A Full Day of Eating + nutrients

Hello :)

I'm here today with a little blog post about what I ate today, it was a rather average day eating wise today, so every now and then I like to type it into a nutrition database to see what nutrients I had enough on that particular day and what I might be lacking. 

School is just around the corner as well, which means busy schedules and my goal is to still eat as healthily as I possibly can while being on a budget and tight on time. The meals I had today were very easy to make, didn't take very long and tasted amazing, so I'm excited to share them, I'm sure there were little things here and there that I could've done better, but for the most part, I did fairly well. The main issue that I had was that I didn't have time to eat enough during the day and my dinner ended up being rather late during the day, ideally, I'd like to eat it a bit earlier, but I know that once school rolls around I might not have the time to.

I also have other limiting factors that don't allow me to meal-prep a lot in advance since we don't have a freezer we also don't have an oven or a microwave where we could heat food up, so everything I prepare must be eaten within a day or two so it wouldn't go bad and I also sometimes must reheat it on a pan or find other means to make it at least lukewarm.

I didn't have a very active day today, I didn't work out, but I did walk around quite a lot and also reached my goal of 10 000 steps, so on a day like today, I would have the calorie goal of around 1800-1900 kcal. That's a fairly reasonable amount for me to maintain my weight and even on a day that I just lie down and do nothing I still burn somewhere around 1600-1650 kcal, so I try my best to always stay above that and below 2100kcal, I've been trying to develop steady and consistent eating habits, so ideally, I'm trying to get around the same amount of energy from food every day, but it still does fluctuate, I aim for the average of the week to be around the mark of 1800-1900 though since that what seems to be suitable for me. Mind you, I am a very small person, so most people should eat quite a bit more. I recommend calculating your RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate) to see below what you shouldn't go. That's at least my recommendation, but I've been writing for so long and there's still no food, so let's actually start with breakfast.

As I say in every single blog post of this type, I'm not a morning person, I don't feel hungry at all when I wake up. It takes me a good few hours before I start feeling slightly peckish, however, I still try to get breakfast in every morning and usually it is granola/muesli with a plant-based milk of my choice and chia seeds, today I had it with blueberry yoghurt instead since the Alpro blueberry yoghurts is one of my favourites, but unfortunately it didn't go well with the muesli I was having, so I'll probably stick to having it with something else. I, of course, added chia seeds and chopped up a banana on it as well, it was very good. My entire breakfast was around 400kcal, which is a bit low, but I felt full afterwards and I couldn't have eaten anymore in the morning even if I wanted to.

Next up was lunch, I had a bowl of grapes, the cotton candy flavoured, I also had another one of those blueberry yoghurts and a glass of red grape juice. It was nice, another 450 or so calories, which again could've been a bit higher, but I was in a hurry during the day, I wanted to also have some porridge, but that didn't happen.

I made up for it during dinner though, I had a big portion of mashed potatoes with mushrooms, carrots, peas and a cucumber tomato salad with a drizzle of camelina oil and it was all very very delicious, I also had a bit of nutritional yeast in the mashed potatoes, which gave it a nice cheesy flavour, so, all in all, I felt very satisfied after eating all of that.

In the evening I also treated myself to a bit of chocolate and blueberries and then I called it a day and went to bed, so that's all I ate, nothing too fancy, but fairly affordable and nutritious. I will talk a bit more about the nutrients got below, so if you wish to know more about that side, then give it a read.

I usually don't follow my macros religiously, I have a range where I'd like to be, but if it's not exactly there then I try to even it out some other day. Today I was a little low on protein, but everything else was within my recommended range.

Calories	1861 kcal		Calories	1861 kcal
Carbohydrates	234 g		Carbohydrates	57,2%E
Fats	66 g		Fats	33,6%E
Protein	41 g		Protein	92,2%E

As for the micronutrients, I did pretty well with all of my vitamins, the only goal that I didn't reach with my food was vitamin D, which is quite common, I did spend some time in the sun, so hopefully, that helped.

When it came to minerals I was a little short of calcium, iron, selenium and iodine, which I could tell throughout the day because of the things I had to eat.

 I reached my water intake for the day as well, I didn't have too much saturated fats, cholesterol or trans-fats. Also, I had a fairly low sodium day so I would count that as a success. 

If I can find a good way to add charts to my blog post, then next time I'll also add a chart with the exact amounts of nutrients that I got, for the time being, I couldn't find a way that would be good enough quality, but maybe I can find a way.

That's all for now, see you in our next blog post.

Kaiela :)