What I Eat in a Day

What I Eat in a Day

I have been a faddy eater all my life. When I was little, and a skinny little thing, I wasn’t interested in eating and ate only the plainest of food – plain spaghetti with cheese – no tomato sauce – Vienna sausages with my dad, who was born in Germany and used to cook them for me and serve them with Polish mustard, and steak. In fact, it’s my father’s food, rather than my mother’s, that I remember – when my parents split, my father would take me to a local steakhouse for Sunday lunch and we’d start with prawn cocktail, followed by a filet, baked potatoes for main and topped off by his favourite lemon meringue pie. But it was around this time that I started to use food as comfort, and by the time I was 16 I was buying an excess of chocolate bars and eating a whole packet of cream crackers with butter and jam after dinner.

Slice of lemon meringue pie on a board with lemons

Since then, I have fought with myself to eat healthily and stay a stable, healthy weight, and it has been a battle. As I mentioned in my exercise video, I’m not sporty, so moving to keep fit has not been easy for me, and controlling my eating was particularly difficult. I’m also quite short – 5ft 4 or 1.63 metres – so I don’t need that many calories to keep me going – and as I’ll come to in a moment, as we age we don’t need as many calories as we used to in our younger days to function.

Fast forward to my singing days and I managed to keep a stable weight for a few years – I was never very slim, I always had a tum, but thanks to working unsocial hours and a ciggie habit of 20 a day – which btw I am NOT recommending – I gave up on 8 May 1996 and have never smoked since – I stayed the same weight. And that continued after I had my children in my early thirties. But I was still an emotional eater and was still smoking, and once I gave up, I ate more. I also started to feel extremely tired and generally unwell, and was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid. Hallelujah, I thought, once I’m on medication, the weight will drop off. But sadly, that didn’t happen, because I was still eating too much. Like I said, I’m small, small boned with slim wrists and ankles, narrow shoulders and hips, and not very active, so I don’t need a lot of calories, but I just didn’t get the message. A failed relationship in my late forties lead me to not want to eat, so much so that my weight dropped considerably, but as soon as I found happiness again, it started to climb. Then came the menopause. Now, I am extremely fortunate that I didn’t experience anything like the symptoms some of my friends have had to contend with. I had hot flushes (flashes) and maybe the odd mood swing, but that was it, but there’s no doubt going through the change, as my parents’ generation called it, didn’t help me to keep my weight down, and it did fluctuate somewhat.

 

Multi coloured macarons in a line

When I turned 60 I decided to seek out a heart specialist who had written a book on eating and cholesterol, as I’d been told mine was too high for some years, and I’d tried to lower it with diet, but it wasn’t working. She told me that she thought it might be an idea to take statins to keep my cholesterol down to a healthy level, so that’s what I did. However, that does not give me carte blanche to eat anything so I still have to watch what I eat.

Now as we know, there is so much written, discussed and argued about on what we should be eating and how, and it can be hard to navigate. However, what is good is that scientists are discovering so much about calories and how they act within our bodies as well as the types of food we should eat for our health and as we age1.  Researchers study communities where societies live long and healthy lives and try to unpick what it is they consume and try to encourage wider society to adopt their eating habits. But most scientists agree that limiting processed, particularly ultra- processed foods – so pre-packaged foods with long lists of ingredients, flavourings and ingredients to prolong the shelf life of the food – is best for health2 .

 

3 Tips for Eating Healthily

So what and how do I consume to stay healthy after 60? Here are my tips for eating healthily but still enjoying your food.

1.  Eat what you love. I’ve said we need to control our processed food intake, and we also need to control our high fat and sugar intake – but you don’t need me to tell you that! So let me tell you what I eat for breakfast: three tablespoons of muesli, with full-fat milk, then a tablespoon of frozen blueberries, topped with full-fat Greek yoghurt and sprinkled with Xylitol or tbc. Lunch is homemade vegetable soup – sweated onions and veg, e.g. cauliflower, in butter, then simmered with stock for half an hour and pulped, to which I add some more cooked veg. A snack at around 4 pm is a matza cracker with a tablespoon of hummus, and dinner is chicken or fish (red meat once a week) with potatoes and veg and a small glass of wine – and later a few squares of chocolate. So don’t deny yourself what you love – crips/potato chips or other highly processed food excepted – because you won’t be able to for long, you’ll resent the whole process and you’ll crave those foods even more. As the song goes, a little of what you fancy.

 

Homemade vegetable soup in a saucepan with a wooden spoon

2.  Control your portions. You have heard this a gazillion times, but it really does help. I am small, so I use a small bowl for my breakfast – and ice cream, if I’m having any – and a small glass for my wine. I have actually measured how much wine I can pour into my glass and believe it or not, it is the recommended daily intake – in the UK that’s 120ml – into this small glass, and that’s my lot during the week – I may have another couple max at the weekend. Using a bowl or glass means I have a rough idea how many calories I’m consuming and I don’t go over the top. If you’ve never attempted this before, choose your top five favourite foods that you don’t want to give up and check their calorie content per portion. Let’s say you loooove Greek yoghurt. The calorie content of 100g of plain Greek yogurt, about 5½ tablespoons, contains 133 calories. Given that a recommended daily intake for a woman is about 1,500 – 2,000 calories, a portion of Greek yoghurt will easily fit into that. But – do not obsess about calories as that takes all the joy out of eating, and we don’t want that! Just eat what you love, only less of it.

Muesli i a jar and fruit plate with mango and lemons

3.  Eat within a designated time frame. Time Restricted Eating – TRE for short. You may have heard of the benefits of intermittent fasting, or the 5:2 diet. The TRE method is a kind of 5:2, except it means you only eat within, say, ten hours, and don’t eat outside of that time. So let’s say you like to finish dinner at 8pm.  If you were following the 16 hour TRE, your next meal would be at 12 the next day – virtually lunch time – which for me is just too long. But I can do 14 hours. So I usually finish eating at 9, and have my breakfast at 11. I also don’t completely fast, I do have a coffee with milk in the morning so technically I am consuming a very small amount of calories within that 14 hours, but since I’ve adopted that method of eating, I seem to have kept my weight stable and my body healthy.  Last year I had a blood test, as my doctor wanted to check whether I was deficient in zinc, as I was experiencing hair loss, and it turned out I was, so I now take a supplement. However, the good news was that all my other vitamin and mineral levels were absolutely where they should be, so I must be doing something right!

tomato salad with olive oil bottle and bread.

So there you have it – my 3 tips for healthy eating after 60 – although to be honest, these can apply to you whatever age you are.

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woman with makeup brush between her teeth

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