4000 calories a day
i can remember the hour when i was told to eat 4,000 calories a day.
for most of my adult life i have restricted myself to 1500-2000 calories a day, with "the day & week before" limiting myself to 1000-1200 cals per day. (this was also in the olden days before we really looked at carbs and thought they were a bad thing).
4000 calories a day. what freedom. so different to being pregnant with young sebastian, where i gained 17 lbs and ate more broccoli and cheese. they tell you that being pregnant is not an excuse to go crazy with the food, and yet here i was, being told to go insane with my eating habits.
i imagined myself eating 10 snickers bars and a wedge of soft cheese a day and calling it quits, but very quickly into the pregnancy, the idea of 10 snickers bars did not appeal to me. i didn’t have morning sickness, but wasn’t very hungry. how awful was this. the one time in my life that i was meant to be eating all the sauces i could, i didn’t have the stomach for it.
one way i managed to meet my calorie requirement was to drink SLIM FAST shakes with and between meals. they are meant to be meal replacements, but they were just beverages. they were so thick, i remember that in order to drink them, i had to use a straw and they needed to be icy cold, stored at the back of the fridge for at least 24 hours.
my trailer park tummy also gave the thumbs up to stauffers microwave macaroni and cheese. kraft dinner was not acceptable, but frozen macaroni and cheese apparently was. i think i ate that meal at least six times per week. with ketchup. no wonder my children were "massive".
in a perfect world i would tell you that i have never been able to stand the smell of stauffers since the triplets were born, but that’s not true. the other day magnificent was travelling and the kids were at a party and i was shopping and actually bought a frozen stauffers macaroni dinner. and ate it. i didn’t even need to check the instructions on how to make it.
just recently i have been quite bored with 2,000 calories a day, probably because i have been going to a number of goodbye lunches, and therefore have to scrimp calories at breakfast and dinner, which isn’t a lot of fun. and it has been raining to such an extent that i am not running or walking, because that’s just what i don’t need, a big slip or accident right around now. so food, or lack of it, is on my mind, and those days of trans fat triplet tess i almost am thinking of sentimentally right now. almost.
