I am very adamant about eating at least 5 times a day. That means besides the obvious breakfast, lunch and dinner I am also eating a mid-morning and a mid-afternoon meal which keeps my system constantly working throughout the day and keeps my energy from “crashing”. For a short and simplified explanation why eating every few hours, several smaller meals per day is better then less, check out this post.

I was a huge sweet tooth before my diagnosis and completely addicted to Coke and Kinder chocolate. I have since completely banished both of them out of my life and haven’t had a cravings for them in ever.

However, changing your eating habits is not easy. Most of all it should NOT be a diet. Don’t look at it as “I can’t eat this or I can’t eat that”, look at it from a “I’ll add this healthy food” perspective.  If you are not ready to completely empty and replace your whole kitchen cupboard regime you can always try to introduce healthier food step by step until you have replaced most of your old bad habits with new healthy ones. Of course my poor boyfriend didn’t really have much of a say in it. So I am allowing him to have his cheat days and let him smuggle the odd snack into the shopping cart here and there.

If you make the decision to eat more healthy don’t look at it as a diet. Diets are something temporary whereas a change in eating habits is something that should be permanent. If you go all out extreme in the beginning without being 100% sure you want to do it then you will most likely fall back into old habits and crave things that you tried to cut out going cold turkey.

Even though, specially if you try to follow a whole exercise program such as P90X, you will get the most extreme results while sticking to a clean and lean eating method, I believe that you should be allowed a few cheating days if you think so. It will slow down the progress a bit but the same time it will help you ease into changing your lifestyle.

Here are a few simple rules I try to follow:

• I only drink water, lots and lots of water. This means at least 1.5 up to 3 Liters per day depending on the temperature
• If it’s pasta or bread I am going for whole-wheat products.
• As little alcohol as possible (not hard for me since I never really drunk a lot anyway)
• I only use Olive oil for cooking and prefer spray-ons
• I hardly use salt and if, only sometimes for tasting and in general look for low sodium versions. Pepper, Lemon, Paprika, Fresh Herbs who needs salt?
• No processed food
• Nothing with ingredients I can’t pronounce or have never heard of
• Nothing labelled with Trans-Fat
• Use Honey instead of sugar if I think I need a bit of sweetness
• Milk only sparsely and if so I try to find skim milk
• Lots and lots of fresh vegetables and fruits
• Grill, bake or slowly fry, nothing deep fried
• No high fat and high sugar stuff
• No sodas, no coffee, rarely tea
• I try to stay away from red meat and only eat it maybe once per week and if so, the leanest possible meat I can find (always on the lookout for those “white” parts). I stick with Chicken, Turkey and Fish mostly