Junk food – Currently Clueless

Some interesting food facts

Posted on February 10, 20122 Comments

I did a little googling out of interest today to see just how many calories are in McDonalds food, because lately I’ve been having the biggest craving for a Triple Cheeseburger. Not just an ordinary cheeseburger but a triple cheeseburger. Ohh the gooey cheesy melting goodness and the extreme greasiness of one of those is just divine. Yes, I know they are so totally bad and unhealthy for you, but every now and then I just crave one. Normally of course I would give in to the temptation and go through the drive through and scoff down the cheeseburger before I get home so that no one knows I’ve had one. Then to cover up the fact that I’ve had one, I eat dinner too so I don’t look suspicious for not eating – because I am not one to miss my meals. That was back in the days when I wasn’t eating healthy and exercising though (mind you, there hasn’t been a great deal on the exercise front this week…), these days I don’t do such naughty things. I just dream about holding the cheeseburger in my hands and dream about the taste of it. Then I have to physically restrain myself from going down to Maccas and scoffing a whole crapload of food.

Now in case you’re interested here’s a bit of info about the calories in McDonalds (taken from their info sheet):

Food	Calories
Big Mac	493cals/2060kj
Cheeseburger	284cals/1190kj
Double Cheeseburger	430cals/1800kj
Triple Cheeseburger	Not even on the website! How ashamed of those calories must they be?
Grand Angus	630cals/2630kj
Mighty Angus	686cals/2870kj
Quarter Pounder	549cals/2300kj
Double Quarter Pounder	851cals/3560kj
McChicken	408cals/1710kj
Small fries	255cals/1070kj
Medium fries	368cals/1540kj
Large fries	453cals/1900kj
6 chicken nuggets	279cals/1160kj
Mustard sauce	66cals/275kj

Now let’s put some of this into perspective. When I used to go to McDonalds I would quite often get (apart from the triple cheeseburger [they were a 3am specialty!]) a Double Quarter Pounder meal, with large fries and a large coke. Sometimes if I was particularly hungry I’d also throw in a 6 pack of nuggets. The grand total of that dinner: 1657 calories (there are apparently 310 calories per large coke according to my Google research). That is not just a daily allowance of food, but a daily allowance of food, plus snacks and then the breakfast and morning snack of the next day. All rolled into one dinner! Bloody freaking hell!

When you look at the figures written down like that it’s really not hard to see how I managed to gain so much weight is it. Considering that wasn’t just a one off dinner for me. During my single times, living by myself I would quite often eat dinners like that, to a varying degree. Plus there was breakfasts of rolls with bacon, eggs and barbecue sauce, full fat latte and lunches of some sort of food court meal. I have to admit I never stopped to think how many calories there were in the dinners that I was eating, and I’m a little ashamed to actually put it out there and to read this. God it makes me feel quite sick, and thankfully the cravings for McDonalds have now gone.

Just something I thought I would share with you all.

Terrible munchies

Posted on February 8, 20121 Comment

Today’s daily food intake…

Weigh in day

Previous weight: 104.6kg.
Today’s weight: 103.4kg.
1.2kg loss

Ack, today I have had the worst munchies. I have been craving salt all day long. I’m putting it down to having popcorn over the last couple of days, which I easily get addicted to. I don’t normally go for the sweet sugary things, I’m not a huge chocolate lover, I like the occasional piece of cake, but I can’t eat brownies because I find them way to sweet for me. But put a packet of chips in front of me and watch me gobble the whole packet up. Without blinking! Today, if you had put that bag of chips in front of me I don’t honestly know that I would have been able to say no. I think I might have caved.

I had a bad start to the day. Turned my alarm off and didn’t get up to do my shufflin’ and when I finally did crawl out of bed when the other alarm went off an hour later I had the worst stinkin’ headache I’ve had in ages. I haven’t felt like that for a long time, but today it’s been hanging around like a bad smell. I’m working on a new website at work which means I’m sitting in front of the monitor all day staring at code and thinking and I’m starting to see the connection between the coding and the headaches. Methinks it might be time for me to start wearing my glasses again. But I’m happy because I didn’t cave in and get any bad munchie food to sit and eat at my desk today, just had a Carman’s muesli bar in the morning and that kept me going.

