Curbing Convenience Calories

What are your convenience foods? You know, the foods that you turn into a meal when you cannot be bothered cooking what you had planned.
For me, they tend to include yoghurt, bread, cheese and milk. These commonly show up as yoghurt mixed with fruit; toast; cheese on crackers; and protein powder mixed with milk.
You are probably thinking that those aren’t the worst meals you have ever heard and they actually sound like decent snack options. This tends to be true with most people’s convenience foods — they aren’t that bad!
The issue comes from what they displace — usually the healthier meals that you had planned. If you had cereal for breakfast and then you have toast instead of your planned chicken salad for lunch, you’re going to be up on carbs while down on protein and vegetable intake until you get to dinner.
The other downside about convenience foods is they are so quick to make that it is easy to make another serving and overeat (I like to call this ‘reloading’). Two pieces of toast turn into four or one bowl of cereal quickly become two.
This rarely happens when you have a prepared meal because once it is gone, it takes a long time to put together a new one. In the meantime, the food hits your stomach and you feel satiated.
After having this discussion with a client a couple of months ago — their convenience food was toasted sandwiches — I decided to run my own trial and see what foods I would eat more of if I cut out my convenience foods for two weeks.
The results have been great. I am eating more fruit and have increased my vegetable intake by at least 25%.
While my total protein intake remains similar, decreasing dairy intake and replacing it with more fish and eggs has my stomach feeling much better throughout the day and I feel satiated with less food.
Over the next few months, I am going to be working with my clients to help identify patterns behind their intake of convenience foods and develop strategies to manage them. Are they consuming them because they are tired and if so is there a pattern to what day of the week or other contributing factors may be present.
Once we know, we can develop a solution. This might be a healthier meal that can be purchased on those busy evenings or just making sure the cupboard is filled with healthy options to get them through the weekend.
If you are looking after your own diet, take a few minutes to think about what your convenience foods are and what they might be displacing. Are you prepared to cut them out for a week or two to see how you go?
It worked well for me!
