Food: The Good And The Bad

I’m totally on a roll when it comes to food these days. During previous attempts to lose weight, I always felt hungry–starving even. No matter what I did, I never felt full and I always felt deprived. That’s no way to live a life, and that’s why all my other attempts at losing weight failed.

With my current lifestyle, I feel like all I ever do is eat. I’ve been allowing myself 2,100 calories per day. I eat a 500 calorie breakfast, a 500 calorie lunch, a 500 calorie dinner and that still leaves room for 3 snacks of about 200 calories each. There’s plenty of eating during the day; in fact, some days I have problems actually eating that much.

I’m also trying to replace all of the calories that I burn while exercising. Lately, I’ve been exercising for an hour, four times per week. Most of that exercise has been running, which means I’ve been burning anywhere from 600 to 900 calories during that hour. It’s really hard to know exactly how many calories I’m burning, so I’m just going with the numbers that show up on my treadmill or on my iphone when I input my food and exercise every day. Those numbers are probably a little elevated, but I’m not going to worry about it so much. So realistically, on the days that I exercise, I should be eating about 3,000 calories per day. Even though the exercise does make me feel hungrier, 3,000 is a lot of calories to eat in a day.

But I’m bored with food. I eat almost the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and snacks each day. My dinners are varied, but the rest of the food I eat is very predictable. This makes it easy for counting calories, but my taste buds are bored. In the past, several readers have commented about how a lack of variety in their diets helps them to keep their weight on track and that repeatedly eating the same things doesn’t bother them. But I don’t know if I can do this forever. I’m not worried about it so much right now because the pounds are coming off. But what about in the future when I no longer want to lose weight. Do I have to still eat the same things over and over every day?

How do you guys manage your food intake? Do you eat a lot of variety, or mostly the same things repeatedly? How do you add variety to your diet and still make it easy to keep track of what your eating