develop a healthy, intuitive approach to food

is a pig.

My intuition is obsessed with breakfast martinis, red burgundy and bourbon. Also dark chocolate and prunes.

While I don’t particularly have a problem with any of the above, it’s not helping me achieve my Best Year Yet goal no.1 and therefore a change of approach is necessary. So I’m giving up on this and bringing in a new goal to replace it.

All excited by this ORACs stuff, I bought a book from Amazon called the Oracle Diet (geddit?), and was reading it last night.

Foods high in ORACs counteract free radicals which are what causes the ageing process and cancer etc. The book compares this to a rusty gate! So what we want is nice protective fruit and veg to, er, repaint the gate.

Dried fruit is the business when it comes to ORACs – the book has some rather yummy sounding ideas for breakfast e.g. a compote of dried fruit (prunes, apricots, dried pear etc.) with yoghurt. Or porridge with dried fruit. I’m quite tempted to try that! Problem is, you musn’t eat too many prunes, for obvious reasons… ;)

My typical morning smoothie, when I can be bothered to make it, consists of frozen blueberries and raspberries and half a banana, so that’s about 2000 ORACs points and I get to feel smug. Hurrah!

I already knew that anything purple, green, red, orange, and yellow is good. What I hadn’t realised is that garlic and onions come surprisingly high up the list – so colour isn’t the only consideration. Guess the moral of the story is: fruit and veg are good for you!

I just need to remember that when going round the supermarket…

there I was last night listening to my intution, which told me to drink a bottle of rather fine Savigny-les-Beaune with George, celebrating the rare occasion of him escaping from the office before midnight…

...and this morning it turns out that there’s a chemical in red wine that lets “middle-aged mice” (what a phrase!) eat more but still be healthy. Unfortunately they’re still overweight. Bugger. Perhaps not such a breakthrough after all.

Pass the dark chocolate. I’m acquiring a taste for 100% chocolate, but only when eaten at the same time as a prune. Weird, moi?

There was an article in the paper yesterday about superfoods. Apparently the antioxidant value of different fruit and veg can be measured by their oxygen radical absorbance capacity or ORAC. There’s a list of the high-scorers here.

Points to note:

1. Fruit/veg with vibrant colours have higher ORAC levels – e.g. dark green (kale), dark purple (prunes), dark red (tomatoes, beetroot), orange (carrots, squashes).

2. Chocolate has a very high ORAC rating! Especially dark chocolate.

So I’m going to try to remember this when I go shopping, and make a conscious effort to eat a variety of different colours of fruit and veg.

And maybe eat some dark chocolate too, but only if I’m very careful, as we wouldn’t want any accidents.

my intuition has been telling me to eat toast, peanut butter sandwiches, and vast quantities of hot chocolate. Also moderate amounts of beer, cider and mead. Which all makes a change from my normal raspberry-and-breakfast-martini based diet.

I don’t really understand why I’m always so hungry when in a strange place (the same thing used to happen when I was sent away for work) but generally it seems best just to go with the flow. Especially when you’re with other people and don’t want to come across as a total weirdo ;)

Now I’m back in London I can get back in charge of my eating habits, so it’s off to Borough Market later this morning to get in some stocks. The shopping principles to be applied: buy seasonal, local (i.e. UK), organic food where possible and in the case of meat, make it free-range. I’m also going to make a conscious effort to eat more vegetables, and a wider range of colours.

Today’s silly BBC news story

have occurred to me over the weekend related to this goal.

1. What to do when intuition fails to work, signals are not received or if they are, not listened to. In particular the “stop” button (strange that!).

Possible solution: adopt a mindful, as opposed to mindless, approach to eating. Eat more slowly, take some notice of it, rather than shovelling it down in front of computer/TV. If I’ve gone to the trouble to cook something nice (which I generally have) then I should make the effort to appreciate it.

2. The need to reconcile this way of eating with social conventions and real life e.g. I may not feel hungry till 3.00 in the afternoon, but I can’t seriously wait till then to have lunch because my colleagues would think I was weird. Nor do I want to go shopping every day so what I eat is going to have to be planned to some extent. Guess I just have to accept this and get in healthy stuff.

This goal is quite difficult at the moment knowing that I’m going to be indulging in large numbers of cream teas and portions of fish and chips in the near future – but then I do have a tendency to think “Why bother being good? X is coming up which will undo all the hard work” where X is a holiday, or Christmas, or a meal out with friends etc.etc. Need to get out of this mindset and remember that this is a long-term goal.

is the dreaded Diet. The whole weight loss issue is a tricky one. I’ve seen some people on here who had as a goal that they wouldn’t support any weight loss goals, and I completely understand where they’re coming from – the amount of female self-hatred related to this issue is quite shocking. But there’s no doubt that being overweight is not a desirable state, so I make no excuses for wanting to be thinner (my BMI has been hovering around 30 for the past couple of years, so this isn’t mere vanity).

I did lose about 30 pounds a while ago and my mother in particular was very pleased with me – but inside I was still the same person and I didn’t really like the implication that I had become morally superior by losing weight! Then when I moved to London, I lost control a bit – e.g. as an auditor you get sent away to awful places (Lincolnshire) for weeks at a time and have to eat nasty pub food and drink with colleagues in the evenings to be sociable.

Enough excuses. That era is now over and I ought to be back in charge. But how to go about it? When I was a student I used to play a bit of table football, and found that there were two successful, but opposite strategies. One was to play sober with my glasses on. The other was not to wear the glasses, and to be drunk. The analogy is that I could take a scientific approach to the diet, or I could be intuitive about it.

I’ve been taking the scientific approach (religiously keeping a food diary, weighing myself every day etc) for some time without much success. Either I’m lying to Fitday or it’s lying to me. I really don’t think I have been lying to it, so the most likely answer is that it’s coming up with a metabolic rate that is higher than I actually have. Also, somehow at the beginning of the day the plan is to eat x calories or whatever, and all goes quite well until about 5.30, but then something crops up (awful day at work = breakfast martini, or George turns up in a bad mood and we crack open a bottle of red) and it all goes haywire.

Or I might self-sabotage e.g. think well, I’m only going down to have 1,500 cals today, that’s not much, why not have a bit of cheese? And before you know it, the calories have shot up to the 2,400 mark ;)

The other problem with the scientific approach is simply that putting stuff into Fitday takes quite a lot of time, and if you miss a day it calculates the averages wrongly, so you really do have to remember everything.

So I’m going to try the second approach:

• not record calories, but develop an intuitive sense of what a suitable portion size is
• eat a wide range of raw and unprocessed foods, particularly vegetables and fish
• eat when hungry as opposed to just because it’s a mealtime – perhaps miss the odd meal – and stop when I’ve had enough
• and generally not obsess about food, drink and weight.

Wish me luck!