eating tweak

So I've tweaked how and what I eat in an attempt to get the diet going again.

The tweak, essentially, is that I have cereal for lunch.  Now we're talking "proper" cereal here - not coco puffs or corn flakes or something, but high-fibre healthy jobs.

There were two real factors in the decision.

The first was that I noticed cereal contains very few calories.  There's that old gag that the cardboard box has more calories in it that the contents, but generally speaking high-fibre cereals are pretty low in calories.  Recommended portion sizes vary but they generally only come in at 200 calories.  Now obviously what they say is a portion and what most people eat are a bit different, but even if you double the amount we're still only talking 400 calories.

If you team it with skimmed milk as well then that helps too (some portions on the box include the calories for semi-skimmed milk).  So the bowl I have is generally a very big bowl, but I reckon even worse case we're talking 500 calories max (I tend to like to mix several cereals together).

That compares to around 1,000 calories for the sandwich-based meal I used to have (and still do some days, to be fair).  Now the idea of the sandwich-based meal was that this was the single big meal of the day.  That worked in the first diet phase, but just recently I've really struggled to limit my dinner to a small meal.

With the cereal lunch I can eat a reasonable dinner without it being a problem - and if I only have a small dinner then that helps even more.

The second factor is that I noticed I was doing okay in terms of hunger with just my bowl of cereal for breakfast.  I therefore thought that maybe if I had cereal at lunch then I wouldn't get hungry, and it turns out it works.

I mean, I've had a few days where I was peckish, but I haven't ended up starving hungry.  Of course I didn't with sandwiches ever, but then that's what makes the evening eating annoying - I'm not hungry, as such, but I eat anyway.

But then that's always been one of my main problems - always eating, even when I'm not hungry.  Eating is just something I do - and if I'm not eating then I'm probably thinking about what I'm going to have for my next meal.

Anyway, initial results have been okay - 1 pound lost in the first week and 3 pounds this last week.  I guess moment of truth will be this weekend as I think 3 weeks losing in a row is a good sign it's working.