hungry, going to the kitchen, washing sinkfuls of pots, loading the dishwasher, running the dishwasher and going back to work, all without remembering to eat even a morsel. This is the same bad habit I had when the kids were small.

Not good. I’ve lost another five pounds. Fortunately I can afford to lose it no problem. But it would be a nice idea if I could start figuring out some healthy fruit breakfasts. I would be happy to put some work into this issue and do some trouble shooting. But my appetite seems quite gone. I can’t think of anything I want to eat, except minimal starches to keep from getting dizzy.

I managed an average of five fruit and vegetables each day for the month of May. The biggest difficulty was finding decent fruit and vegetables worth buying so this may get easier as we move into summer but another problem was the usual seasonal spring drop in appetite. It’s always much easier to eat in November when I dream of stew with dumplings and baked apples and filling comfort food, than it is in May when I look forward to fiddleheads but seeming to be running more on stamina and sunlight than calories.

My goal for June? Do better than 5.2 servings average.

My sub-goal for the month of May is to finish the month with an average of 7 fruit or vegetable servings each day. If I do that I will average five per day for the whole month.

In April I averaged 5.2 servings so this will be a drop, but only a small one. However I have my work cut out for me managing those seven servings a day.

My intake of vegetables over the month of April rose a tiny bit over the month of March but my intake of fruit slipped an equally tiny percent.

I have not been charting progress on making sure I get variety in carbs so I don’t know if this has gone up or down. I have found that a third of a can of chick peas cold makes an okay breakfast though, so that helps.

Now what can I do to up my intake of the good stuff? The produce at the store is just so icky. I had to pick over a dozen heads of broccoli before I could find one that wasn’t moldy under the plastic, and the last bag of apples I picked up made good deer fodder but were scorned by all family members as bitter skinned and under ripe.

In fact the only fresh vegetables at the big grocery store near us were peppers. Everything else was packaged in plastic and showed unmistakable signs of going into that plastic more than a week ago. I mean, when the strawberry leaves are brown and withered you know the strawberries were not picked three or four days ago.

Maybe I could get a new blender and start making up fruit smoothies again. I was big on them last summer.

I noticed some weeks ago that my consumption of fruits and vegetables had slipped so I made this a goal. Since then it has slipped still further.

I think there are two factors involved here. One is that we are in a mini-austerity and I am spending money more carefully. This means I am buying less ready-to-eat food, and not buying fresh produce when I think there is an even chance it will get forgotten, go bad and get tossed. So the supply of produce has not gone up but the competition for it has.

The other factor is the shared kitchen factor. I’ve taken to making dinner at six o’clock every night. But this means that the menu is limited to things that most of the family will eat, which means a meat and a starch, minimum. If I’m only up to cooking one or two dishes it’s the vegetables and fruit that get left out.

And I sometimes can’t think straight in the kitchen because when I am in it sociable kids may consider it the ideal time to get quality mummy time. While hearing about revolutionary new progress in Dwarf Fortress I find it hard to figure out what I want to eat.

I’m bored with my food lately. I’m not managing variety. I’m not finding what I do prepare appetizing. I think this is normal though. It’s spring and in spring my appetite dwindles.

Now, how do I work of finding things appetizing again?

Today I got up to find the kitchen full of greasy broiler trays and roasting pans.

This made the kitchen unpleasant enough for fastidious over-sensitive me that I was unable to stay in it for more than a few moments before stressing and fleeing back to my room to hide.

The end result was that I managed to eat four slices of bread and margarine today and nothing else, until I became ill from not eating properly. I thought I had managed the minimum to keep me from getting woozy but I hadn’t.

(Please picture me at this moment looking interestingly pale and delicate instead of merely sulky and hypochondriacal.)

The good news is that I went out and stopped at the City Market and hit two produce stalls, the butcher, and the fishmonger and brought home various nice things to eat which will help my menu planning.

I desperately want soup bones… This is hard! Two things keep tripping me up. One is whenever whoever is on kitchen clean up duty falls down on the job poor-little-me is too sensitive to think straight when she can’t find any clean pots or clean surfaces, and the other is that I really need to be bringing home fruit and animal protein more often. I’m shopping once a week and by Sunday and Monday we are usually out of fresh produce and I have to resort to something like stale cheerios.

I can’t solve the problem of kitchen duty shirks, but I can solve the shop more often problem. I will try to hit the City Market every Friday when I do a library run.

Again, not good
Vegetables: avocado, about two servings of celery/onion/carrot/spinach
Fruit: Orange(2), strawberry, banana
Carbs: Oatmeal, potatoes, white wheat tortellini
Other: Chicken, unsweetened chocolate, tea, milk, four chocolate biscuits, trace amount of blueberries.
Omega 3’s: avocado

Once again the day got too busy to sit down with a proper lunch and dinner ended up being after seven-thirty. Another time I could try putting beans in the soup instead of frozen tortellini and that wouldn’t have been a white starch.

Dead loss
Vegetables: Um… some traces of celery and onion
Fruit: Orange, raisins
Carbs: Oatmeal, pumpernickel, whole rice
Other: chicken, oysters, milk, unsweetened chocolate, trace amount of cream cheese, tea, walnuts
Omega 3’s today: walnuts

Basically I only ate half a dinner and didn’t eat any lunch. When I skip meals it is hard to get enough servings of fruits and vegetables in.

Vegetables: Avocado, mixed vegetables(2) lima beans
Fruit: Orange, strawberries, raisins
Carbs: Oatmeal, potatoes(2), ww macaroni
Other: steak, walnuts, milk, tea, unsweetened chocolate, one chocolate biscuit, small amounts of blueberries and onion. Omega 3’s today are the walnuts and avocado

Vegetables: Pickled cucumber, cauliflower (2), tomato
Fruit: Strawberries, orange(2), dried mango
Carbs: Oats, potato
Other: Chicken, oysters, unsweetened chocolate, margarine, cheese, tea and skim milk and one chocolate biscuit.