Ever thought about what you eat in a week?

In a world where we are constantly chasing the clock, forever inundated with emails, messages, calls, pings from a plethora of social media streams, time has become even more valuable. Many people are simply time poor and before you know it the clock strikes 12 and all of a sudden it’s Monday again.

Often the weeks zoom by so quickly that the days can become a blur and between your work, taking care of your home, social life,  your health, exercising, cooking, cleaning and whatever else fills your time, its so easy to look over what you are consuming on a daily basis.

How often do you look back at the week and think about the pile of food you have consumed in a week? If you had to put those items onto a table at the start of your week and look at what you will consume in the next 7 days, would you be surprised at how many healthy or unhealthy items are on your table?

We’re talking about every glass of water, cups of tea or coffee, juice, slices of bread, pieces of fruit, nuts, vegetables, meat, salad, spreads, chips, sweets, alcohol, cigarettes, chewing gum, spoons of sugar… the list goes on. Just think about that for a second. What are you actually consuming?

How much goodness are you actually putting in your system? Broken into breakfast, lunch and dinner its much easier to think about and arrange on your weeks-worth-of-food table. What are you eating in-between those meals, what are you snacking on? This is often the part where lots of rubbish sneaks in. A quick bag of crisps, a small bag of jellies, a chocolate, biscuits, pastries, a pizza slice, a sausage roll, smoothies, fruit juices, sodas.

If you look at snacks as a medium to get you through from one meal to the next what nutrients are actually carrying you through from meal to meal? What are the bigger meals made up of? Are you eating a pile heavily processed carbs and calories or are you consciously considering what it is you’re consuming?

Now not all people eat 3 meals a day (which is fine). Some people skip breakfast, some don’t eat lunch, some prefer to fast in windows, some only eat veg, some only eat meat, some mix it up, some people don’t think about this at all and just throw it all back as it comes, a bit like a living Pac man. Gobble gobble. 

There is so much cr*p out there on offer to us on the daily and its hard making these decisions to avoid temptation. It’s not that we can’t reward ourselves but that should be occasionally and not daily. Weather you are vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, flexiterian, carnivore, omnivore, just make sure that you are mostly filling your body with nutritionally loaded goodness and try start by just taking control of your snacking. Control that and you will see how those choices will cascade into other parts of your life. Add in some exercise and you’ll fast notice how much of a positive impact that will have on the way you feel.

Snack well people. Snack efficiently. Btw, biltong is great for this ;)