Not a lot on the exercise front sadly. I went to softball training tonight, and once again, ended up burning sweet FA in the form of calories. Seriously, we really don’t do anything at training, it’s such a waste of time, I could have been doing some proper exercise. I did speak to one of the ladies there tonight though who is a high school P.E. teacher and I asked if she does any person training. Turns out she is the coach of a B-Grade hockey team, and she said I’m more than welcome to come along and see if I like it and if I do then I can join the hockey team. Funny thing is, I’m seriously considering it. It means giving up Friday night food shopping because they play on some Friday evenings, and they play in rain, hail or shine, but I think I could like it.

Which is scary for me. Here I was only 6 months ago having never, ever in my life played a team sport, and having no interest in changing that fact, and now I find myself on the softball team (which okay I don’t really like, but am still considering returning to next season) and now I might possibly find myself on a hockey team. Yay go sporty me! Soon they will be calling me Sporty Spice hahaha *thump* (sorry I fell of the chair then I was laughing so hard…) but it’s all things to take into consideration for the future of my exercising.

Chicken schnitzel

Posted on February 1, 2012Leave a comment

Today’s daily food intake…

Weigh in day

Previous weight: 106.9kg.
Today’s weight: 104.6kg.
2.3kg loss

YAY, great weigh in today made me very happy that finally my weight had stabilised and all that extra weight I put on last week came off, plus a wee little bit more 🙂 I was concerned after weighing in on Saturday and being up to 107.3kg that I’d done something wrong, but it seems all is good.

Having said that, tomorrow I am going to have to do some extra training that’s for sure. We went to the pub for dinner tonight and I had a chicken schnitzel. Oh god, it was fantastic! I enjoyed every single mouthful. Won’t be doing that again in a hurry I can assure you. But on the other hand, a nice meal out occasionally is going to happen, I’m not a hermit. So I’ll enjoy it when I do it, and work a bit harder the next day to make up for it.

Uneventful isn’t a bad thing

Posted on January 20, 2012Leave a comment

Today’s daily food intake…

Had quite the uneventful day today. Nothing exciting, nothing earth shattering, nothing at all really.

Which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing. Sometimes uneventful, plain days are a good thing. No stress, no crap, just a good old fashioned take it easy kind of day.

so that was today. Went to work, sat at my desk, fought with getting our company website (which I’m currently re-developing) to work with IE6 (not all that successfully actually), went home, got our meal plan ready for next week and did food shopping.

But the one thing that I did learn about myself today is a bad habit that I had no idea I have. When I build websites I go into a little world of my own. I will sit and obsessively code away for hours, working on one problem – again obsessively – until it’s fixed. When I’m in that little world at home I quite often forget about food, I’ve been known to go all day without eating when I’m doing things like this. But at work, it’s a different story. I’ve always had snackies at work. Maybe lollies, or chips, or nuts – something. And I still haven’t cleaned that draw at work out, so at the moment there is a little snack-pot of nuts in my draw.

As I sat down this morning and opened up my programs and started working on the website, I almost instinctively reached into the draw to grab out the snack-pot, so that I could nibble on the things in there as I worked. Thankfully I stopped myself in time, because that’s a high calorie snack-pot I have sitting there. It made me stop though, and that was when I realised that it’s a habit of mine. Not a habit at home, but it’s a habit at work, which I’m going to put down to the fact that when I was living in Adelaide my jobs were, shall we say, on the stressful side – and to combat this I would eat. And eat a lot. I don’t have that same problem here, my job here is great, I love the work and I have the freedom to work at my own pace without someone breathing down my neck, but apparently, I brought my bad Adelaide habits with me.

So the snack-pot is gone. Now I just have to start trying to remember that it’s not the thing to snack while I’m working.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a list of excuses that I need to work out and write down. I hate this pre-season task, but love it at the same time, because it really makes me think.

12wbt day sixty four – I’m still alive

Posted on August 24, 2010Leave a comment

It’s true everyone, I am still alive and I am still eating healthy (mostly). Actually that’s a bit of a lie. I’ve not had the best week. I got another dose of the flu last week, and I tried to make the right decisions food wise, but I don’t think I really did. There was yoghurt – full fat and there were Subway cookies, 2 of them and god they were good.

