Breakfast Lunch and Dinner

[maggiethecat]

Like most of us, when I was a blithe young thing my breakfast consisted of caffeine, sugar and carbs -- a chocolate digestive, a beaver tail, toast and jam.

Lunch was a restaurant affair -- I was poor, but I never brown-bagged it --and Montreal provided a vast assortment of temptations, from Hungarian at The Coffee Mill, smoked meat at Schwartzes, all those bistos, Anglo comfort food at Murray's or the Tartan Tray at Ogilvie's. I dug in.

Dinner was a perfectly cooked epicurean feast courtesy of my mother or a swell restaurant meal with a date.

I ate this way for many decades: sugary breakfast, store-bought lunch, careful and bounteous dinner. I cared a lot about dinner when our daughter was growing up becuase the only rules we had as parents were: 1) Library card. 2)Music lessons. 3) Dinner en famille. (And it worked.)

It's topsy turvey now. The idea of getting through the morning at work courtesy of Krispy Kreme or a yoghurt is impossible: I know I'll get the sugar crash from the doughtnut or the bag of Cheetos at ten because a yog makes my tummy call an audible by 9:30. My co-workers are in awe of the meatloaf sandwiches and leftover fried chicken with which I break my fast.

Dinner: It's still a big deal in our foodie empty- nester household but we eat late and I'm too tired to eat much. It's my Lite Meal now.

Lunch: Delicious dinner leftovers, an omelette, a nuked potato, grilled cheese -- I work close to home so that I never ever buy lunch.

Have any of you noticed a shift in your eating patterns? It could be geography, age , circumstance, metabolism, medication ...

[suzilightning]

i have never been a big breakfast food eater though dinner/lunch has always been my big meal. when i was 26 or so i developed a hiatal hernia so i had to relearn eating (eg - no 12 cups of coffee, no chocolate, no soda and for a few years no spicy foods).

if i'm working and working out i'll have a cup or two of hot cocoa and some yoghurt.

lunch at work is my main meal - pasta with meat sauce, leftover meat with a starch and veg

dinner is lighter - soup, salad

late night snack will be some nuts or some cheese and fruit and crackers or, like tonight, a piece of whole wheat bread with some thin slice turkey breast and some honey mustard.

if i do eat out i prefer to eat out for lunch on the days i don't work. johnnybird and i eat out for dinner (together) about once every two months or so...usually when i have to work the weekend and i decide i don't give a flying flip about cooking....otherwise i love planning and cooking for us

[annecros]

I've gone from three meals a day to five small ones. As a younger person, I was bulletproof, with a cast iron stomach and a constitution to match. Caffeine for breakfast, skipped lunch as often as not, chips out of the vending machine, ginormous rich dinner. I went to the doctor about once every two or three years, yaddah - yaddah.

Then, I had my 38th birthday. One of those "If I had known I was going to live this long..." moments.

Now, it is four or five small meals a day, because my GI was pretty much trashed by chronic illness from the top down over the first three years. My dietary adjustments were probably the hardest ones I had to make. I would take four or five bites of a meal that I loved, and just couldn't put another bite in my mouth. Frustrating. Then there were a couple of stints on steroids, lots of anti-inflammatories, a cute little clinical study on an experimental med that probably saved my life (or at least has improved the quality of my life dramatically) - that'll mess up your metabolism. The medical profession doesn't have a good grip on what is going on with my condition and related conditions that affects millions of others (scleroderma, lupus, crohn's, colitis, rheumatoid arthritis) so they just treat the symptoms and do the best they can to be supportive.

Phew! Do I sound like a crybaby, or what? I should qualify things here by saying that my condition (scleroderma) pretty much ran its course over about five years (which is typical) and I am stable now, and even have seen improvement over the last couple of years. Or at least, my disease process is not going gangbusters and my coping mechanisms have caught up with it. I've been very lucky in that things could have been so much worse.

I now think of food much differently. I've always loved good food, but I had to get into a "food as fuel" mindset, which sounds bad but is fundamentally true. Because of limited portions, I had to begin to be careful about getting the most bang for the buck every time I put food in my mouth. Although I resorted to it as a fall back from time to time, I was resolved not to go the Ensure route for two meals a day. I had to boost fibre, boost nutrional content, and yes - I even had to boost calories and fat. I always thought when I was younger and didn't have to watch my weight, that when I reached middle age it would catch up with me and I would have to teach myself to diet. Well, it did - but not in the way I envisioned it!

Fortunately, I work from home, so my eating habits are easy to handle. I still cook a large meal at the end of the day for my hubby who has a nine to five schedule, but more often than not I just eat a very small portion then have the biggest meal as leftovers for breakfast the next day. I have slipped small amounts of caffeine, spicy foods and alcohol back into my diet - but very small. The constant moderation has been the key. I used to be able to sit down with a bowl of onion soup, a tossed salad, a king cut prime rib, a loaded baker, and end it with cheesecake. Now that same meal has turned into six, with the prime rib making up two meals.

I hate moderation!

Now, I will quit my bitchin' and go make a grilled cheese and be glad I can eat it.

[Carrot Top]

Somehow here we (I say "we" with reservation because though it happens, I only partake of the food in a much smaller quantity than the children do) have edged into having a small breakfast before they go to school for the day, then two meals which are almost like suppers or dinners themselves, right after school ends about 3:00 then another later about 8:00. How this has happened is that (whether or not I pack a lunch for them or whether they decide to eat at the school cafeteria) they really do not eat a full lunch. Either from the stress of the middle-school cafeteria (which I understand can be an awesome thing due to social pressures and the age of the kids which creates some "interesting" behavior among some of them sometimes, to say the least ) or, if it was a school-bought lunch that day, from the awfullness of the food itself. Granted, if the kids were *really* hungry, they would eat. But they have been lucky enough in their lives that they don't really know that sort of hunger. And I figure that to give them this sort of "meal" is healthier in the long run than offering a whole lot of cookies and milk.

