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Results of my Healthy Week Experiment

A couple weeks ago I started my “Healthy Week Experiment” to see if I could eat better, cutting out all of the rubbish food in my diet. I did it for a number of reasons:

1. To see if I could live without sugar, caffeine, burgers and pizzas
2. To find out how easy it is to buy healthy food
3. To test my own willpower

How it went

It was an interesting week, going without caffeine and any thing I deemed to be unhealthy. Thankfully London has such a wide choice of shops and places to eat, I didn’t have too much trouble finding stuff to eat and drink including lots of sushi, soups and fruit and to drink I stuck with fruit juice, water and herbal teas.

Towards the end of the week I was feeling pretty ill, I was struggling to keep up the 2500 calorie intake per day and due to my high metabolism it was having quite an effect on me, I was not trying to loose weight this week since I’m already thin (6′3 tall and 11.5 stone) and the main problem was that i just didn’t get as much energy from eating the same amount of healthy food as unhealthy foods.

What I learnt

To summarize, here are some of the things I’ve learnt about healthy eating:

• Salads from pubs are rubbish - I went to eat out a couple of times in the week and decided to have salads, but they are just nasty.

• Everyone has an opinion on what is healthy eating - Everyone has been telling me what they think is the best way to be healthy, what to eat and what not to eat, someone even told me to go vegan!

• Moderation is the key (but it’s boring) - you can eat what ever you like as long as you have everything in moderation, don’t go crazy and have a wide variety of things, but I found that really boring so I went a bit more extreme to spice things up.

• Healthy food has less energy in it - for the same amount of unhealthy food there is less energy you can get out of healthy food so I have to eat more of it to get enough to keep going.

• Eating healthier either costs more or takes longer - preparation of healthy food is either going to take longer that grabbing some fast food or cost more if its prepared and way if your really busy then it’s going to cost you more to eat well unless you spend more time preparing food.

• Healthy foods didn’t make me feel hungry - Usually I get hungry when I’m running low on energy, my tummy rumbles or sometimes even hurts when I need to eat, but I didn’t get that when I was eating healthily, my body didn’t remind me that i need to eat anywhere near as often so I tended to forget to eat throughout the day.

The Result

So after my super healthy week, I did go on a bit of a binge, with pizza and burgers and tea but I’ve settled back down now to a happy medium between the two, eating more fruit and less burgers, and I’ve only been having 2 or 3 cups of tea per day instead of the 5 - 10 I would have had before.