I’ve been asked for a blog piece about how I structure my meals and how I work out the timing, type and amount of food I eat. I have no problem sharing this with you but I can’t stress strongly enough how individual we all are and that what works for one person may not work for another. If you want to implement some changes then do it slowly and see what kind of reaction you get from your body.
When I first saw Billy (crikey almost 2 years ago now!) we decided that I should implement small meals throughout the day because I was struggling to eat, as I had no appetite, my digestion was awful and eating could bring on horrendous anxiety. I had become scared of eating as I never knew if I was going to get the crushing anxiety after a meal or not. Still, I needed to get my calories in so small meals sounded like the best plan. As I could only manage about 250 calories per meal I had to fit at least 7 meals in to get a reasonable total amount of calories (approx. 1750 total). In order to get 7 meals in I literally had to eat every 2 – 2 ½ hours. I couldn’t drink anything with sugar in, i.e. orange juice, as that made me sick and gave me anxiety. To begin with the meals were very protein and fat heavy as having too many carbs just seemed to make the anxiety worse. This was yucky as it felt like I had gone back to my low carb diet – god knows how I ate that way for as long as I did!!
When I first saw Billy (crikey almost 2 years ago now!) we decided that I should implement small meals throughout the day because I was struggling to eat, as I had no appetite, my digestion was awful and eating could bring on horrendous anxiety. I had become scared of eating as I never knew if I was going to get the crushing anxiety after a meal or not. Still, I needed to get my calories in so small meals sounded like the best plan. As I could only manage about 250 calories per meal I had to fit at least 7 meals in to get a reasonable total amount of calories (approx. 1750 total). In order to get 7 meals in I literally had to eat every 2 – 2 ½ hours. I couldn’t drink anything with sugar in, i.e. orange juice, as that made me sick and gave me anxiety. To begin with the meals were very protein and fat heavy as having too many carbs just seemed to make the anxiety worse. This was yucky as it felt like I had gone back to my low carb diet – god knows how I ate that way for as long as I did!!
I would cook a pan full of new potatoes every morning and have 2 really small potatoes (with butter) with each meal. I rotated different types of protein with each meal (eggs, sausages, chicken, lamb, meatballs etc.) just for variety, and often made a creamy sauce to go with it for extra calories. There are barely any calories in 2 small potatoes, and usually 100-150 cals in the piece of meat I had so I still needed 100 cals to make it up to 250 cals total. Very slowly I started to add in extra potatoes, so after a few days or a week I would add another potato to each meal. Eventually, after about 4 months I was eating 200g of potatoes with each meal (approx. 150 cals), and I had added in a tiny Petits Filous yoghurt after each meal, so each meal was now around 450 calories, giving me a daily total of around 3000 calories – much closer to where I wanted to be than when I first started out. Here is a section of an email I sent to Billy on 4 July 2014…
"I am still doing what you told me to do and eating every couple of hours. I get 7 meals in per day. I would say I have 3000+ calories per day and at least half, if not slightly more, are coming from carbs (A fact that I was pretty chuffed with, given the state I was in a few months ago!) I can tell I'm heading in the right direction because.... my sleep has improved tremendously (I haven't taken melatonin for the last couple of months, I usually fall asleep within 5 minutes and I am up to sleeping for a good 5 hour chunk now before I have to get up to wee but then I fall straight back asleep again), I am starting to feel a bit less tired (I no longer feel like I'm walking through custard!), my anxiety is a lot less (I get the odd bit coming and going but it is altogether much more manageable) and for the first time this month I got my period after 28 days (previously it had been every 9-10 weeks). Surely all these small signs are signs that things are heading in the right direction?"
I feel like I should say something about calories here as most people, upon hearing that I eat 3000 calories, start to look decidedly uneasy, like they want to comment about my weight as a reflection of all those calories! At my heaviest a couple of years ago I weighed 202 lbs. I don’t usually weigh myself (I don’t even own scales!!) but this morning I borrowed a friend’s scales just so I could share my weight with you lovely people and I weighed 185 lbs. When I first saw Billy I had already put all the extra weight on and was at 202 lbs. Even through the period where I was increasing my daily calories from 1750 to 3000 my weight didn’t change. I have no idea when my weight decreased, probably slowly over the last year or so, and I suspect that some of the loss will be water. I had quite bad water retention, so bad in my legs that I couldn’t even kneel down!! I noticed a couple of months ago that I could kneel down and I seemed to be getting some shape back and some muscle in the tops of my legs. My point is that people generally equate eating more with gaining weight and eating less with losing weight. Life is never that simplistic!! Some of my previous blog posts explain why that isn’t the case. If you want to keep your metabolic rate high for good cellular energy and therefore good health, then you need to be providing enough fuel for your body. If you have lowered your metabolic rate through dieting or stress or for whatever reason, then when you first start eating more you will probably gain some weight. As your body starts to recover the weight gain should taper off. You have to learn to have patience!!
