When I went through my self observation phase, Step 1, I noticed a number of things about my eating.
One of the things I noticed was my habit of eating pre dinner nibbles. This is what I was doing was; whilst preparing the evening meal I would nibble. My nibble of choice was crisps with dips. I would buy one those big bags of crisps and a little plastic tub of dip. The dips included humous, cheese and chive, or sour cream.
Whist chopping vegetables and cooking dinner I would take a crisp and scoop it in the dip and enjoy. Then I would do it again and then again. I would pour the crisps into a bowl and nibble away.
How many crisps per meal? Quite a lot. Taking them from a big bag meant there was a lot to go for. Bear in mind I didn’t think about what I was doing. I just did it.
When I thought about it, I decided this is what was going on; I started cooking when I was hungry. Because I was hungry and felt impatient I nibbled. Then because I repeated this behaviour over a number of meals it became a habit. So when I prepared a meal, my tummy expected nibbles. I’d created a habit.
Was this important? Well consider how many calories I was taking in. Let’s say 150 for the crisps, which is a modest estimate. Plus say 100 calories for the dip. That’s an extra 250 calories per meal. Let’s say I did this four times a week. That’s 1000 extra calories a week. Now I probabaly need about 2,500 calories a day. So my nibbling habit meant that I was eating almost two extra days worth of calories a month. 4,000 calories.
And remember this was before I ate a full meal. It’s not difficult to see what I needed to change.
But I do like nibbles. So the first step was to make a small but important change. I replaced crisps for bread sticks. A lot less calories. Bread sticks are about 15 calories per stick.
Second change was to decide how many bread sticks I would nibble and get these out onto a plate, and then put the packet away. This meant I couldn’t just graze through an entire packet of breadsticks!
This ended up as quite a small change but it had a big impact. Reducing the calorie intake by quite a big number. And these were red calories.