We started this semester off with a fairly simple
assignment. Every student in the class needed
to keep a diet diary for two days. It
just so happened that I would be traveling for work during most of the weeklong
period we had to complete this assignment.
While I realized that my consumption while traveling would vary from my
normal eating habits, I thought it would be more interesting to track my diet
while on the road than it would be to review a normal period. Here is brief summary of my 48-hour diet
diary:
Day one started with a tofu
scramble before a breakfast meeting at 7:30am EST. Throughout the course of the morning there
were a couple of waters and a banana as a snack. At lunch I had a turkey sandwich and a bag of
chips with some colleagues in the cafeteria before heading to the airport en
route to Seattle. While traveling, I
consumed a few more waters, a protein bar, and some honey-roasted peanuts
before arriving in Seattle where I needed to complete some work. This meant Chinese food in my hotel room at
8:40pm local time (11:40pm EST) after Uber Eats mixed up my original order. Day two featured another breakfast meeting
but this time with a buffet. I wasn’t
particularly hungry but had some fresh fruit and two pieces of bacon. Lunch was provided in the form of a grilled
chicken sandwich and bag of chips with peers and late afternoon ended with a
happy hour featuring finger foods plus a couple of beers before running back to
the hotel to change and then meeting some friends for dinner at a pizza joint.
I don’t
expect readers to find my recounting of these meals particularly
captivating. In fact, I would venture
that most would find these 48 hours fairly unremarkable and perhaps even
relatable and that’s what I find concerning.
During this relatively normal two-day period, I didn’t have a single
meal where I controlled when I ate and often times I didn’t even have control
over the portion size I was served (for the sake of simplicity we’ll ignore the
lack of control relating to what I was served, how it was prepared, where it
was sourced, etc. since those all could be posts in their own right).
Startlingly enough, I didn’t
realize how little control I had over my meals until I reviewed my diet diary
after the trip. However, I reassured
myself that things would change once I settled back into my “normal”
routine. I was wrong. Between work lunches with colleagues, meals
with friends in the evenings or on the weekends, and squeezing breakfasts in
between a workout and my first meeting of the day, I realized that I probably
only had complete control over six to eight meals a week.
This
realization made Dr. Linda Craighead’s lecture on Disorderly Eating
particularly interesting to me. In
addition to a variety of other topics, Dr. Craighead discussed the importance
of monitoring how your body feels before/during/after eating and the amount you
consume at each meal. Her application of
mindfulness to eating makes a lot of sense to me in helping determine the right
amount to eat when meal times and portion sizes are often out of your
control. Since work, school, family,
social, and other personal obligations will likely continue to impact my eating
habits, I found this to be a particularly valuable lesson and something that
will help me eat until I am satisfied rather than eat until I am full/finished.
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