Then we decided to go camping over the weekend, and can I say BRING ON THE CARBS. I made damper twice and loaded it up with cheese and it was delicious. The lamb stew in the camp oven was divine, and actually very healthy loaded up as it was with vegetables. The bacon and eggs for breakfast the next day was even better 🙂

On the exercise front, well it’s been a no show all week. Trying to get the energy just to breathe was hard enough without attempting exercise. But I went back to the gym last night and had a great workout in my BodyCombat class. No gym tonight unfortunately, but back again tomorrow night, skipping Thursday for the hairdressers, then back again on Friday night to get my personal program sorted out by a personal trainer – and I can’t wait for that 🙂

On other news, I have been busily working on a quilt for my impending niece or nephew. My little sister only has 6 weeks left before the bundle of joy arrives, so I really need to get a move on with it. I have the top of the quilt all pieced and sewn together, so now I just have to piece the back, baste it, quilt it and then bind it. So a fair bit to do still, while trying to incorporate work and the gym. I need a few extra hours (and the energy to go with them) in every day. Photos of the quilt shall follow.

Good luck with weigh day tomorrow everyone. I’m certainly not looking forward to it I know 🙁 such a bad stuff up week, but I own it. And it was still worth it for the fantastic weekend away camping.

Holiday habits I need to kick

Posted on June 16, 2010Leave a comment

Last weekend was a long weekend for us in Adelaide, and for us that means we tend to go away. In fact over long weekends we tend to take the 6 1/2 hour drive and head over to Port Lincoln. It is the most beautiful spot in Australia, and I would move there in a second. But I digress. When we go to Port Lincoln, we stay with some friends of Micks, and often it involves a fair bit of eating, and even more drinking, of which I am always happy to partake.

So this long weekend was no different. We packed up the car early on Saturday, headed over to Nic’s place and I did weigh in (YAY me, I lost 1/2kg – could have been more, but I did no, [absolutely none] exercise over the week, so I’m taking my 500gm and running) and then we were off.

First mistake? I broke the cardinal rule – I didn’t have breakfast before we left. So when Mick suggested we get McDonalds for breakfast, did I complain? Well no, because by that time I was starving and would have eaten a horse if he’d put it in front of me. So I’m sitting there in the car, munching on my Bacon and Egg McMuffin and hash brown (and god was it good), drinking down my Iced Coffee and thinking to myself. Okay bad start – but I can come back from this. Did I? No.

Lunch time was a Whopper from Hungry Jacks. Dinner (we had reached our destination by then) was a super delicious full fat Spaghetti Bolognaise. And let me just say that topping the night off with one and a bit bottles of red wine, certainly didn’t help. In my defence, I did stop at 2 glasses and then somehow the glass kept getting refilled and certainly not by me. I put all this down to being in Lincoln, it was the first night and tomorrow and the rest of the weekend would be better.

It didn’t. What followed was a super high calorie weekend. No more alcohol, good thing, but, such bad food. And even knowing how bad all of the bacon and eggs and chips and roast pork were for me, I just couldn’t seem to stop the food going from my fingers to my mouth. I dread getting back on the scales now, because I have this horrible fear that I have undone all the good that I have done over the past few weeks.

So the lesson I have learned is:

Prepare some healthy snacks the night before we go on a road trip – celery sticks, carrot sticks, a few nuts etc – so that I’m not tempted to reach for the lollies.
Make sure that I eat breakfast before we go on our road trip next time. Don’t be conned into going down the McDonalds route.
Eat a healthy lunch. There are always other options other than Hungry Jacks. (Which by the way, I have made a personal pact with Mick, that I won’t touch any junk food, especially Hungry Jacks for the next 6 months).
When we get to our destination, do a bit of a food shop to help out with us staying, and buy healthy food and fruit and veggies. Explain to our hosts that I am eating healthy and changing my lifestyle to be healthier.
Limit my portions when dinner is served up. Eat more of the vegetables, and less of the meat and bad stuff.

So overall, this was not a good weekend, but on the plus side, I have learned some very valuable lessons that I can put into practice next time we go away – in July *sigh*

Food

Calories

Weigh in day

Weigh in day