I’ve been doing well so far with my resolution to track food intake daily. My Macros+ is the tracking app I’ve been using because it allows me to input my macro goals, and it shows my accumulations throughout the day. It also has a barcode scanning function to search for foods and populate the nutrition information that has saved me so much time. I’m also working on getting my protein intake up to 158g per day (which is my current body weight, as of Monday, so I’m eating 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight)
I’ll be real for a second here, tracking food daily is hard for me. It may not seem like a difficult task to many, just logging food eaten, but I’ve struggled with disordered eating and emotional eating through my life, and I subconsciously place a lot of emotional weight around my dietary habits. Holding myself accountable and pre-measuring the foods I eat is challenging. There is a strange association in my mind between sitting on the couch mindlessly eating a bag of pita chips and relaxation or stress relief–which, rationally, I know to be uncorrelated. Today was tough because I’m a little overwhelmed with life at the moment and my normal response to stress is to mindlessly eat.
I’ve been listening to the Physique Science Radio Podcasts by Sohee Lee and Layne Norton, episode 17 to be specific. Their guest on this episode, Steve Ledbetter, a fitness psychologist, says one should view things like scale weight and food logs with as much emotion as one would count the number of white cars in a parking lot. This is definitely something I’m aspiring toward in my pursuits this year. I’m addressing my sources of stress rather than escaping from them with food and constantly reminding myself that the number on the scale is just a number and has nothing to do with my happiness or the quality of person I am.
I’m going to share a couple of my meals from this week (meals I remembered to take a picture of). You’ll notice they are not perfectly “clean” or made of only “good” foods, but they are good enough. I hope these help give you all some ideas of protein-centered meals you might like to include in your diet.
Meal 1 (Left): a handful of Spinach, grape tomatoes, a can of tuna, and half an avocado seasoned with salt and pepper (27g Protein)
Meal 2 (Center): 4 ounces lean ground turkey, refried beans, and 1 ounce of cheese (33g Protein)
Meal 3: (Right): a cup of plain greek yogurt (taste-wise, I prefer the 2% over the nonfat) and half a cup of trail mix consisting of almonds, cashews, and dried cranberries (25g Protein)
Strength Coach K8 