Meal Check!

I had planned on tracking my food for today, September 8th, as I kept forgetting to take photos of my meals over the last few days and thought it would be nice to add some photos to the post. Then I started thinking about it and to get a realistic view of what I actually eat I decided to analyze what I ate yesterday. I try to be pretty conscious of what I eat and yesterday wasn’t necessarily a “bad” day but I was at home studying with not much food left in the fridge so I ended up snacking for lunch instead of prepping a healthier meal.

I plugged my meals into the USDA’s SuperTracker website to get a good analysis of my nutrient and calorie intake. Some foods were a little difficult to input, but I did my best to reconcile the nutritional information of what I ate with the options they had available on their site.

This is a summary of my meals from yesterday:

Breakfast: Quinoa sauteed red bell pepper, onion, and mushrooms topped with sheep’s milk feta and a boiled egg

Lunchtime Snacking: Seedless green grapes, carrots and white bean hummus, TJ’s flattened bananas, and TJ’s thai chile and lime cashews, TJ’s mango icecream bar… not the best lunch

Dinner: Rice noodles with broccoli, onion, and mushrooms in a garlic, ginger, soy sauce. Apfelshorle to drink (sparkling water and apple juice).

Looking at my daily food group targets I don’t think I did a bad job:

 

I went slightly over for my fruit intake but the majority was whole fruits. I also went over for my veggie intake which I think is great. I almost hit my protein target and was under on my grains target but feel I had plenty of fiber.

I was significantly under on my dairy but I thought I would have hit my calcium and B12 needs with other food groups. Unfortunately I was under the target in both of these nutrients. I usually snack on more cheese, eat meat a couple times a week, and have quite a bit of fortified almond milk so I hope this isn’t an issue. It would be interesting to track my intake over an extended period of time to see if I hit the targets.

 

Now for the heart healthy diet… I went over the limit on both saturated fat and sodium intake!

My overall fat intake wasn’t too bad. It made up 34% of my daily calories, largely in part to my large snack of cashews which I definitely don’t eat on a regular basis.

My saturated fat was a bit high (13% of my total calories). There is a lot of information that has recently circulated about cooking with olive oil at high heat so I’ve tried to start cooking more with coconut oil and ghee or butter. Researching more about different types of oils and how they are affected when used for cooking has been on my to do list for awhile. Regardless of their safety when heated, I should be conscious of the amount of oil I use when cooking.

I was also over on my sodium intake but thankfully not by too much. I typically don’t cook with a lot of soy sauce but I do use salt and love salty cheeses like feta. Despite this I did go on a long run yesterday and think I sweat out my fair share of sodium in the heat. I also try to stay away from processed foods and know that many are prepared with large amounts of sodium.

I think following a heart healthy diet or any kind of restrictive diet would be difficult. I love food and tend to let myself eat what I want as long as it is in moderation. However, I definitely can’t say I always moderate myself appropriately, especially when studying or writing a paper

Thankfully there are many tools available that can help an individual monitor how they eat and exercise and how it affects their health. I know a large part of keeping myself active involves setting goals and tracking my workouts. It can be very motivating when you’re able to track your progress and see improvement.