To prove I’m not starving.

I went back to the last day that I tracked everything I consumed, and present it to you:

Breakfast:  One six-minute boiled egg, with salt.  Fifteen fresh blueberries.

Midmorning snack:  20 pecan halves and 4 almonds, packed in a ziplock bag and eaten while running errands.

Lunch: 1 can King Oscar brand Mediterranean Style Sardines. (Inelegant, but I ate it with a fork out of the can.)  Half a cup of homemade tabouli with lots of parsley in it.  One fresh plum.  

Tea:  One or two cups of black tea with whole milk, sipped while my children ate milk and packaged whole-grain cookies.

Dinner:  About half a cup of whole wheat spaghetti, three quarters of a cup of homemade tomato sauce, and three homemade 1-1/2 inch beef meatballs.  Topped with a generous handful of parmesan cheese — about five tablespoons.  One cup of green beans, cooked from frozen.  A salad made from a big handful of lettuce, several slices of cucumber, a quarter cup of chopped raw carrots, and a tablespoon of full-fat bottled honey-mustard salad dressing.

Bed time snack:  2 pieces of Wasa brand Sourdough Crispbread, topped with 3 tablespoons (total) homemade hummus and half a thinly sliced Granny Smith apple.

The calorie count for this day comes in between 1200 and 1300 calories, which is kind of a minimum acceptable level for an adult woman; yet I felt very satisfied all day (I didn't eat anything at teatime because I wasn't hungry at all).   I attribute at least part of the satiety to the fairly high level of fat I'm consuming.  On this day I had something like 65 grams of fat, accounting for nearly half my calories.

Sure, I could save a few calories by swapping whole milk in my tea for skim, or skimping on the parmesan cheese, or making turkey meatballs, but why would I do that?  I felt full, and I really couldn't eat fewer calories without dropping into the too-low-to-be-healthy regime.  I'm more convinced than ever that low-fat is a weight-loss red herring.  People really underestimate the benefits of satiety, and of satisfaction, with the food they're eating.  

You can see that I don't really have a junk food problem, that I easily got the "five-a-day," that I get plenty of protein and whole grains.  The menu is pretty representative of what I was eating before, by the way, except that I probably ate twice as much of everything that wasn't a vegetable.  For example, I almost always used to have two eggs for breakfast.  And there is no way I would ever have stopped at half a cup of tabouli.   Or called 24 nut pieces a "snack."