Gradually, as my digestion got better, and I started to be able to have more food at a time, I whittled my meals down to 6 a day and then down to 5. Really this was to make life a bit more manageable as well. It’s easy to eat every couple of hours if you are eating some fruit and cheese and juice or something, but when you want to eat potatoes all the time then it’s pretty time consuming!! I still have potatoes at every meal but over time I started to move away from boiled new potatoes to wanting mashed potatoes some of the time. Then a few months later I wanted to have some home-made chips. Initially I couldn’t stand the thought of eating chips. The only reason I can think of for these changes are that new potatoes are more watery so less of a boost to the metabolism maybe? Earlier on my body was overwhelmed by anything that tried to give too much of a boost to my metabolism. Possibly because my digestion was rubbish and I was very low in potassium? I state these reasons as questions because I don’t really know the answers; I just like to think out loud about possible causes!
It’s interesting to watch the small changes you make to your diet over time as your tastes change. After a few months of eating the 7 meals a day with plenty of potatoes, I started to feel like I would enjoy a cup of coffee again. When I first got ill (nearly 3 years ago) I just went completely off tea, coffee, and alcohol. I couldn’t stand them! I still haven’t drunk tea or alcohol since but I do love coffee now. I started off just having one small cup (mixed with half a cup of warm milk and 4 tablespoons of sugar!) in the morning when I had my second meal of the day. I still can’t drink coffee with my first meal of the day, or on its own without food. I just don’t like it then. I love it with any other meal though!
So what do I eat now? Well, I still really enjoy my new potatoes (with lots of yummy butter and salt) and boiled eggs for breakfast. Although interestingly enough, after about a year, I went from eating my boiled eggs really hard boiled to preferring them to be really soft boiled and runny. Not sure what that means though!! Then usually for brunch I eat mash potatoes, beans and sausages, with a nice cup of coffee. Afternoon tea consists of more mash potatoes, usually with some form of casserole (I often make a large casserole at the beginning of the week, to last for several days). At the moment my favourite is pork casserole with added apples and mushrooms. I just leave it to cook for a couple of hours in the oven and it’s lovely. I’ve found that if I add a tablespoon of coconut oil to the casserole then the pork is lovely and tender. I will probably have another cup of coffee then as well. Tea will be something like egg, chips and beans, and then supper is usually a shepherd’s pie (a la Aldi – because I am totally bored of cooking by the evening!!). I eat at around 8am, 11am, 3pm, 7pm and 10pm (although it’ll probably be slightly different every day!) Doing a rough, back of the envelope, calculation this gives me a total of around 3000 calories still and 300g of carbs.
Apart from the coffee I drink with my meals, I only drink when I am thirsty and my drink of choice is generally coke, so I have included the calories and carbs from coke in the totals above. All my meals include carbs, fat and protein (although I don’t work out specific macros – I just eat what feels right to me) and I salt every meal to taste. This usually means I add quite a bit of salt, which can be as frightening to people as the amount of calories I eat!! I always make my own mash potatoes with butter, milk and salt, and I fry my own chips in beef dripping.
My digestion is much better now and I no longer take over half an hour to eat a small amount of food! My appetite is back and I am hungry for every meal I eat. That is one of the reasons the timings vary throughout the day. Sometimes it takes 3 hours to feel hungry again but sometimes it might only be 2 hours, so I’m pretty flexible and if I’m hungry I eat! Occasionally I will add in liver for one of my meals (with mash potato, gravy, sautéed onions and bacon). I find liver ok to eat but am not that keen so it’s usually every few weeks.
I did try to change my meals down to only 4 instead of 5, but even keeping the calories the same, I just stopped sleeping as well as I had been. I would wake up a few times in the night and find it harder to go back to sleep. That might be down to less potassium as if I take out one potato meal I’ve lost a reasonable amount of potassium. I already eat the maximum amount of potato I can manage in each meal so maybe I just wasn’t getting enough across the 4 meals? Hmmm, not sure, but I went back to 5 potato based meals and my sleep got much better again.
I should also add that I don't just eat potato based meals because they have helped me recover my health, I eat them because I find them blooming delicious!! If the day comes where I fancy something else in place of the potatoes then I guess that just means my needs are changing. You just have to be able to roll with the punches, and adjust accordingly! I also don't fret if I'm out and about or at someone else's house and I have to eat something else for one of my meals.
I should also add that I don't just eat potato based meals because they have helped me recover my health, I eat them because I find them blooming delicious!! If the day comes where I fancy something else in place of the potatoes then I guess that just means my needs are changing. You just have to be able to roll with the punches, and adjust accordingly! I also don't fret if I'm out and about or at someone else's house and I have to eat something else for one of my meals.
As always, I hope you have found my ramblings useful! Please remember though, this is only me thinking out loud and that everybody is different. Just because this has worked for me does not mean that if you swap out all your foods for potato based meals tomorrow you will suddenly feel much better!! Not everybody likes potatoes (are they crazy????) and not everybody can tolerate potatoes (very sad :-( ). If you want to make changes then go slow and don’t change too much at once. You want to keep stress to the body to a minimum.
Thanks for reading and if you have any comments, stories or thoughts to share then just pop them in the comments below. I always love to hear from you! Take care, x.
Thanks for reading and if you have any comments, stories or thoughts to share then just pop them in the comments below. I always love to hear from you! Take care, x.
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