Eat Well Wednesday: Renounce the perfect diet

Posted on 6 May, 2015

Yesterday morning I woke up and dragged myself out of bed at 7am. It was supposed to be 6am. I had grand plans of being uber productive – you know, shaving my legs, washing and drying my hair, having a good breakfast and getting to work by 8am. My hubby does the school drop off, leaving me to be a free agent, with my mornings as my own. It’s glorious.

But I’m tired. SO tired.

So, as you can see, now I’m behind. So I skip the shower. Up the hair goes into a messy bun. Then it happens.

“MUMMMMMM!!!!”

Carter is pant-less in the middle of the hallway. I can see poo down his legs.

“I did a poo in my pants. It’s a bit runny.”

Dear God, bless him. Because I certainly don’t want to right now.

After a good 25 minutes of gritted teeth, dry-retching and mumbles of “I’m a princess, dammit!”, the poo was cleaned up and I was sipping my traveller coffee on my way to work. I didn’t eat breakfast. I’m not sure whether I finished my makeup or not.

My afternoon consisted of a 30-minute workout, taking a five and six year old through homework and readers (at the same time), washing the white school shirts in time for tomorrow, cooking dinner, finishing emails and here I am writing an article for publishing tomorrow, while watching House Rules and racing the husband to do 10 push ups, 10 sit ups and 10 squats every ad break. I know, I know, I’m a high achiever!

Fellow mums, I understand. Life is full. It’s chaotic at times and doesn’t always go to plan.

Your daily eating pattens will fall victim, occasionally, to the unpredictability of life. It’s normal. Totally normal.

The important thing that you NEED to know is that you don’t actually need to have a perfect diet.

In fact, there is no such thing as the perfect diet. No such thing. It’s just food. And some food will just help you function a little better than other food. End of story.

As mums, we feel guilty about enough already. We have to balance so many things. Just because your lifestyle doesn’t enable you to eat exactly like a ‘wellness blogger’, doesn’t mean you have to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Sometimes we give our food the wrong focus. We think that we need to put all the focus on making food to be as nutritious as possible and neglect the fact that the kale and goats cheese salad with 10 different vegetables and ancient grains for lunch just doesn’t work with our lifestyle and it’s hard to stick to. Instead we grab hot chips and a sausage roll.

I challenge you to look at food from a different angle. Discover what you want out of life and then let your diet flow out of that with some healthy principles as the backbone.

For me — I need to be cohesive and my brain needs to work. Restrictive, low energy diets, skipping meals or poor quality food leaves me feeling like I’m not coping. My emotional state disintegrates into sporadic volcanic eruptions. It’s not pretty. It’s not surprising, considering that our blood sugar levels are highly correlated to our overall mood and mental state.

So when I skipped breakfast this morning, I wasn’t worried. At work I have fruit on my desk and yogurt in the fridge. There’s wholegrain crackers and peanut butter in the cupboard. They may not be as ‘perfect’ as my awesome natural muesli made by The Muesli Bar with a little drizzle of honey and milk but they give me the energy I need to function.

I’ve spent the past few months trying to figure this out for myself. A new routine, a busier schedule and more business pressure has meant I’d come to work with nothing but a latte in my stomach and then crash and burn at 3pm from not eating the whole day. Yeah, I know. I know better.

My life and routine had changed but I hadn’t adjusted my food routine too. It’s taken me some time to re-work things again and find my groove. I call it re-negotiating. In fact, my mum taught me how to do it.

From the foundation of needing to have a functioning brain, I plan to eat food that gives me sustained energy, is easy to prepare and tasty. My meals and snacks are created upon the following backbone:

• My day’s diet contains vegetables – as much as I can. Some days I eat the same salad and the same five vegetables. This is ok.
• Snack on fruit – I do this first. If I’m still hungry I’ll go get something else, but I choose the fruit first. Nine times out of 10 I end up not eating anything else.
• Choose whole, minimally processed foods – I do this as often as I can, but not to the point where it’s socially isolating or eating processed food makes me feel guilty.

That’s it. With these three principles in place, I find that the rest of my diet works out pretty ok.

We need to stop trying to have a perfect diet. Why? Because when it doesn’t work out perfectly (which is inevitable), we go in the complete opposite direction with our eating habits and there are no healthy boundaries at all.

Instead of trying for perfection, work toward consistency. Start making some little changes to your diet day by day. Think about what you want to get out of life first – be energetic with your kids, feel focused at work – and go from there. What goals do you want to achieve? Would a consistent, more routine eating pattern help you achieve those goals?

I suggest making little changes like:

• Keeping fall-back foods at work so if ‘poo’ strikes, you’ve got something to eat when you need it.
• Having fruit available in all sorts of places so you’ve got something perfectly portioned to eat when you need something quick.
• Pulling into the supermarket after work and buying a bag of green leafy salad, a capsicum, a cucumber and a carrot. Serve this salad (half a plates worth) with whatever else is going for dinner.
• Filling up on good quality foods. Better that you eat more chicken, more baked potato and more vegetables at dinner than eat too little only to feel starving and grab chocolate or high sugar foods later.
• Swapping high sugar drinks (juice, soft drink, cordial) for water – seriously it’s one of the best long term habits you can create.

It’s time to renounce perfection.

You deserve better than perfection for your diet. You deserve realistic. Consistent. Sufficient.

To help you with this, The Healthy Eating Hub in Harrison has designed a number of interactive workshops baed around practical everyday nutrition advice that will not only help your body function well but fit into your day to day life ad well.