So when I pick them up from school they are ravenous. So I make them a big sandwich (often a hot one) with salads or something for sides. Large enough for a casual meal. Sometimes, they have soup or a stew instead, with a salad. Then homework happens, then their activities happen. Karate three times a week for Drew, two hours each (he "teaches" the four and five year olds though he is only thirteen, along with his usual classes) that lands right smack-dab in the middle of the more traditional "dinner-time". Kristen also has activities several nights a week that happen around these times. When they come home from the activities, around 7:30, they ask: "What's for dinner?" and I say, "You sort of already had dinner, how about a snack?" and they say "MOMMMM. I'm HUNGRY." And I've learned that they are hungry for two things when they say this: First, a real meal that looks like a traditional "dinner". And second, the idea of having "dinner", not a snack. That seems Right to them. So it happens.

Maybe I should name these late afternoon/late evening meals by adding the "f" of "first"and the "s" of "second" to the word "dinner"? "Finner" and "Sinner". Ah, yes. We pay for our sins.

[viva]

Carrot Top - you could call them by Hobbit names...

I always have an 11 AM snack so I can eat a later lunch... it's my "elevenses".

[Lilija]

Over the years, work sorta dictated when and where I would eat. When I was in college, I worked midnights at a convienience store, so I would not eat all day, or subsist on vending machine goodies, then gorge myself all night on free hot dogs and burritos (doughnuts, bagels, ice cream, cookies, whatever you can find in a 7-11, I ate it). Ah, to be 18 again.

For awhile, I was going to school, working at a deli in the morning, and as a janitor at night. I had exactly one hour to eat, during the day, and I often did the drive thru thing, or grabbed something from the deli. Dinner would come at quitting time, after 11 pm, from the diner. I gained 42 lbs that year.

That was years ago, and I still have weird eating habits, though for the sake of my family, we normalize things as much as possible. Now, I have a very light breakfast of tea and a piece of toast or a few crackers, in the morning, just to get something in me. Lunch comes around 3:30, when I give the kid his after school snack, I get hungry too. That's when my real appetite hits. Due to work schedules, we don't often eat dinner till 8-9 pm. If it runs too late, I feed sonny-boy an earlier dinner, and have a few bites myself, then I sit down with my husband when he gets home, and finish my bit of dinner.

As for -what- I'm eating...it's not out of vending machines anymore, that's for sure. I haven't had a 7-11 hot dog since I worked there, either. Age has both given me real tried and true wisdom about food choices, as well as altered my tastes, and my body dictates what I can, or cannot eat now. No more KFC, or Taco Bell, in the parking lot. My tummy does a flipflop spinny thing at the mere idea. We still indulge in a late-night diner run, from time to time, because a reuben sandwhich doesn't taste any better, that at 3 am, after an evening partying. But now it's a treat, instead of a necessity.

[C. sapidus]

Have any of you noticed a shift in your eating patterns? It could be geography, age , circumstance, metabolism, medication ...

←

Until my mid-30s, water polo and other activities burned up so many calories that I could eat as much as I wanted. This was freaking awesome. After breakfasting on multiple bowls of Total or Product 19 cereal with whole milk, I would usually eat one huge meal and two light meals over the course of the day. The huge meal could be lunch or dinner, depending on the day’s activities.

I often left the house early in the morning and returned home after midnight, so I became adept at navigating interstate highways while balancing Styrofoam containers of palak paneer, yedoro wat, or jerk chicken. I had a rubber-bottomed travel mug that endured a multi-thousand dollar rear-ending without spilling a drop of coffee.

*Sigh*. I miss eating like that. Nowadays:

Dinner: We eat our main meal together as a family, scheduled around the boys’ evening activities.

Lunch: My wife and I usually eat workday lunches together. Cafeteria food or soup and salad are most frequent, but occasionally we enjoy a lunch date at a restaurant or grab a quick meal at home.

Breakfast: Like Maggie, I often breakfast on protein-rich leftovers to prevent a mid-morning sugar crash. During the winter, steel-cut oatmeal with nuts also works well. Oddly, skipping breakfast and nursing cream-and-sugar coffee throughout the morning also does the trick. I can no longer manage carb-laden breakfast cereal, even those varieties that are reasonably low in sugar. Ah, well, no great loss.

To summarize:

1) No more breakfast cereal.

2) Similar balance of protein, veggies, and carbs, but less cheese these days.

3) Greatly reduced overall volume of food.

Edit: summary

Edited March 8, 2007 by C. sapidus (log)

[minichef]

i have found as i have gotten older, that i no longer need to have breakfast. I used to wake up starving, but now i find that i have to wait an hour or two before actually becoming hungry. I still have breakfast anyway if i'm hungry or not out of pure habit, usually toast with lots of butter,or a high fibre cereal or porridge with jam and cold milk, juice and tea.

I've found since moving back to Ireland from Barcelona, my eating habits have changed incredibly; In spain it would be breakfast at midday, lunch at five and dinner at midnight, whereas here, often if im working (in a restaurant) dinner is before service at five o clock.

Big difference. But i think i prefer the Spanish pattern.